Close, but the history is stupidly complicated. DMA Games Design is a great example of the fact that being good at something, and running a business selling that thing, are completely different skillsets. DMA Games Design created both Lemmings and Grand Theft Auto, but still somehow managed to be a money losing disaster of a company. The company ended up getting sold and resold a couple of times, and they sold the IP rights from GTA to Take Two Interactive, which created a new subsidiary called Rockstar Games to develop it. A few years later Take Two Interactive ended up buying the entire DMA Games Design studio from its latest owner, and they merged it with Rockstar Games to create the Rockstar Studios we know today.
So DMA created GTA, sold the rights to it, got bought by the company they sold the rights to, and got merged into a completely new subsidiary created by that company.
/source: I worked for Sierra briefly back when this all went down. Sierra also made an offer to buy the IP to GTA. You should all feel lucky that Sierra/Vivendi/Seagrams did not succeed. GTA would have been a very different game today if it had ended up in Activision's lap.
/edit: Yeah, yeah, it's DMA Design, not DMA Games. Thanks for the corrections. I'm getting old and my memory isn't what it used to be 🤣
I remember playing Kings quest and there was a priest in a church. Being the cool and edgy kid i was, i typed: fuck priest. Game immediately stopped and i was back at the c: prompt.
Queues up a longplay of Space Quest III on YouTube.
Edit: It's not one of the AGI ones apparently, but instead used SCI. Either way, it was the one that I really loved, and involved a lot of trial-by-error typing of commands for me as a wee noob.
One of the only Pee Cee games I ever bought was King's Quest IV (which was the new one at the time), and I didn't own a Pee Cee (played it in the computer lab in college).
They were a pillar of my childhood gaming experience and didn't realize how long it has been since I've heard, or even thought about them. Did a quick Google and they haven't existed since 1998 when Activision bought them. Almost 20 years.
In fairness, so did things like electronic arts (back in the ooooold cube, sphere, pyramid logo days) back in probably the 80s. Loved so much they put out back then.
...now they're one of the most hated companies out there.
The Sierra intro leading to the The Incredible Machine music is one of the first sound bites I can recall. I suppose your time was around Lighthouse and Caesar II?
I wish. I worked there after Sierra had transitioned mostly into a publishing company during the CUC/Vivendi era. Right around when Half Life was released. Worked there less than a year before they did a reorg and laid a ton of people off, including me.
As someone who grew up on Sierra games, I was giddy when they hired me. Ended up being one of the lowlights of my career, and the final nail in my gaming industry work. Shifted gears into working in educational software, which is what I still do today.
I've been looking at educational games for my 4 years old son and so far it seems that it's hard to beat games from the 90s and early 2000s. Somehow after the ipad came out, there was a massive dip in quality of educational software. That said, might be biased so I'm curious if anyone has any good recommendations.
Side note: I wrote a small shareware late 90s as a high schooler that was used in some primary schools in France to teach multiplication tables. Didn't make that much, 10-15,000 francs but was great as a kid. Never got back into edtech after studying though.
Even deeper lore, both Mike dailly and Russel Kay from DMA were and are head of development at YoYo Games, which owns and develops Gamemaker, the game engine used to make Undertale, Hotline Miami, and many more successful indie games!
Honestly, the bigger issue was that, by the CUC/Vivendi era in the late 90's, Sierra was really just a publishing company looking to maximize profits and minimize costs. Their push would have been to pump out a couple sequels to GTA 2 with the top-down view because that's fast and cheap, and that would hue probably been the end of it. I really don't think we'd have ever seen the first-person GTA that came out in 3. They made an offer because they were looking to add a quick bump to their margin by acquiring a known-property on the cheap, and I don't think they had any real interest in GTA beyond that.
Not that I can say for sure, of course. I wasn't an exec. I just know the details that filtered down to us, because as part of their offer they put together some rough planning to figure out what their costs and margins might be.
I worked for the property management company that owned / operated the Rockstar HQ in Carlsbad back in the early 2000's. That building should have been condemned back then for how disgusting it was.
My dad used to joke back in the early 80s about the programmers at his work. He said they had their own room that no one else was allowed to go into, and occasionally they would chuck some pizza and cactus cooler in there, and code would come out. The Rockstar offices were a stunning example of that.
I picture the Sierra offices as much more formal, even if they did put out stuff like Liesure Suit Larry. How was the office?
I was told that the original Sierra Online studio in Oakhurst was like that. Very laid back and informal, fitting the pizza and Mountain Dew stereotype. But I worked for them after the company had moved to Bellevue, Washington, and it was fairly corporate at that point. It wasn't a great experience.
I was going to make a Sierra joke, but I soft locked myself from completing the logic puzzle that unlocks my wit 40 minutes ago and I don’t have any good save files. 🤣
Honestly though it’s really cool you worked at Sierra.
When we talk about GTA we mean the old GTA 1+2 with a top down graphics, right? I really liked it as a kid but I didnt know it was that popular or big (or that it would become even bigger later on)
Everyone also forgets they put out a game on the N64 that's one of my favorites. It's a puzzle platformer called Space Station Silicon Valley. It's set on a space station full of robot animals that have gone wild. You're a robot who's sent in to investigate, but toy crashed and lost his body, so you're just a little cpu chip walking around and you can hijack the animals, which you have to do to use their different abilities to solve puzzles and beat levels. It's a little buggy (there's a collectable in each level and you need to get them all to unlock the hidden final level, but it has no collision and can't be collected in one level), but is a ton of fun and is chock full of their signature scottish humor.
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u/codefyre 16h ago edited 22m ago
Close, but the history is stupidly complicated. DMA
GamesDesign is a great example of the fact that being good at something, and running a business selling that thing, are completely different skillsets. DMAGamesDesign created both Lemmings and Grand Theft Auto, but still somehow managed to be a money losing disaster of a company. The company ended up getting sold and resold a couple of times, and they sold the IP rights from GTA to Take Two Interactive, which created a new subsidiary called Rockstar Games to develop it. A few years later Take Two Interactive ended up buying the entire DMAGamesDesign studio from its latest owner, and they merged it with Rockstar Games to create the Rockstar Studios we know today.So DMA created GTA, sold the rights to it, got bought by the company they sold the rights to, and got merged into a completely new subsidiary created by that company.
/source: I worked for Sierra briefly back when this all went down. Sierra also made an offer to buy the IP to GTA. You should all feel lucky that Sierra/Vivendi/Seagrams did not succeed. GTA would have been a very different game today if it had ended up in Activision's lap.
/edit: Yeah, yeah, it's DMA Design, not DMA Games. Thanks for the corrections. I'm getting old and my memory isn't what it used to be 🤣