For many years now, the heart of the company’s identity had been a set of long-running adventure-game series, most of which worked the word “quest” somewhere into their title. Meanwhile Sierra implemented a significant shift in their product-development strategy. As one of his first projects, Brochu led the negotiations that resulted in the sale of The ImagiNation Network, Sierra’s visionary but perpetually money-losing online-gaming service, to AT&T for $40 million in cash in November of 1994. The man whom Ken still describes as “probably the best hire I ever made” was a garrulous Texan who “inspired confidence in everyone around him.” Not coincidentally, Sierra began to display a newly hard-nosed, bottom-line-focused attitude toward their business from virtually the moment of his arrival. Nine months after the move to Bellevue, Ken finally found his rock star in the form of one Mike Brochu, a financial whizz who had spent the last nineteen years working for Burlington Resources. The answer came back without hesitation: “Ken, you’re aren’t getting it. I was tired of having my time wasted interviewing candidates who were not at the level I was seeking. “Why do you keep sending me B and C level candidates?” I asked. I had hired a San Francisco-based company, Heidrick & Struggles, to lead the search, and after months of getting nowhere I called my contact at Heidrick in frustration. He’d been seeking a rock star of a chief financial officer for a long time from Oakhurst to no avail. He believed that doing so must entail assembling the kind of top-flight management team which could only be found in a big city. Under pressure from his shareholders, Ken Williams realized that he had to find a way to make his company start to pay off. Of late in fact, the bottom line had dipped sharply into loss territory even as revenues continued their steady climb. But less wonderful was the fact that profits had never been as high as that progression would imply Sierra had a knack for spending almost every dime they earned. The company’s annual revenues had grown every single year since 1987, more often than not substantially, and this was of course wonderful. Still, there are no grounds to doubt that the public reason Ken gave for the move back in the day was indeed a major part of the calculation: the need to recruit the sort of seasoned business talent that could take Sierra to the next level. Additionally, life in general as the biggest fish of all in the fishbowl of a company town that Oakhurst had become wasn’t always pleasant for example, Ken has claimed that his kids were at times bullied by “the children of former Sierra employees who had a grudge against Sierra.” Some other former employees suspect still another reason for the move to Bellevue, one that Ken neglects to mention: the fact that Washington State had no personal income tax, while California’s was the highest in the nation. Their children were getting older, for one thing, and the schools in Oakhurst were far from world-class.
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They did so for a mixture of personal and professional reasons, as Ken has since acknowledged. Scenes from the Phantasmagoria set, with Roberta Williams in pride of place at center.Īt the conclusion of my previous article on Sierra Online’s corporate history, we saw how Ken and Roberta Williams moved their company’s headquarters from the tiny Northern California town of Oakhurst to the Seattle suburb of Bellevue, home to Microsoft among others, in September of 1993.
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