Sierra is back! And bringing King’s Quest with it?

By Adam Rosenberg August 8, 2014

Sierra returns — Image used with permission by copyright holder

Fans of old-school PC gaming, listen up: the Sierra label appears to be making a comeback. A teaser site has popped up at Sierra.com for the Activision-owned brand, with the promise of more news to be revealed at August 2014’s Gamescom. Code buried deep within a CSS script on the site contains ASCII characters that mention King’s Quest and Geometry Wars. You might not realize it, but 2007’s Wii/DS game Geometry Wars: Galaxies was published under the Sierra name.

Related: King’s Quest rights revert to Activision as Telltale Games moves to other projects

The buried code was first discovered by a commenter on the IGN news story that points to the teaser site. The code itself is found inside one of the CSS scripts on the page, which is accessible by viewing the page source (you can also click here to go there directly). This is what you see when you get there:

The Sierra brand landed in Activision’s vault following the 2008 merger between Vivendi Games and the mega-publisher. Sierra was first founded in 1979 by husband-and-wife creative leads, Ken and Roberta Williams. The company, which was known as On-Line Systems until a 1982 name change rebranded it as Sierra On-Line, was one of the early popular developers of PC games, specifically graphical adventure games.

Sierra On-Line carried on after the Vivendi merger, with another name change in 2002 establishing it as Sierra Entertainment. The bulk of the studio’s output came prior to the merger, with series’ like King’s Quest, Space Quest, Police Quest, Leisure Suit Larry, Hero’s Quest (renamed to Quest for Glory), Gabriel Knight, and others helping to establish Sierra as one of the early dominant forces in PC game development.

Related: Gods Will Be Watching brings us back to the glory days of dying repeatedly in King’s Quest III

There’s been very little activity for Sierra since the Activision/Vivendi merger, but Gamescom seems poised to change that. The annual consumer and trade show kicks off in Cologne, Germany on August 13 and runs through August 17, so we should hear more soon.

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Former Digital Trends Contributor

Previously, Adam worked in the games press as a freelance writer and critic for a range of outlets, including Digital Trends…

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