No joke: Ken and Roberta Williams could have been the bosses of id Software, but the acquisition fell through…

Sierra On-Line was an undeniable pioneer in graphical adventure games, but they could have had some lasting achievement in first-person shooters… if they had been able to buy up id Software in 1992. That’s the story that John Romero, a prominent figure at id, told as he gave us a glimpse into the development behind Wolfenstein 3D at this year’s Game Developers Conference (GDC).

Romero loved the King’s Quest games and sent some Commander Keen games to Roberta Williams, the creator of King’s Quest (who was also the head of Sierra On-Line as the wife of Ken Williams) because he saw the publisher was opening up to games for kids. “She loved it, and she asked if we would fly to their office to talk business,” Romero said. And so they did: id Software flew to California to meet with the Williams couple, and in the process, the team showed them an early version of Wolfenstein 3D. Ken didn’t like it much. “After about 30 seconds of watching, he wanted to show me the new game they were working on, Red Baron Online. I was dumbfounded. Here’s the future, the start of a new genre: the first-person shooter. And Ken could not pay it any notice.”

Sierra looked at id Software’s books and saw that the team, including John Carmack, made $50,000 a month from shareware games. Romero told us that Ken Williams offered $2.5 million in stock for the studio, and although the guys were happy to get four years of income right away, there was a bump. id Software asked for $100,000 in cash upfront. “Ken thought about it for a second, then he was like, ‘No thanks, but good luck with everything.’ So the 100k was a little too rich for him,” Romero said.

The stealth game Castle Wolfenstein, released for the Apple II in 1981, was the starting point for Wolfenstein 3D. “When we started creating gameplay, we were replicating all of the original game’s stealth features, like searching dead bodies, dragging those guards around so enemy soldiers wouldn’t see them and become suspicious, and attempting to break into storage lockers for food and ammo, But while we were adding these features to the game and playing the game constantly, we started to notice that the more fun part of the game was running and gunning. Stopping to drag a guard or unlock a chest slowed down the innovative high-speed running and blasting Nazis that was the real fun core of the game,” Romero explained.

The developers focused on speed, so the game’s design was simplified. Romero says, “The entire time you’re making the game, you’re trying to find the fun as soon as you can. And sometimes the fun isn’t in the features you thought would be fun. You have to listen to the game.”

PCGamer caught up with the Williams couple at GDC to hear from them. Ken told them if he regretted not paying the four guys: “Well, no. See, there were four guys in a van. I mean, they didn’t seem stable and predictable.” Roberta confirmed this. Ken added, “Because I was going to write this cheque to take them,” Ken went on, “but they weren’t very official. If you’re going to acquire a company, you want to know the guys go to work every day and have an office. Now you look back on it, and it was one of the dumber moves.” (One of the better moves is that the duo started developing a game for PC and VR, Colossal Cave 3D, out of boredom in the coronavirus global pandemic!)

Ken added that he was prejudiced against violent, bloody games at the time and didn’t like the idea of Sierra On-Line becoming id Software’s publisher: “I didn’t like the idea of kids running through a building with a gun, shooting at other humanoid figures and blood spurting.” Then they made 1995’s Phantasmagoria, a point-and-click game that made the news with its scandal (rape, let’s leave it at that).

We wonder how much the games industry would have changed if id and Sierra had got together under one roof to make DOOM…?

Source: Gamesindustry, PCGamer