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Roberta Williams/Josh Mandel discussion

posted by tomst on - last edited - Viewed by 2.8K users

Congrats to the Telltale team for announcing the return of mid-30 year old males (and anyone else old enough to remember this series) to the world of computer gaming!

Can anyone from TT comment on Roberta Williams's involvement in terms of story & design, if such plans even exist?

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  • @MusicallyInspired said: Ron Gilbert left Hothead for Double Fine now.

    I know.

  • Sorry, it's late. I was skimming posts, noticed an anecdote about Ron Gilbert and Deathspank, didn't notice a factoid about his current whereabouts and decided to share that. That's all. Pretend it never happened.

  • I was not trying to "one up" you.

  • Love me some petty bickering!! :D

  • So, I was looking up Replay Games, the company that's making the Leisure Suit Larry remake with Al Lowe, and it looks like they're slowly accumulating other Sierra veterans as well. Or well, Josh Mandel and Leslie Balfour appear to be working with them now at any rate. I'm guessing that the game Mandel was teasing in that Adventure-Treff Christmas video was either the new Larry game or another project at Replay and not Telltale's King's Quest (as I had been hoping).

  • I'm not really sure if I wanna read all 11 pages.. so I'll just make my comment based on something I saw on page 1.

    It was mentioned that Roberta Williams disliked being credited for King's Quest 7 and 8? Maybe I'm misunderstanding it, or maybe it was misquoted, but I thought KQ7 was a great game, and I remember Roberta seemed really excited for KQ8, even though it DID turn out to be a gigantic flop.

    In any event, I absolutely loved Roberta's work and Sierra in general back in the 90's. I couldn't get enough of their games. I had heard a few rumours, but never knew details, behind why the company suddenly vanished or seemed to be in new hands some years later in the 2000's. It's a shame if some of the things I'd heard were true, and knowing the games industry, I wouldn't be surprised...

    EDIT: I just thought of something I should clarify. When I say KQ8, I do mean Mask of Eternity, or whatever it was called. I was reading another thread and suddenly wondered if there was a second one someone made out there. Probably an unnecessary clarification, but yeah. :p

  • Before Baggins gets back, Roberta wanted her name removed from MOE because it didn't turn out to be the game she wanted and everyone was adding their own ideas. I believe the story is that in order to get her name back on the product they allowed her some leeway before the game released where she put back in some ideas that she had wanted...something like that. Anyway, the resulting game is something she was proud of, if I'm remember Baggins' story right. It's somewhere in this probably a hundred threads.

  • Aaah, I see. Yeah, I'd heard there was some struggling about her vision of the game versus someone else's ideas, or something to that effect. ..or would that be affect, damn, I'm not sure.

    I used to follow Sierra's activity pretty closely up until Mask of Eternity, at which point it became a bit harder to follow for a number of reasons, and then the company sort of vanished and later I'd find KQ8 and GK3, neither of which seemed up to par with the previous entries into the series, and couldn't find out much of Sierra after that.

    I'd heard she left the company or that it'd been bought out/dissolved, but nothing more. The "death" of adventure games really hit a lot of people in the industry pretty hard from what I've gathered. It's a shame, cause it was one of my favourite genres. I mean, it's one of the reasons we ended up with Telltale Games, so I suppose it wasn't all bad.

  • Ken Williams sold Sierra and the new owners flushed it down the toilet, basically. Later Vivendi Universal bought it and rereleased collections of the main Quest games. Then ActiVision bought out Vivendi and now they own the Sierra licenses.

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