Oh, internet. It's Monday November 2nd and you're listening to Waypoint Radio episode 356. I'm your host, Rob Zagny.

We've got been an odd one here for you today. We are going to be discussing a massive feature on the

history, well, not the history of Sierra, the game company, but the history of Sierra is

sudden death as it was bought out by a coupon company that was apparently committing massive

financial fraud and then destroyed and so in fallout when that sort of scheme began to upload.

And the person who told that story for us and who spent months researching it as with us today,

freelance writer Duncan Fife. Hi. So Duncan, tell me a little bit about what drew you to this story

because I think until you sort of pitched me on it, I had forgotten that there was this aspect of

the end of Sierra that it was actually corporate crime that caused the company to fall apart because

I think, you know, if you think of games history as an unfolds across the pages of magazines from that

era, it's easy to think, well, Sierra adventure games started being a little more, they were

much more expensive. Their quality was maybe questionable in places and adventure games were no

longer what they were. Sierra was probably just old fashioned and just couldn't keep up with the

times, but that's manifestly not really the story of what happens here. This is not this is not a case

of, you know, the logic of the market or preferences, calling time on a company, but instead,

something very different. Yeah. And in fact, if Sierra had got a few more years, I think it would have

evolved and it was already starting to evolve into a very different company. There were rather a

company that made very different games. Like the talent at Sierra, the designers, I think, were

more attached to adventure games than the leadership ever was. And that goes back to Ken Williams,

who founded the company. You know, like I think by the end, this is 99, 2000, you know, they were,

they had just signed the rights to publish Half-Life. They were working on this big Babylon 5 game

that had the whole cast and crew of the TV series. Working on that, that was never released.

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