Official previews of some DOS Sierra/Cocktel games found

[MrFlibble]

Hey guys,

It's been quite a while since I last showed up here, but my interest in the history of DOS games and related materials continues, and recently I made a rather interesting discovery.

A while ago, a user in the BetaArchive forums posted links to a working Wayback Machine snapshot of a German shareware BBS from 1997. It has some indeed pretty interesting shareware games alongside stuff like drivers and non-gaming software, but more digging revealed (rather accidentally) that it also had a couple of pages dedicated to Sierra's games:
SIERRA - Screenshots, Spiele, Edutainment
SIERRA - Demos
SIERRA - Patches und Problemhilfe

The most interesting of these (to me at least) are the screenshots, which are in best quality TIF format, with many being the stuff shown on the back of the respective games' boxes (e.g. Earthsiege Expansion Pack). I'm quite a fan of this kind of official promo art so I thought it might be interesting to you too.

[Collector]

I was not noticing anything demo or patchwise that is not already on SHP. I was hoping that the patches might have included some patches for non-English variants of the games. When I raided the Sierra FTP before it was shut down I skipped all of the ones that were not English or PC since my bandwidth and storage at the time was limited. It would be nice to have those on the site too.

[MrFlibble]

Thanks to Hallfiry's catalogue I found a big collection of preview screenshots for later Sierra games from 1996. Hallfiry kindly uploaded the contents of that CD here.