Randy Littlejohn

From The Great Machine

During the last five years of Sierra On-Line before Ken Williams sold out to a company that fused with another company to become the biggest FEC fraud case in United States history before ENRON, there were rumors in Oakhurst, and more than enough paranoia to go around. Frankly, Sierra On-Line was like a terribly dysfunctional family. Ken was mumbling about being as big as Disney someday and the big secret was that Roberta couldn’t design her way out of paper bag. Nobody trusted anybody else, outside of friendships anyway. Games were made in spite of, or maybe to spite management, which seemed to mostly get in the way.

Marketing weevils used black arts to decide how new games were to be budgeted and everyone in management seemed to think it was okay for those weevils to under-project estimated sales in order to all but guarantee themselves bonuses when sales eventually exceeded (purposely false) expectations. That's the story I heard anyway.

You see, projected sales equaled the amount of money management was willing to spend on a project. And of course those ridiculously small budgets were unrealistic for developing AAA games, which of course, is what they demanded. So developers lied through their teeth about how much a game would cost in time and money from the get go. That’s why games went over budget and missed milestones. The game development process was chaotic. Every game reinvented the wheel. It was obvious to me, at least, that this couldn’t go on.

Everybody was tense, waiting for the hammer to fall – when was the Oakhurst studio going to be closed? That question took the forefront after Ken and Roberta moved away from Oakhurst where it all started and began their search for a mini-kingdom on an island in Puget Sound. Five years is a long time to endure that kind of stress. I went gray during that time, and I don’t think it’s a coincidence.

Out of that morass (which also included the decision to stop making adventure games) grew the B5 project, and that’s why it’s not surprising that the best space combat sim ever to be devised was canceled after millions of dollars and a few years of our lives went into developing it.

I got my first chance to work in a writing/design position as a kind of junior designer under Marc on the game Echoes - a kind of Myst on the moon. I still love that game and the work that was done on it. But the decision came down from above that no more adventure games were going to be made, so Echoes was canceled. I started working on another game in development, and then it too was canceled because it was an adventure game (a very unique one). There was interest in a space combat simulator, so Marc and I started on something tentatively called Starsiege, and this game (which was to have some very cool ship and environmental designs done by Marc), turned into our B5 game.

When the FEC fraud case hit, the next day there was the sound of munitions falling form the skies, but it wasn’t bombs, it was the sound of plummeting stock options. Soon after came word that the Oakhurst studio would be closed. When the team was told the game would continue development in Washington, I had little hope, because to me, the writing was on the wall. That’s why Christy and I decided to stay in California and continue working on the game as freelancers – that and because Christy owned 11 acres and a nice house – and because there’s no way we’d trust management at that point.

Just like there were rumors for five years about when the Oakhurst studio was going to be closed, there were rumors about why the game was canceled. There was intrigue. There were conspiracy theories, and lots of paranoia. In the end I never found out exactly why. I still don’t know whom to blame. Not really. Which is why it’s so hard to let it go. It’s unfinished business.