The Sierra Death

Tonight, I got to see this:

As with all such things I found myself overthinking it. Particularly, in this case, I got to thinking about the Sierra Death.

they were content, y’know?

It was pretty evident when you first played an early Sierra game that your character was pretty limited in animation. You only ever got to see a character the same way, and most of the time, any action only yielded an [okay] or maybe a joke, which was definitely content. But if you wanted spectacle, if you wanted visuals, if you wanted to see something on the screen change or do something, you usually had to die.

I think that’s the solution of the Sierra death. Yes, it sucked to lose progress – and these days, a good autosave system should cover that. But it’s not just a fail state. It’s a tiny little moment of comedy spectacle. Somehow, dying in a ridiculous way that’s funny is a lot of fun. Dying a lot of times, frustratingly for things that aren’t discernibly your fault (like I’m looking at you, Souls games), that’s not a ton of fun. But the more I think back on it, the Sierra games were at least putting their deaths after interesting or comedy things.

Not that they were blameless, too. The maze in Space Quest ][ was breathtakingly bad.

Maybe something to bear in mind, developers.