A Sierra Retrospective: Part 4 – Works of Art

Rotoscoping was a process that Bill Davis had introduced to Sierra at the start of the VGA era as, with only 256 colours, using any shortcuts would be more noticeable. “The animation was pretty crude and I realised once again with 256 colours it could look better but we needed to animate better so I started hiring real animators – we didn’t have any – to do squash and stretch.”

Bill elaborates on the differences in the two animation styles: “You’ve got two different kinds of animation, even in features. You’ve got the way Snow White moves in Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, and you’ve got the way the Dwarves move. So Snow White is rotoscoped, but the dwarves are done with what they call squash and stretch animation. So they’re very exaggerated. The reason they call it squash and stretch is when their weight comes down on a step they squash down like a rubber ball, and when they jump up they’re very elastic and they stretch so it gives a varied look to the way a character moves. They’re much more bouncy and animated and the rotoscoping is much more subtle.”

“What I wanted to do, I wanted our characters like King Graham to be rotoscoped so he moved in a very real way, but then I wanted any dwarves or trolls or other characters in the game to be squash and stretch.”

Creating a setup for rotoscoping was left in the hands of Dan Foy, a programmer at Sierra who came up with a unique way of dealing with the issue.

“I needed to find a way we could rotoscope walkers,” Bill recalls, “So we set up a very dangerous treadmill without rails on it and [Dan] set up a system that could capture it. We’d take it into the tools and touch it up a little bit and that’s how we rotoscoped. It sped up animation, I tell you. Now it’s motion capture, but same kind of principle.”

Marc Hudgins also worked as the Animation Director on King’s Quest VII, a game that saw an increase in graphic resolution, something that brought greater clarity for the player but also caused more problems for the production team.

“King’s Quest VII was our first 640×480, which was a bit of a problem,” Marc says. “I was actually concerned about that because we were getting to a point where there was enough resolution where the warts would begin to show. You couldn’t cover them up; you’re still making weird choices about what you could do to clean up a drawing. It wasn’t high enough resolution for you to do really clean animation, and it wasn’t low enough you could kind of make it fudged.”

The game turned out to be a massive job for Marc, taking on art responsibilities after the Art Director moved to the Seattle studio.

“That was a rough one. It was probably the most ambitious hand-animated thing we’d attempted there. Roberta’s idea for this thing, this was going to be full blown hand-animation like a Disney film. It was a big game. When I looked at the scope of it, and I looked at the time we had to get this thing done… I came on board in February, maybe January at the earliest, and it was going to ship by Thanksgiving. Less than a year to make the most ambitious game we’d ever tried in terms of hand-drawn animation stuff.”

Marc says his most enjoyable part of working on King’s Quest VII was in populating the game: “I designed all the characters. Between 80 and 100. That was fun; I love character design.”

Another issue Sierra encountered due to the increase in quality was that animations required more frames than had previously been needed, so a lot more work was required of the artists.

“We didn’t have enough in-house staff to do the animation so we had to contract with some outsourced type of thing. The first thing we did was we got this company in Saint Petersburg, Russia, and they said, yes, we can take it on. So we went over to Saint Petersburg and set them up with our tools and explained the process to them. We started getting stuff back but after less than a month they said, ‘you know what, we can’t do all of this’,” Marc says.

Taking some of the work away from the Russian studio, Sierra contracted the animation work to three other studios, which caused other problems.

“We had a studio in Croatia, we had a studio in upstate New York, and we had a studio in South Carolina,” Marc remembers. “We had no time for revisions, so my job was to try and make sure that it looked, as best I could, like it was all drawn by one person. Which I don’t think I really succeeded at. Some were really tight, some were a lot looser than others. It was a real challenge. That was the first time I had really encountered that level of management in my life. I spent my life on fax machines because we didn’t have the internet yet, not in any meaningful way. I would fax drawings off to these studios and I would make phone calls at weird hours because I’d be calling Saint Petersburg, Russia. It was nuts.”

“Everything would come into the studio raw from these places and we basically took people off every single project and had people cleaning up the animation for the game. So I probably had about 30 people in the studio actually working on it. Just taking this raw stuff in and cleaning it up and making it appropriate to use in the game. There were no retakes. Everything went in, we fixed what we could. I think those studios did the best they could but we were all under enormous pressure to get that thing out on time,” Marc says.

As was the usual situation with game production at Sierra, there was a lot of stress and a lot of challenging issues to overcome, but in the end the game that was released went on to become one of Sierra’s biggest hits that year.
 

A legacy is something that is handed down from one generation to the next, and Sierra has certainly left an enduring impression on the industry and the many gamers who grew up with it. As a groundbreaking genre pioneer, the company’s influence is still keenly felt in the many adventure games today, a lasting heritage that everyone who worked there can be proud of. In our final article in this Sierra retrospective, we look at that legacy and the people that created it, as well as those who continue to be inspired by it today.