With a career at Sierra that spanned 16 years, Al faced challenges largely unheard of in today's mod-friendly market. Unsurprisingly, those inventive people at Sierra created their own solutions - as he explained, 'This is weird to say this, but this was a time before there was a Photoshop. I mean, you say that to people, and they say, "what?!" There were no graphics tools, there was nothing available - Sierra had to invent a picture editor, something to paint dots on a screen.'
Laughing, he elaborated, 'When Ken [Williams] first created the graphics adventure game, he created a vector-based drawing program that had fill and the various tools and that was it - there was nothing, there was no program, he had to create one! The weird part was that for years, you ran the graphics program by typing Roberta [Williams, his wife], because he named it after her so she could draw things on the computer!'
When asked about how he originally got into the industry, Al spoke about his early access to his school's computer. Unfortunately, even though he managed to talk his way into getting access to what was then a very expensive environment, things were a little different to the way they are today. Explaining his biggest problem, he said, 'We couldn't afford a word processor though! It cost $8,000 to get the software!'
We also asked about his experiences at one of the companies that defined many gamers' childhoods. Chuckling, he explained the situation - 'It's funny that people don't realise that at one point Sierra has the largest selling database software in the world and the largest selling word processor. You think, well, they were just a games company, but they published a compiler, they published graphics tools, they did amazing things 25, 30 years ago!'
Giving some insight into how much focus the parser got, Al also explained how he built his phrase lists. 'I made it really simple, we had a fixed grade level where there would be no words that weren't on the first grade reading list or second grade reading list. Since I had a background in education, that came naturally to me.'
Expanding on how the testing processes ran, Al explained, 'We developed a group on Compuserve, found some people on the gamers forum that were interested in testing, and we would mail them a floppy disk. I wrote a little routine that, every time they got the message "You can't do that here, at least not now...', which was my generic "I don't know what's going on" message ... would write down data to the floppy and store where they were, what they'd typed in, what scene they were in, what the animation was, what the character states were, and so forth.'
He continued, 'When I got those files, I got this gigantic text file back and I used DOS's sort routine to go and sort it. I went through and eliminated all the duplicates, and finally I had a set of commands that people had tried and had failed at. And, I implemented every one of them! Because they were all things I hadn't thought of and it was like if they thought of this, I think that's one of the reasons Larry 1 seemed smarter than other games at the time. Not because I was smarter, but because a lot of people contributed to it!'
In the time that Al was kind enough to spend talking with us, we also discussed his first foray into the education gaming market (and associated forgetfulness), how he felt about the demise of Sierra, and how the development process went back in the original, pre-buyout, Sierra.
The first part of the interview is available in our latest podcast, but the full-text transcript, including the second part of our interview, will be available this weekend.
PALGN would like to thank Al Lowe for the time he took out of his busy schedule to speak with us.
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