United States · Founded 1979 · Closed 2008 · 8-bit / 16-bit / 32-bit
Founded by Ken and Roberta Williams, Sierra invented the graphic adventure with Mystery House and dominated the genre for two decades with King's Quest, Space Quest, and Leisure Suit Larry.
Ken and Roberta Williams founded On-Line Systems in 1979, initially operating out of their home. In 1980 Roberta designed Mystery House, a modest commercial success that is credited as the first graphic adventure game — a text adventure that, revolutionarily, drew pictures of what the player was describing. It was sold by mail order, advertised in computer magazines under the name of Ken's consulting company, and it began a genre. The company renamed itself Sierra On-Line after the Sierra Nevada mountains near which it was based, and in 1982 moved to Oakhurst, California — an unusual rural location for a software company, and one that gave Sierra a distinctive identity as a kind of creative commune in the foothills. Roberta Williams became the definitive figure of the graphic adventure, conceiving King's Quest, a series that won international awards and spawned sequels at a rate that rivalled a Hollywood franchise, and later designing the full-motion-video horror game Phantasmagoria (1995). Sierra's catalogue became a genre unto itself. Alongside King's Quest came Space Quest's science-fiction comedy, the police procedural Police Quest, the fantasy role-playing hybrid Quest for Glory, and Al Lowe's scandalous Leisure Suit Larry. The company's parser-driven design — type what you want to do — was harder and crueller than the point-and-click approach LucasArts would later champion, and Sierra games were notorious for letting players die, or render a game unwinnable, without warning. That cruelty is inseparable from their character. Sierra also pushed beyond adventures into simulation, publishing the Leisure Suit Larry team's work alongside titles that ranged from flight sims to the enormously successful Half-Life, which it published in 1998. But the company's independence ended badly: it was acquired in 1996 by CUC International, which was subsequently consumed by an enormous accounting fraud that gutted the business, and the Sierra name was passed between owners until it was effectively retired in 2008. Its legacy is the graphic adventure itself — a genre it invented and defined.