Meh, I wonder how much of it is rose colored glasses. There is one KQ (forgot which one) where you have to walk through a bunch of thorny bushes to get to a castle. Any touching of the plants = instant death. This was essentially an exercise in 'take a few steps, save game, repeat'. Where was the fun in that? There were many things like that, although I forgot most of them of course. Many of the mechanics just felt like 'hard for hard sakes', not 'hard for fun sakes' - of course with the idea that harder is more fun, but still.

Sierra was a big fan of 'cruel' game design. Fail to do something at the start properly? The game will let you continue but you can never win.

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/UnwinnableByDesign/Sie...

And yeah it sucked.

In that same vein, Lori and Corey Cole are working on a game right now: http://hero-u.com

Sierra was definitely a seal of quality for a time, like Blizzard, Disney or Nintendo-- anything they produced was going to be very well polished and even if it wasn't your thing, you could tell it was a solid product.

Adventure games died for a while, but there are some good ones that have come out since the 90s. The Shivah captured a lot of the humor of the genre but with a distinctly Jewish flavor, and I found The Cat Lady to be far more captivating than Gabriel Knight or Phantasmagoria.

Favorite? Mine was King's Quest IV.

King's Quest III and IV are my favorite in the KQ series. But overall I'd probably say the first Quest For Glory. It was such a great melding of Sierra adventure and RPG.

Couldn't agree more! I got into QFG1 at the time of Sierra's VGA point-and-click remake, and what a lasting impression.

The artwork, music, sense of humor, and character building - including being able to import your character and keep building your skill points through each successive game in the series - made it really special. Truly the golden years of graphical RPGs, IMO.

Both Manhunters. I've never seen anything quite like them. You'd watch a cryptic, low-tech surveillance-style scene play out, then travel to the scene and try to figure out who was who and what happened. Then on to the next scene to advance the plot.

I'm glad I'm not the only one who remembers those. For the longest time I thought only my brother and I had ever played them at all.

Just a shame the series ended on a cliffhanger. There was supposed to be a Manhunter: London, but it was unfortunately canceled.

The incredible machine!

I had forgotten this was a Sierra game! Another great one. Reminds me of this awesome game box: https://static.giantbomb.com/uploads/original/1/15693/139356...

King's Quest IV was good (it was the first one I played), but I think I prefer King's Quest VI. Things started to go downhill after that. However, the new King's Quest which got released on Steam is actually pretty good!

My intro to the series was Kings Quest VII, my sister and I loved it. It inspired is to buy the collection set with all the previous games. I think Kings Quest VIII was the death knell for that series. They attempted to make a 3D action game out of the series but it wasn't well executed and it meanwhile lost the charm.

I would've said Caesar III and/or Ground Control, but neither was developed by Sierra, only published. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Space Quest series!