I remember being very puzzled when I saw this game on the shelves. Why in the world would the participation of this old cop make a video game any better? And isn't this the guy who said that the Rodney King beatings was no big deal? My high school best friend, who was going through a talk-radio conservative phase, was delighted, in an "oh, doesn't this just piss you off that I don't have a problem with the LAPD" kind of way.

Anyway, I wish the article had more about how the game itself did. I remember Sierra games of that era were generally horrible, and seemed to just rely of the novelty of what computer games could do at that time. I vaguely remember playing Police Quest III and Space Quest IV, which consisted mostly of moving the mouse around on the screen to see what you could interact with, and solving really stupid riddles that would move the plot along in a highly railroaded fashion.
posted by skewed at 3:14 PM on January 18, 2018 [3 favorites]

I remember this game being similar to Indigo Prophecy in that it started out in a decent, interesting manner but quickly became the most insane, stupid bullshit.
posted by selfnoise at 3:24 PM on January 18, 2018 [1 favorite]

I stopped paying attention to Sierra games when they began to move from being text-driven to click-driven, so I have no recollection of this game at all. I guess it shows how desperate the Williamses were for a commercial success at a time when LucasArts seemed to be eating their lunch.
posted by tonycpsu at 3:39 PM on January 18, 2018 [1 favorite]

As a kid, I used to get Sierra On-Line's magazine, I guess because I bought and registered a King's Quest game. Even back then, from reading it, I could tell they were such a bunch of fucking squares. Never bought another of their games, but kept getting the stupid magazine until they stopped making it.
posted by destructive cactus at 4:28 PM on January 18, 2018 [5 favorites]

I played the Police Quest games but I would have been 10 when this came out. I remember the name on the box but I had no idea who Daryl Gates was until today. I don't remember getting far in this one.

Sierra games in general were so good though. I mean no, they were frustrating and the puzzles made no sense, and if you ate a pie at the very beginning of a game it meant you couldn't throw it in a Yeti's face later and you had made the game unwinnable. Police Quests were extra hard in that you had to follow police procedure to the letter, which the article mentions. It was maddening.

So the games are frustrating but they played a huge part of my youth. I played almost everything they put out. I even first became aware of the Internet through their Sierra Network service. King Graham, Gabriel Knight and Laura Bow shaped me more than I'll probably never know.
posted by yellowbinder at 4:54 PM on January 18, 2018 [9 favorites]

I remember these games existing somewhere in the background, but I never actually made the connection to Gates and who he was.

From this piece I also learned that he was responsible (at least in part) for D.A.R.E., which explains a whole lot.
posted by brennen at 5:33 PM on January 18, 2018 [1 favorite]

Wow. I had no idea Sierra were that awful. I thought that they would have been fairly liberal, in a somewhat of-the-time casually-sexist reads-Playboy-for-the-articles sort of way. (Leisure Suit Larry was hardly woke by any standards, but it wasn't a Gamergate manifesto either.)
posted by acb at 5:42 PM on January 18, 2018 [3 favorites]

I guess it shows how desperate the Williamses were for a commercial success at a time when LucasArts seemed to be eating their lunch.

Not the case, actually: Sierra outsold LucasArts by a significant margin throughout the period, even though now LucasArts are assessed as having the better games. Sierra had a far better distribution network; they were one of the few game publishers to have a strong relationship with Radio Shack, which meant that for much of the US, Sierra's adventure games were the only ones available. In addition, Sierra's games were much more creatively ambitious; LucasArts mostly made comedies, but this was an era where 'Can A Computer Game Make You Cry?' was an intriguing and ambitious question.

Of course, while LucasArts is seen as having made the better games, they didn't really meet their ambitions either. Despite orienting their flow around what makes sense for the story, their storytelling is interrupted by the puzzles, and the puzzle design necessitates the player making lots of unmotivated moves to other locations to get necessary items. Modern adventure games either do away with puzzles in favour of choice-based storytelling (a signature technique of Telltale games), or use innovative puzzles in a more story-based way (the Phoenix Wright series has a cross-examination mechanic where you identify contradictions in testimony to force witnesses into a lie; games like The Shivah and Her Story have a search engine that delivers vital information if you can work out the right clue to give it).
posted by Merus at 5:51 PM on January 18, 2018 [14 favorites]

SIERRA WHY
posted by corb at 6:10 PM on January 18, 2018 [1 favorite]

Wow, I had forgotten about Open Season. I remember buying it from the remainder bin for like $10, so it must have been 1994 or 1995 by then. Even as a dumb teenager I hated it. The “deviant” killer thing was dumb and mean and made no sense.

