The two founders of Sierra On-Line, Roberta and Ken Williams, have a distinguished history in the gaming industry, and Phantasmagoria is just a tiny slice of their past.

After more than twenty years, the Williams couple is, admittedly out of boredom, making a game called Colossal Cave 3D, a 3D remake of the 1976 Colossal Cave Adventure, a text adventure game that had a significant impact on the gaming industry. This game inspired Roberta Williams to create Mystery House, her first game (so King’s Quest wouldn’t have gotten off the ground without it). Sierra was successful and influential, but they didn’t have the opportunity to work on every IP.

Ken Williams told PCGamer at the GDC (Game Developers Conference) that he wanted to make something out of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, but Infocom ended up getting the go-ahead. He wanted to work with Douglas Adams, the book’s author, but that didn’t happen either.

But Stephen King was an even bigger target for the Williams duo. He was the uncrowned king of the horror genre in the eighties and nineties, and the couple revealed how they tried to work with him. Roberta said they tried to work with him because she wanted to create a horror game. According to Ken, there were several knocks on his door, and King may have regretted it after Sierra made Phantasmagoria. Roberta says he had no idea about them and what they were doing, so she ended up doing her game, which (although a bit scandalous) turned out well because Phantasmagoria was an excellent game.

Ken would work with Bugliosi through the book Helter Skelter (true crime), written in 1974 by Vincent Bugliosi and Curt Gentry. He was a famous lawyer (indeed: he represented Charles Manson in court), and he fancied himself as a lawyer wannabe, so to speak, as Roberta said he was a sucker for courtroom drama. So they hired him and then started talking to the creative people about how they could make a courtroom drama game, which didn’t work out (they couldn’t do an Ace Attorney after all). Roberta said the idea itself was no fun, and Ken was proud of his vision at the time…

Yesterday, we wrote about how the acquisition of id Software didn’t work out for them, even though the Carmack’s weren’t developing DOOM at the time, but Wolfenstein 3D…

Source: PCGamer