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Thirty years ago today I made the final gold masters for Monkey Island.

Ken Williams wants you to know Sierra On-Line was murdered.

In a new, self-published autobiography, Williams also says he doesn’t want you to remember the company the way you do. Williams founded Sierra as a telecommunications consultancy in 1979, when he was twenty-five; the company was the body to which his wife Roberta gave breath. [...]

Williams wasn’t a game designer, but a visionary who saw the company always moving forward, leading the market with other genres, other software, online worlds connecting every kind of person. That Sierra is instead remembered, basically entirely, for these 2D adventure games from the eighties and nineties is, he says, because the company was killed.

Williams has compared the end of Sierra to watching his child be tortured to death, but does not, in his book, offer a culprit, and has no real animosity for the most obvious candidate. Why is that? I spoke to Williams, and many others, to understand: if Sierra On-Line was murdered, why does Ken Williams seem to like the man who did it?

How an aborted Twin Peaks game, a bizarre trip to Hollywood, and '90s comic art coalesced into an unforgettable adventure.

In 1997, John Romero was driving around the US handing out blank cheques to some of the country’s greatest game designers. To Tom Hall, his old Doom comrade, he gave penthouse space in Dallas to make the brilliant JRPG Anachronox. For Warren Spector, he funded an office full of immersive sim nerds in Austin who went on to create Deus Ex. And in San Francisco, he approached Tim Schafer to make a point-and-click adventure under the auspices of Ion Storm.

Schafer, however, wasn’t ready to leave LucasArts, the company that had given him access to Skywalker Ranch, and to his mentor, Monkey Island’s Ron Gilbert. He turned Romero down. It’s a decision that might have suggested a lack of entrepreneurial spirit; that Schafer was ‘just’ a designer and writer, not a studio head. No shame in that. In the fullness of time, however, he would go on to reshape the business of games more than once with his own company, Double Fine.

Duncan Jones, [...] the director of Moon, Source Code, and the Warcraft movie wrote an entire script for a movie based on Tim Schafer's badass biker adventure game Full Throttle.

A lot of indie adventure games try to replicate the distinctive feel of classic LucasArts point-and-clickers, but Loco Motive doesn't just pull this off; it absolutely nails it. Set in the 1930s on a train speeding through the mountains of Austria, you play as Arthur, a straight-laced lawyer tasked with solving the bloody murder of his wealthy employer, Lady Unterwald.

It's a classic Agatha Christie mystery, but with the goofy, self-aware humour of Monkey Island.

Jane Jensen’s Gray Matter tells a story about magic—the paranormal kind as well as where burlesque performers squirt disappearing ink at baffled men—but the most interesting thing about it, ten years later, is the magic trick that happened off-screen.