Reading that Ken Williams was a reactionary shitheel isn’t surprising, but it’s still disappointing. That he could meet Gates and come away thinking he’s a great guy is just gross.

That said, the first Gabriel Knight game is still one of my favorite adventure games, even though I’m much, much more of a Lucasarts fan (Grim Fandango? Day of the Tentacle?).
posted by uncleozzy at 6:34 PM on January 18, 2018 [4 favorites]

I liked the Space Quests, at least the early ones I played -- they had cheeky references to other Sierra titles, too.
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 6:42 PM on January 18, 2018 [6 favorites]

Sierra was my favorite video game developer by a mile. I was as loyal as they come, but I've never heard of this game. Thanks for posting the article.
posted by Beholder at 6:45 PM on January 18, 2018

One of the various "History of Video Games" books from the past decade (I wish I could remember which one, there have been many) had a chapter on Sierra, and despite their association with Roberta Williams, Lori Ann Cole, and Jane Jenson, the vibe at the office/studio was more a reflection of their games like Softporn Adventure and Leisure Suit Larry than anything. Lots of hot tub parties and newly rich nerdy men objectifying women.

I'm not surprised that same group would a few years later end up in bed with Chief Gates.
posted by thecjm at 7:09 PM on January 18, 2018 [5 favorites]

Oh geez they do mention it at the beginning of the article. The book was Hackers. The depiction of their company soured my memories of Sierra games.
posted by thecjm at 7:18 PM on January 18, 2018

The extremely excellent PushingUpRoses has a video on Police Quest that is definitely worth checking out. She offers a review and analysis of the game qua game and also gives some background on it's development. Like, for example, the fact that Leisure Suit Larry's Al Lowe was the lead programmer, a fact she invokes to explain some weird tonal issues the game runs into.
posted by tobascodagama at 7:22 PM on January 18, 2018 [6 favorites]

You are not carrying that item.
posted by Construction Concern at 7:42 PM on January 18, 2018 [5 favorites]

BTW, I never knew Sierra had their own in house publicity magazine. You can find them archived, and they're a real hoot if you're looking for a nostalgia fix.
posted by Beholder at 7:46 PM on January 18, 2018

I did read Hackers, and yeah, Ken Williams doesn't come across well in there at all, even though it's early days for Sierra. His hero is Jonas Cord, the thinly-veiled Howard Hughes expy in Harold Robbins' The Carpetbaggers, and he uses a bunch of naive and enthusiastic teenage hackers to help grow his company before kicking them to the curb at the earliest opportunity. I'm still moderately staggered that he wouldn't consider going with Joseph Wambaugh, who, if he didn't invent the modern police procedural, is one of the best-known practitioners of it. (From Wambaugh's Wikipedia entry: "Wambaugh became sharply critical of the command structure of the LAPD and individuals within it, and later, of the city government as well. The character of 'Deputy Chief Digby Bates' in The Black Marble, for example, is likely a thinly-veiled lampoon of Chief Daryl Gates.")
posted by Halloween Jack at 8:19 PM on January 18, 2018 [2 favorites]

It seemed obvious… that there were going to be existing Police Quest Sierra players who would drop out rather than buy a game with Daryl Gates’ Sierra's name on it.”

FTFY
posted by Ogre Lawless at 8:44 PM on January 18, 2018

Ew.
posted by PMdixon at 10:47 PM on January 18, 2018 [1 favorite]

Wow, I'm nervous about ruining my past affection for Sierra. King's Quest VI was the first computer games I ever played before I discovered the knowledge adventure games that came with our Compaq. I think this game is why I learned English so quickly after immigrating to the us; I read that stupid guide pamphlet cover to cover so many times just to beat the game. Which I actually never did.

