SHP Forums

So, we're fans of Sierra On-line. We all have different stories of how we came to know the game. We all have different favorite games. Different favorite moments.

But what's your favorite Sierra memory? Was it first playing a game? Was it playing a game with a friend or family? Was it a specific scene? Overcoming a specific puzzle? Did the game(s) help you in life? Were they there during a difficult time?

Maybe it has nothing to do with the game, but the Sierra Community?

Let's hear about it.

Too many to name. Typing naughty things in KQ4 and then getting feedback certainly blew my mind as a kid.

It was probably the Catacombs in KQ6 that sticks out for me. I used to spend summers at my aunt's, and she used to play all the old King's Quest games with me. I remember distinctly being terrified of the atmosphere in the catacombs, but then was amazed when my aunt just ripped through them like they were nothing. And when she left the room, I'd load the game and try it myself. I spent a couple nights trying to get that maze down perfect, right down to memorizing the poem for the floor puzzle. I felt like a total bad-ass when I finally nailed it, but I still get chills thinking about that place.

10 Running a favourite Sierra death poll - and browsing hours of death videos looking for candidates!

9 To this day, when I fill in an age at LSL1, I use "38". When my father first showed the game to my sister and me, he filled in his proper age, 38, to reach the question set. It may be surprising what fun a 10-year-old who speaks little English can have trying to break through the question barrier - and occasionally succeeding.

8 Watching in amazement as my father managed to make it to California in Gold Rush, taking the Cape Horn route. Of all routes I've found Cape Horn the most difficult because of the numerous random deaths. I could never repeat my father's performance. Also because I was using a savegame from after leaving Brooklyn.

7 Seated on the old kiddie chair I had many playdays on, playing Shivers on my Dino, getting so startled by the first Ixupi scare that I fell off my seat and immediately closed the game. I did want to continue as soon as my heart stopped racing, so I checked a walkthrough - and found that it was supposed to happen, and since I hadn't saved... I had to go through it again.

6 It's great when a game makes you laugh uncontrollably. LSL was great in that respect of course, but also the GKs. The "Nice legs" from GK3 had me in stitches to the extent that I kept playing the file over and over. The Clue reference later in that game knocked me off my kiddie chair. The GK1 tattoo sequence is wrong in all ways, so funny! SQ4, descending down the sewers with unstable ordnance! Don's cackling in Phantasmagoria! Trevor Barnes in Phantas 2! Dancing skeletons in KQ6! Limericks leading to death by boogeyman because you're having such a good time in KQ7!

5 Having problems with LSL5 because I didn't know who Donald Trump was. Those were the days...

4 Solving puzzles that are known to be difficult, like Shivers's pinball puzzle, Le Serpent Rouge and Victorian's Conversion. Especially Victorian Principles was amazing since I was like 14 playing LSL7 and a lot of it went over my head.

3 Dad wanted to see the game I just bought when I brought my first copy of Shivers home. He only saw it for a few seconds - then it slipped from his fingers into the slit between the arm and the seat of the couch. There was no way to retrieve the disk from the small opening.
The sofa was my father's pride and joy when he first got it, which was but a memory by the time of the incident fifteen years later, but all the same, having him cut the bottom of the sofa to retrieve a CD that cost 50 cents...
Rudy was so taken by the story he asked me to post a picture on the Vivendi forums.

2 Falling head-over-heels in love with Gabriel Knight 3 at the sound of the music - and finding the orchestra version! Playing your first Gabriel Knight is an eye-opener: I never knew a game could be of such genuine quality, such virtue...

1 Playing Strip Liar's Dice with my boyfriend and hear him giggling at Dewmi's drink on the table move...



Honorable mentions: when you discover something new through a game. Like GK3 got me watching Hitchcock.
Finding someting new and funny in a game you thought you knew back to front.

Datadog wrote:Typing naughty things in KQ4 and then getting feedback certainly blew my mind as a kid.

"Not in front of the players!"
Perhaps you need to purchase a copy of "Leisure Suit Larry?"

I've changed it to say "Memories" now... Yeah, I have no idea what I was thinking making it sound singular.

In no particular order...

