A Sierra Retrospective: Part 3 – From Atari to the Magic Kingdom
When it came to designing
Winnie the Pooh
, Al worked on his design by reading all the Pooh books and synthesizing what he could. He then created a map of the Hundred Acre Wood, the setting for the Winnie the Pooh tales, and worked out the story and puzzles for the game. Then he decided to take a different tack in working with Disney’s liaisons. “I just went ahead and did the entire
Winnie the Pooh
game, got it finished and then showed it to them,” he recalls.
“They said ‘Can you change this or can you do that?’ and I replied that if we did that it’s going to get behind and I have other projects that I have booked ahead, so I don’t know how. I just kind of rammed it through; I did an end-around them and scored. I knew I had Ken’s (Williams) ear and I knew Ken would support me on it because he was interested in shipping the game and selling copies. He wasn’t interested in futzing around with this guy’s shirt color and that person’s feet color and stuff.”
“I basically said ‘Here it is, wanna sell it?’ So they did. They took the money.”
It worked. Disney were so happy with the success of the three games that they offered Sierra the opportunity to create a game based on their new animated movie,
The Black Cauldron
.
Lowe again agreed to design the game, this time with Roberta Williams, and accepted an offer from Disney to visit their studios and view an early cut of the film.
Seated in a private theater by himself, Al was impressed with the movie and could envisage creating a game based on it. “I got to see The Black Cauldron when it was the midst of production. Parts of the scenes were gorgeous finished and finalized stuff. Parts of it were pencil sketches. Parts of it were just a backdrop hanging on a piece of pipe in a basement. Literally you could see the pipe and a piece of wall and they zoomed in on it because it was going to get replaced with the final product. They would pick classical or some other sort of music and play a record behind it. The dialog was all in, though. So I got to see the film ahead of time and I said ‘Yeah, I can work on this.’”
After watching the movie, Lowe was sent to the archives, expecting to see something grand and opulent like the national archives in Washington DC. Instead he went down a set of exterior stairs to a door where he rang the doorbell and was led into a basement hallway by the archivist.
Al recalls, “As I stepped inside she said ‘Oh hang on, the phone’s ringing and there’s nobody else here. I’ll go get it, just wait here.’ So I stood in the doorway there waiting to start our conversation, and leaned my hand against the wall. I looked over and my hand was on the original pencil drawings for
Sleeping Beauty
. I was like ‘Oh my God! Seriously?’”
In this basement hallway, with sewer pipes, water lines and sprinklers overhead, sat open industrial shelving with original drawings for every movie from Mickey Mouse’s first cartoon,
Steamboat Willie
. With no protection other than manila folders, the pencil drawings were stored on a steel shelf, so it was an easy process getting access to The Black Cauldron’s to take back to the production team for use in the game. Al took away copies of Elmer Bernstein’s original score and some pieces of background art.
Lowe also remembers his great surprise when he was taken to a gigantic mound of poster boards, each with an original background watercolor from
The Black Cauldron
. “They were just thrown in a giant heap and I said, ‘So, what’s with this?’ and she said ‘I have to go through this and decide which ones to keep.’ I said ‘You don’t keep them all?’ and she replied ‘Oh no! We’ll throw 98% of this in the garbage.’
“That was my introduction to Disney. But working on
The Black Cauldron
was fun. It was a fun project. There was very little oversight from anybody down there. We pretty much made the game that we wanted to and it was a really fun project to do.”
Still working at a reduced scale after the video game crash, the team worked out of the study at Ken and Roberta’s house. A large, relatively empty room, it had a shelf which sat about desk height and ran for close to 30 feet around the room.
“We just all kind of moved in there and worked on that shelf. That became our desks. We sat in his house every day and night. Because I lived down at Fresno, he just gave me a guest room at his house. I’d work until I couldn’t stay awake anymore and I’d go and have a lie down upstairs and come back and do it again. That was how we wrote that game!” Al says.
Al’s team, which included Ken Williams, Mark Crowe and Scott Murphy, worked hard to keep each other’s spirits up. Crowe and Murphy also discovered they were both science fiction fans, and while working on
The Black Cauldron
developed what became
Space Quest
, another major series for Sierra.
While
The Black Cauldron
marked the end of Sierra’s relationship with Disney, with Sierra moving on to concentrate on their own properties and Disney developing their own computer games, Al Lowe still has a reminder of those days on his home office wall.
“I ended up becoming a big Lloyd Alexander fan. He’s the guy who wrote the Chronicles of Prydain; they’re five kind of youth novels I suppose you’d call them. But boy, they’re really good books and good writing. One of my favorite things on the wall here, I have a signed letter from Lloyd Alexander talking about how much his nieces and nephews enjoyed my game. Pretty cool.”
Graphic adventure games. The name itself establishes how integral visuals are to the gaming experience. When Sierra started with Mystery House, backgrounds were crude and animations were non-existent, but through the years, they developed games that ranged from four colours to 16-bit colour, full motion video to pre-rendered 3D, and animation styles that ran the gamut from simplistic to Disney-esque. Next time, we’ll explore Sierra’s rich graphical odyssey that kept the company at the industry forefront throughout its heyday.
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