CIRCLE WITH A DOT

as far as i know, i found a software preservation zebra this week: this bit of extremely obscure archival work blends together HyperCard, Sierra On-Line and edutainment.back in the early 90s, a company named EarthQuest started publishing educational reference titles for kids using HyperCard. the early titles were nice hypercard stacks probably drawn in macpaint. this one doesn't depart much from that format, except with nicer art and more creative page layoutsnow, here's where things get weird. when saw it on ebay, only one pic buried at the bottom captured my attention: a weird stamped label on the bottom of the box that read Property OF SIERRA with the Half Dome logo. i bought it out of curiosity, and it arrived today.back in the 90s, the larger game companies routinely maintained their own on-site libraries of competitors' games. Origin Systems in Austin had one. EA Burnaby, when it was known as Distinctive Software, had one. These were kept so marketing folks and developers could get an idea of what other studios were doing.thing is, i've never seen mention of a library at Sierra On-Line in Oakhurst. the On-Line part of the logo is critical: Time Treks was published in 1992, and this is the year before Sierra moved its corporate offices from Oakhurst, California to Bellevue, Washington.i have no doubt that there are other games from the Sierra On-Line corporate library somewhere out there, but i've never come across one even once in 30+ years. feel free to share this post with your fellow Sierra collectors it would be great if we could figure out where/when the Sierra library existed.https://macintoshgarden.org/games/time-treks#hypercard #macintosh #vintageApple #sierraOnline #adventureGames #retrogaming

sad to report, very belatedly, that game artist and designer Carolly Hauksdottir passed away unexpectedly after a brief hospitalization in 2023.if you don't recognize the name, it's because Carolly wasn't an industry celeb. but if you played 90s graphical adventure and puzzle games, you probably played something she had worked on, like King's Quest IV, Inherit the Earth, Ishido, Ultima Underworld II, or Kasparov's Gambit.Carolly had a lifelong relationship with the scifi and fantasy scene in california. if you lived in the Berkeley area, you will have seen her art if you ever visited the Other Change of Hobbit bookstore: she drew the best logo they ever had.she was also the person who introduced Ken Williams to Lori and Corey Cole, whom she knew from the local scifi/fantasy/rpg scene. without that key introduction, we would never have received the Quest for Glory series.RIP Carolly.#sierraOnline #adventureGames #obituary