I guess when you get older you realize your heroes are just people and sometimes they are shitty people.
posted by tedious at 11:12 PM on January 18, 2018 [6 favorites]

I was never really into the Sierra games, although I loved LucasFilm games for the most part, and was quite fond of Dynamix games (which Sierra later bought).
posted by blueberry at 11:12 PM on January 18, 2018 [1 favorite]

I'd like to know if this game kept with the strict enforcement of proper procedure that defined the earlier games. Somehow, I doubt it.
posted by ckape at 12:52 AM on January 19, 2018

I love Police Quest I and II. III had that abysmal driving thingy and combined with how poorly the SCI handled timing with CPUs a few MHz higher than what was available at the time often meant I gave up after driving from second location.
Open Season? Unredeemingly shit - the story is awful from top to bottom, it abuses the digital photography thing everyone had to use at the time but aged terribly, and has a criminal in the byline. I do have a boxed copy from a store that was emptying their storage, but my experience from playing it from an abandonware site was more than enough.
posted by lmfsilva at 3:23 AM on January 19, 2018 [2 favorites]

Sierra had some properly great stuff, Space Quests III and IV being my particular favorites, and I still remember LSL 3-7 fondly (their/Al Lowe's laughable gender politics just registered as silly fantasy fun to teenage me). None of the Police Quest games grabbed me at all, though. After very little exposure to PQ1 and 2 they looked like joyless slogs that took themselves too seriously and I never delved deeper, so I had no idea that PQ4 was this batshit, until now. Thanks for the post!
posted by jklaiho at 3:37 AM on January 19, 2018 [2 favorites]

From this piece I also learned that he was responsible (at least in part) for D.A.R.E., which explains a whole lot.

Not just DARE. Daryl Fucking Gates is responsible for the SWAT concept and the current militarization of police.
posted by mikelieman at 4:40 AM on January 19, 2018 [16 favorites]

If memory serves, one of the Police Quest titles contains one of the most notoriously wacky puzzles of the era, in which you have to [spoiler] make a fake mustache by applying a piece of tape to a cat.
posted by Faint of Butt at 5:09 AM on January 19, 2018 [2 favorites]

Actually that's Gabriel Knight 3. It's a terrible puzzle. You have to disguise yourself as Detective Mosley in order to ... use his ID for something? So of course you need a fake mustache. Except that Mosley doesn't have a mustache, so you also have to draw a mustache onto his passport.

Moon. Logic.
posted by uncleozzy at 5:22 AM on January 19, 2018 [15 favorites]

The logic of the moustache isn't that far off. Knight and Mosley look nothing alike, with the moustache most people (at least with jobs as important as "checking out motorcycles to tourists") would see it and go "yeah, that checks out". It's like those minimalist posters thingy where you have a bunch of people, perfectly recognizable just by their facial hair with no other features drawn.

It's how you get the hair that doesn't make any sense.
posted by lmfsilva at 6:13 AM on January 19, 2018

I still remember LSL 3-7 fondly (their/Al Lowe's laughable gender politics just registered as silly fantasy fun to teenage me).

LSL3: Ultimately, Larry and Patti spend the night together, but after a round of passionate lovemaking, Larry hears Patti mumble her previous partner's name (who she intends to leave) as she drifts to sleep. Dejected, Larry abandons his new lover, eventually becoming lost in the uncharted jungle surrounding the resort area. It is at this point, the game shifts perspectives; the player now controls Patti, who must navigate the hostile terrain and assorted perils of the jungle (usually by removing parts of her clothing in the process) to find Larry and resolve the misunderstanding.

I still remember being a girl who loved Kings Quest & Space Quest, and who was utterly dejected when I finally looked past the decidedly un-teen-girl-friendly covers to listen to what a few guy friends were saying and check out what this silly fantasy fun was they were talking about. It was a formative experience that gave me essentially this sort of view. I never paid for another Sierra game after that. (I babysat and coded AutoLisp scripts for my parents, so did earn my own money.)

Roberta Williams did some neat stuff but was literally (as in literally) used as a token by her husband more than once.
posted by fraula at 6:26 AM on January 19, 2018 [7 favorites]

D.A.R.E.: Drugs Are Really Excellent. No hard-core high school stoner was complete without one of those T-shirts.
posted by Halloween Jack at 6:35 AM on January 19, 2018 [4 favorites]

fwiw, it seems like a whole lot of people at Sierra really hated that Daryl Gates was there and Ken Williams was just a shitheel you worked for because he paid your salary. some of those games are the product of very hands-off management from the shitheel so you can still love them and still really hate the whole enterprise that was everything Ken Williams touched

the article is really interesting and well worth a read:

Williams and Gates got to know one another over the phone, and the more Williams learned, the more he liked. He liked that Gates made time for surfing in the mornings. Both were fans of Rush Limbaugh’s radio show. For Gates’ part, he saw in Sierra and Police Quest the opportunity to “maybe say something important about law enforcement… [and to] try and give people a better appreciation for what officers face on the job and encourage a willingness to support them.”