• 1. When my best friend (at the time)'s father introduced both Shawn and I to Sierra games. It was King's Quest I, like with only 4 colors and required booting from the disk.
  2. Shawn and I spending hours in his father's office, playing the Sierra games we would pay 50/50 on.
  3. Shawn and I "developing" our own game - B.C. Quest (before we realized there was one Sierra did, called that based on the comic strip). Ours stood for "Before Civilization" - and also focused on a cave man, but he was named Duh Ugg. (Pronounced "Doug")
  4. Getting responses from the onslaught of letters I used to write Sierra. (My heart still breaks knowing these got lost somewhere in the move between SD -> TN -> SD ... Not sure at what point they got lost)
  5. Getting the autographed black and white photos of all the designers from Sierra. (My heart still breaks knowing these got lost somewhere in the move between SD -> TN -> SD ... Not sure at what point they got lost)
  6. My days on The Sierra Network/Imagination - because that's where I met Amiee, who would go on, for reasons beyond logic - agree to be my wife.
  7. Sending in a random "Leisure Suit Larry" fan photo of myself and having it be used for a Leisure Suit Larry contest in InterAction magazine.
  8. The Official Sierra forums back in the day - met some incredibly nice people on those forums.
  9. Getting to meet Jules in person, from the forums (by then I knew her also from my own forum and the forums on here)
  10. Being able to be a part of Collector's "site" when I hosted it on Tawmis.com - and seeing it grow to what it is now!

Oh, but the community is a whole different story altogether!

Favourite SHP Community Memories:

10: Gross Man, a comic I started that references Sierra and the people on SHP a LOT. I built him to use at the Masquerade, but a better idea popped up, and my superhero was relegated to my birthday thread (which was almost immediately merged into the general birthday topic)

9: Andrea and Spikey sharing their photos of Rennes-Le-Chateau

8: Jules has shared quite a lot of great photos of herself: seeing her win the Halloween contest at work was awesome!

7: But speaking of cool photos, of course Pirate Odin wins!

6: Mini Moon Dragon!
http://www.sierrahelp.com/forums/viewto ... =35&t=3874

5:
The support you all gave me when I broke my ankle was heart-warming!
http://www.sierrahelp.com/forums/viewto ... =35&t=1169

4:
Cake Battle: In 2012 I posted a lovely Alice In Wonderland-cake in Rath's B-day topic (starts on page 78 of the archive) : after Tawm mistakes me for Andrea, hilarity ensues!
http://www.sierrahelp.com/forums/viewto ... start=1155

3: When we all pulled together to help out Rudy in his time of need, such a wonderful community spirit!

2: My stint as Stephenie Meyer at the 2011 ball was terrific! I thought my two previous misadventures at the masquerades were below my capabilities at having fun: in 2009 I picked a user name before I found an identity and had to settle for Morla, in 2010 posing as Gary made me nervous about posting anything creative in English, which is not my native language. So I chose Meyer since many of the people on the forum had a negative opinion of her work. Personally I didn't know very much about Twilight, so I had to read up to get the gist of the book (wasn't too hard) and then I proceeded to have as much fun as possible in writing a silly fic.
After two weeks the fatigue settled in and the story wasn't posted fully here, but LED-light is on my DeviantArt.
As icing on the cake, the other contestants had a hard time guessing me: it wasn't until there were 2 left and I'd already been guessed for the other option that I was found out.

1: Meeting Qbix of course!
http://www.sierrahelp.com/forums/viewto ... =35&t=4292


Honorary moments: phallic beanbags starting on Hobbies & Photos page 8,

Favourite Sierra memory...? Hmm.

- Playing QfG1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 for the first time. I think that when the first time I played QfG5, I was so immediately hooked that I stayed up playing until about 6am - and then went to bed. (Of course, that was when I was much younger. I couldn't last that nowadays). Also, it was a Saturday night - so I didn't have work or university to get up for the next day.

Just think... some people stay up late, drink alcohol, and puke all over the place. I stayed up late and played QfG.

- Playing LSL1 EGA for the first time. It was my very first Sierra game, and I was 12. Naturally, I tried typing in naughty things, just to see what would happen.

Two minutes later, Larry died from venereal disease.

- Sending Roger on suicide missions throughout SQ1, 2 and 3, just to see what would happen. (Sorry, Roger).

- My very first Masquerade Ball here, last year, was heaps of fun. (I was Ratatosk, the incredibly hammy DOOM SQUIRREL!)

- My time here over the past few years has been very... interesting. I very much liked Tawm's Neverending Nights. (I wonder when we might see another...) *hint, nudge*

As Gnome Ann of QfG5 would say: "it was fun, honey bun!"

- Favourite memory? Spending time on the old official Sierra board, of course! With Kimmus! And Perdita! And Winlok! And Maghrabi! And... gee, who else was there?

- The Sierra Haiku Game on the old Sierra board was lots of fun. Maybe we can play it here again. The rules are simple: just write a 5-7-5 haiku about anything you like from Sierra games. For instance, one for QfG2:

Fish swim round and round.
Golden scales flash - but naught happens.
Aziza! Feed me!

