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Remember when someone claimed the Sierra takeover by CUC (Cendant) Corporation was a conspiratorial one? As it turns out, there was a conspiracy to buy out Sierra On-Line (more like well-timed fraud than anything else, though), and Al Lowe has proof. Who done it? Read the first part of the article, then follow Al's advice and Google "Cendant verdict Forbes trial".

Addendum:

Dang, after re-reading my own words, I realize I need better sleep. Anyways, I agree with a fellow on Reddit how Al Lowe seems to be rather cynical about the past as to overlook things. After all, Sierra's profit margins were getting tighter with their adventure game mainstays, so I imagine the board of directors was starting to get antsy. Furthermore, the derivativeness Al talks about which results in greenlighting only titles/genres which previously made money? If you take a look at Sierra's releases from 1996-1998, a lot of those games are sequels to popular games and/or are games in popular genres, such as RTS (Outpost 2) and FPS (Starsiege series, Half-Life by Valve).

I didn't realize that anyone thought that it was just a conspiracy. Remember that it occurred at the end of the leverage buyout craze. The difference was that it was also a scam. It was not the only one of the era. It is the time that Bain Capital was in full swing with their tactic of doing a leverage buyout on credit and unloading the credit burden on the targeted company so they no longer had to carry it, all to raid some fat asset of the company like the retirement fund and then sell off the remaining carcass. What CUC did was not too dissimilar.

Ken Williams has spoken of it at length on Sierra Gamers, but the database for the old forums was hosed at one point, so posters' names, attachments, etc. were disassociated from the posts and the search function is broken.

Collector wrote:Ken Williams has spoken of it at length on Sierra Gamers, but the database for the old forums was hosed at one point, so posters' names, attachments, etc. were disassociated from the posts and the search function is broken.

It's not the same content as the posts Ken made on Sierra Gamers, but here's a nonetheless-interesting Gamasutra article from October 2005 where he briefly touches on the CUC buyout.

It's not called vulture capitalism for no reason.

Expack3 wrote: Dang, after re-reading my own words, I realize I need better sleep. Anyways, I agree with a fellow on Reddit how Al Lowe seems to be rather cynical about the past as to overlook things.

From what I have seen of Al Lowe (talked to him a bit when I launched the Larry Laffer site, also when I asked him to voice one of the characters of my web series) - this struck me as anything but cynical about the past. He seemed thankful and grateful for the opportunity he had at Sierra. I certainly think he's one to speak his mind, if asked. Which I think may come off as cynical, rather than "matter of fact."