Sierra Entertainment, Inc. The company is known for pioneering the graphic adventure game genre, including the first such game, Mystery House. However, CUC International was caught in an accounting scandal in , and many of the original founders of Sierra including the Williamses left the company. Sierra remained as part of CUC Software as it was sold and renamed several times over the next few years.
Sierra was formally disestablished as a company and reformed as a division of this group in August The Sierra division continued to operate through Vivendi Games's merger with Activision to form Activision Blizzard on July 10, , but was shut down later that year.
The Sierra brand was revived by Activision in to re-release former Sierra games and some independently developed games. Currently, the Sierra brand is under Microsoft 's ownership through its gaming division , following the acquisition of Activision Blizzard. After Ken had brought an Apple II to their home, she played through other text adventures such as those by Scott Adams and Softape to study them. With Ken's help in some of the programming, Roberta designed Mystery House , inspired by the novel And Then There Were None and the board game Clue , using text commands and printout combined with rudimentary graphics depicting the current setting.
Mystery House was released through mail-order in May It is the first computer adventure game to have graphics, although made with crude, static, monochrome, line drawings. The two shifted the focus to developing more graphical adventure games. Mystery House became the first in the Hi-Res Adventure series. The next release, Wizard and the Princess , also known as Adventure in Serenia , is considered a prelude to the later King's Quest series in both story and concept.
Ken Williams was reportedly described as "bewildered by the pace at which computers come into and fall out of favor", and Williams said, "I've learned my lesson. I'm not moving until I understand the market better. Many of Sierra's best known series began in the s. Ken and Roberta Williams accepted and started on the project. Roberta Williams created a story featuring classic fairy-tale elements. Her game concept includes animated color graphics, a pseudo 3D-perspective where the main character is visible on the screen, a more competent text parser that understands advanced commands from the player, and music playing in the background through the PCjr sound hardware.
