Just a quick update for everyone who geeked out with us last week at the idea of Activision bringing back the legendary gaming brand that is Sierra: It’s happening.
Details are still pretty light, but Activision made the revival official at the Gamescom conference this week.
Here’s everything we know so far:
- The new Sierra will be more of a publisher than an in-house development team
- They’ll be helping smaller indie studios build games around classic Sierra IP, though they’re open to publishing fully-original titles as well.
- They’ve announced two titles in the works so far: a new Kings Quest and Geometry Wars 3
- The new Kings Quest will be built by indie dev house The Odd Gentleman, who built the super well-received PC/Xbox puzzler The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom. If you’ve played the game, you’d probably agree: this seems like a damned good fit.
- Kings Quest is expected to ship sometime in 2015. Geometry Wars 3, meanwhile, will launch sometime this year.
It’s an interesting move. Many of the people behind the titles that Sierra is best known for (Kings Quest, Leisure Suit Larry, etc.) are long retired — so “getting the band back together” wasn’t really an option.
If the options, then, were “let Sierra’s old games fade away forever,” “spend a ton of money to hire a bunch of new developers/artists to try to recreate something that resembles Sierra in its glory days,” or “let carefully selected indie developers with proven track records take a stab at making these old series great again,” I’m glad they went with Door No. 3.