Ken Williams definitely has a Blue Lives Matter bumper sticker. and oh my fucking god those bits that summarize Open Season's plot points

Computer Gaming World ran an interview with Gates but disclaimed that “the well-beaten ground of past controversy” would not be addressed in its pages.

I mean, sure, why dive into controversial political territory when you have the privilege of being largely unaffected by it, right? modern day GamerGate reactions to studios trying to be more intersectional and diverse and wanting them to stay 'apolitical' (as if there were such a thing) came from somewhere

it's almost like we've been dealing with some shit for a very long time, long before most people decided to become nominally aware of them, eh
posted by runt at 7:38 AM on January 19, 2018 [10 favorites]

Huh, no love for Hero's Quest/Quest for Glory? I loved those games. I still go back and play them every now and then for nostalgia sake, and I still enjoy them.

I never got into the Police Quest games tho, the stick-to-the-rules-or-you-die mechanic mentioned in the article was a deal breaker for me.
posted by Grither at 8:02 AM on January 19, 2018 [4 favorites]

Gabriel Knight--I never played 3, but 1 was brilliant and 2 was actually pretty good (and 2 didn't have the problematic voodoo thing). Gold Rush. Laura Bow and the Dagger of Amon Ra may still be one of my favorite video games of all time, and aside from being a pretty feminist premise, actually portrayed the Egyptology craze as largely being a thing created by privileged assholes ransacking somebody else's culture. I don't get this idea that Sierra games were always terrible, but I will say that I never hear anybody say "oh god remember Police Quest, that was my favorite". Especially not this one. But this was also the early 90s in this phase where adventure games should have been coming into their own--graphically they could suddenly do so much and Dagger of Amon Ra was gorgeous--but interest was falling off a lot, and it's kind of revolting to realize that this was the sort of thing Ken Williams thought was going to fix everything.

I am unsurprised to find out that the writer on Dagger of Amon Ra was the Josh Mandel who found this so objectionable.
posted by Sequence at 8:34 AM on January 19, 2018 [5 favorites]

I prefer the attitude that Conquests of the Longbow had to the law, where at the end, Robin Hood is put on trial and you get to argue why everyone you robbed deserved it.
posted by RobotHero at 8:54 AM on January 19, 2018 [3 favorites]

I don't get this idea that Sierra games were always terrible

I think it's just that they stuck more closely to the "ideal" of early text adventures, where puzzles were frequently opaque and missteps were punished by death, and for a lot of people, that's not fun. Like, I started playing The Dagger of Amon-Ra a few weeks ago, but the early-game look-both-ways mechanic soured me on it so quickly that I put it down and haven't picked it back up. Ditto Gold Rush, which I remember fondly, but some of the gameplay is punishing just for the sake of being cruel.

Gabriel Knight has several insta-death scenarios, of course, but the art, atmosphere, story, and voice acting really place it at the peak of Sierra's output and make the occasional frustration forgivable.

Fans of Lucas-style adventures should pick up Thimbleweed Park, if you haven't already. It's a really loving retro-modern take on the genre.
posted by uncleozzy at 9:12 AM on January 19, 2018 [4 favorites]

I got one of those packs of twelve discount games on CD when I was a kid - the one I really wanted was Descent - and there were a couple CDs in the set my parents hid so I couldn't play them. This was on one of them. At the time I thought it was because it advertised mature themes, but now that I think about it I'm sure my parents knew who Daryl F. Gates was.
posted by atoxyl at 9:29 AM on January 19, 2018 [4 favorites]

The Daryl Gates Police Quest game was the before/after for me. Before, I was in my early teens and uncritically adored Sierra (and LucasArts) games, even the bargain bin remainders like Manhunter 2 that ended up being more expensive than one of the better games when you factored in the cost to call the Sierra tip line (and the world of shit that got me from my parents when the phone bill arrived). I made a lot of friends through Sierra game swaps, though you had to have something worth trading to get started. (Nobody was trading Space Quest IV for Manhunter 2.)

After, never bought another Sierra game. I got a couple as gifts but they gathered dust. I was so disgusted. (Not that it cost Ken Williams anything, if you see how much he sold the company for.)
posted by chimpsonfilm at 10:08 AM on January 19, 2018 [1 favorite]

What I learned from police quest: drive everywhere with your sirens on so you could blow past red lights without thinking about it.
posted by Perfectibilist at 4:59 PM on January 19, 2018 [1 favorite]