In 1979 Ken Williams brought home a teletype terminal to write business software. His wife Roberta found Colossal Cave Adventure on it, got hooked, and wondered why a computer capable of graphics was only showing words. This episode traces how that distraction became Sierra On-Line, from Mystery House in May 1980, the first computer adventure game with graphics, traced with a VersaWriter tablet and sold by mail order for 167,000 dollars, through the move to Oakhurst, California, the 1983 crash that taught Ken about hardware obsolescence, and the IBM PCjr deal that funded the Adventure Game Interpreter engine and King’s Quest in 1984.

The hosts explain how Ken stepped back from programming to become a talent incubator, greenlighting Space Quest from Mark Crowe and Scott Murphy, Leisure Suit Larry from Al Lowe, and Police Quest from retired highway patrolman Jim Walls, while Roberta pushed the bleeding edge with the seven-CD full-motion-video horror game Phantasmagoria in 1995. Sierra went public on the NASDAQ in 1989, launched the dial-up Sierra Network in 1991, and was the PC market leader by 1995. Then Walter Forbes of CUC International offered roughly 1.5 billion dollars in stock, Ken accepted despite Roberta’s instincts, and the acquisition unraveled into one of the largest accounting frauds in corporate history.

• Why the AGI engine acted as a universal translator and was what IBM was really buying
• How Police Quest turned a real cop’s protocols into a procedural simulation that ended the game for skipping a Miranda warning
• Ken’s late-1996 deal with an unproven studio called Valve to publish Half-Life
• The culture clash with East Coast executives who despised Phantasmagoria and Leisure Suit Larry
• Chainsaw Monday in 1999: 250 layoffs, the closure of Yosemite Entertainment, and the hollowing out of the Sierra brand