Or... here's one for the poor QfG hero... (ohboy ohboy!)

Grumble mumble... no
control over life or pants...
*braces snap, pants fall*

I've got way too many favourite memories. It's hard to remember them all.

Great question!

Playing KQ7 for the first time (my first ever computer game) will always be a special memory because of the doors it opened. I was 6 years old and really didn't have a clue what I was doing. Our computer, at the time, was set up in one of our guest bedrooms. Initially, I was too afraid to play it by myself; I wouldn't touch it unless my dad was with me. We didn't do much with it at first, just walked Valanice back and forth across the desert. It wasn't until several days that we discovered the temple with the scorpion in it.

My folks were the ones who would actually try to progress after I went to bed (with many calls to the hint-line, I was later told), and then they'd guide me through what to do the following day. We bought the game right around the time it first came out, and our initial copy must've been version 1.1 or 1.4. Eventually, we had to put playing it on hold after encountering the dreaded "wooden nickel" bug, so we waited until Sierra shipped us version 1.5.

I think I mentioned elsewhere playing LB2 when I was around the same age. Going straight from KQ7 to LB2 - yeah, I threw my lifejacket off fast and jumped right in the deep end! Though most of the plot was completely over my head, I did progress much farther than my mother ever did (primarily due to dumb luck, but I did figure a lot of things out for myself). We'd moved the computer into the basement by that time, and I'll never forget running to the foot of the stairs and shouting, "I found another body!" A few years ago, I found my old kindergarten notebooks buried in a tub somewhere, and they were full of Laura Bow doodles.

Our neighbors had a copy of QG4, and I do remember dabbling with it when visiting them, but it was much too complex for me at that age. I didn't rediscover it until I found a used copy at a thrift store in 2002. The minute I started playing it, I remembered where I'd seen it before. I was in Texas at the time, staying with my grandmother while she was battling cancer, and it really helped soothe my worried mind.

Those are some I can think of right now - I know more will come to me. Ah, such fond memories

If we're extending this to the actual community...

Anything involving Odin was always good. And that time I liked Tawmis's page on Facebook, and my timeline read, without context, "Chris likes Pirate Booty". I got a few messages from family members about that one.

My old time on the Virtual Broomcloset was great. Out of high school, I went to a friend's wedding in New York and met other forum members there.

Going back to game memories, I still remember getting Police Quest I (AGI) for Christmas and playing through it pretty much over the entire Christmas break. I think it was kind of bittersweet when I finished because it was over. Looking back, I think it was the best game of the AGI era and my favorite for the Police Quest series. It had a great progression from writing a ticket, to your first time your life is in danger, to your first arrest. There were no dead ends which could plague some titles at the time. Over the years, I pretty much played it to death. During one of the poker games, I managed to get a Straight Flush!

A few memories pertaining to specific moments:

1. Finding Ziggy's severed head in the Life Mask exhibit scared the daylights out of me. Probably the only game moment ever to make me scream out loud, so that's a memorable one for me.
2. Finally arriving at a screen pictured on the back of the box was always a thrill, as I was usually anxious to see those.
3. Discovering something new after years of having played something, no matter how minor, reminds me how complex some of these titles are. I only found out last year that Laura could open the door to Fifi's dressing room while she was changing in TCB.
4. Seeing Katrina' s vampire portrait for the first time. The painting was so intense it really stuck with me.
5. My friends and I finding out every possible way to make the characters die, then making it happen over and over again
6. Hearing KQ4 with MT-32 music for the very first time. I can still feel the goosebumps.

Oh, yes... I just remembered. The creepy way that Ad Avis in QfG4 says "How nice of you to come." after he forges Katrina's note to you.

Not to mention Boris Stovich's "Welcome again" etc. Quite a few of the voice actors in QfG4 seem to have deliberately hammed it up. The first time I played QfG4, I thought that Boris was a vampire!

Not to mention the triple-comedy-act of Hans, Franz and Ivan. After all these years, they still crack me up!

I love that everyone has different things that tug at the heart strings when it comes to our passion for Sierra. It shows they cast a wide web and didn't just have ONE thing that we were all drawn to.

Oh... speaking of things that tug at the heartstrings - I have two candidates:

1. Toby's sacrifice in QfG4;

2. Gunther's death in GK1. I totally understood Gabriel's rage. "Tetelo! You're going to pay for this, you BITCH!"

Toby's sacrifice to save Tanya puts a lump in my throat every time, too.

Another emotional moment that always gets me is Valanice restoring Lady Ceres with the pomegranate. I was the first one to figure that solution out in my family - my mother thought it was a ridiculous idea, and the image of her jaw dropping afterwards still makes me smile.