After Larry 3 shipped, I thought the series had
ended. Seeking another project, I spoke with Ken
Williams about several game ideas. Maybe a humorous
western game? (No, that came later; we called it
Freddy Pharkas, Frontier Pharmacist.)
Ken offered instead something he had wanted to do
for years: on-line gaming.
Back in the Dark Ages of the Commodore 64, Ken had
published a helicopter flight simulator that included
modem play. (I recall those Commodore modems were
300 baud, but I could be wrong. They might have
been fast—1200!)
None of us knew anything about the Internet. Sure,
we had all been on CompuServe and the other, lesser
information services that were around back then.
I’m sure I had read about something called
ARPAnet, but we knew nothing about that. Remember,
this was before there was a Cisco Systems. Ken thought
there should be a way to play adventure games via
modem.
So he assigned Jeff Stephenson (who was the head
of Sierra’s AGI and SCI system programmers
and responsible for much of the code of both of
those languages) to work on a new programming language
suitable for “modem gaming.” Jeff called
it LSCI, for Large-model Script Code Interpreter.
Later, when Sierra went public, someone in marketing
made up the much more saleable phrase, “Sierra’s
Creative Interpreter.” Jeff originally called
it SCI simply because it ran scripts.
Ken also hired Matthew George as the “low level
comm” guy to handle all the communications
protocols. The three of us got a good-sized office
and began filling it with wires and modems.
My job? Simple.
All I was had to do was to design the first interactive,
multi-player, on-line adventure game.
Needless to say, I failed.
Hell, here it is a decade later, and still no one
has done one. I now believe it’s impossible.
But, what did I know? I was young, foolish and confident—well,
okay, definitely foolish. All I had to do was change
adventures from single-person, sit-and-think, object-puzzles,
inventory-manipulation, reading games to a game
not requiring, or allowing, any of this. It had
to be played by several players, where objects could
be in any player’s possession, with no plot
since everyone would be at a different place in
the world…well, you can see that created conflicts
that are impossible to resolve. But I wasn’t
smart enough to realize that then.
Meanwhile, Jeff was reinventing the entire SCI code
base, making many improvements while trying to make
his code communicate with copies of itself running
on an unknown number of machines of unknown speed
delayed by unknown microseconds.
Matt was trying to decide just how many 2400-baud
modems he could deal with. He found an expansion
chassis for the old AT machines. We got several
of those, plugged them into one main computer using
every ISA slot available, then filled each slot
in each expansion chassis with a modem. I think
he got up to 32 modems in 4 chassis linked by ribbon
cable to one poor old, brand new, high speed 386
with a whopping 8 megabytes of RAM. The local small-town
telephone company loved us. We got 32 new phone
lines into our office that week, each with Central
Office rollover.
As I sweated out my design issues, I realized this
system wouldn’t be viable for months. Maybe
I could make some board games to test the new language’s
communication ability? When they actually ran, and
we could play checkers through dialup modems, we
thought we were hot stuff! So I added chess. Still
no system. So I added backgammon. I was running
out of board games.
Ken insisted that the system be “easy enough
so my grandmother can play bridge on it.” That
necessitated quite a bit of work creating a front
end, changing from one game to another, handling
“waiting rooms” for people to gather,
what happens when the 33rd player logs
in and finds himself on another server with zero
people, even though his buddy just phoned him and
was on, etc. etc. And what did you look like? I
made a “Mr. Potato Head” interface when
you could decorate your own characters. Of course,
all the graphics would be on disk. Your character
would tell the other players how you looked by a
string of digits: 2, 5, 1, 5, 3, etc. This meant
you had face #2, with hair #5, eyes #1, etc. 1200
baud modems, remember?
But how could all this make money? Ken thought we
would need 50,000 subscribers just to break even.
Jeff, Matt, and I computed that it would take 40
fulltime employees just to stuff modems into expansion
chassis and connect them to phone lines to handle
those 50,000. And what about long distance? There
were no 5-cent per minutes telephone calls back
then. Even the cheapest long distance service was
pricey. Maybe we should scatter servers throughout
the United States? Where? How?
After six months, I realized my folly and begged
off the project. Since I was not a salaried employee,
but only got paid a percentage of sales, it was
going to be years before I would see income. The
sales department was clamoring for Larry 4. I decided
to give it to them. (Of course, it ended up being
named Larry 5, but that’s another story, kiddies.)
And what would we call this thing? Ken thought it
would be perfect for lonely people who wanted to
play a game with another human instead of a computer.
My wife, Margaret, thought up the original name:
“Constant Companion.” We liked it, but
it didn’t stick. “The Sierra Network”
was its name for years.
Years later, when TSN had its own building filled
with hundreds of employees, they tried to create
a “Larryland.” It was never an adventure
game, but was a pretty fun environment with gambling
and chat.
About then, when TSN was losing millions of dollars
for Sierra each year, Ken sold half-interest in
it to AT&T for $50 million. They renamed it
“The ImagiNation Network” and immediately
took out “Larryland” because it was “too
risqué.”
A year later, AT&T bought the other half for
another $50 million. We joked that Sierra was the
only company that ever made a profit from on-line
gaming! At that time, it was true. Ironically, AT&T
started many big improvements, but in a year or
so ended up selling INN to AOL for much less. Then
AOL sat on it until it died.
But that’s another story, kiddies.