The DOS Guru

For those that know me, you will find that I have a consuming obsession with Sierra Online, and all things related to that company, genre, and historical time period (i.e. the golden age of adventure gaming).  Perhaps its nostalgic value, or maybe I’m old fashioned.  

When I was a kid in middle school, while other kids my age dreamt of playing video games, I longed to make them.  At the tender young age of 14 I was convinced of my calling in life.  I would hunker down and become a C/C++ jedi, skip college, hitchhike north, and show up at the doors of the infamous Sierra Online “redwood” building and demand a job from Ken Williams.  Perhaps I would start by manning the hint lines and work my way up to development lead on Quest For Glory 7.  

Sadly, that never quite panned out.  Sierra’s strategic vision led the company away from adventure games, contributing a death knell to the rapidly declining genre.  Ken sold the company and before long, Sierra was just a name slapped onto titles from various other studios.  Feeling somewhat cheated, I blundered my way through college and still ended up in software development - just not game development.  

To this day I’m still intrigued by that iconic building, however.  I googled and looked through my vast collection of Sierra games and memorabilia and failed to locate any historical addresses for the company other than a couple of P.O Boxes.  Dare I hope I find actual pictures of ancestral home of adventure gaming? Perhaps even a google streetview image?  

So today, with the help of Bing maps, I attempted to track down the elusive building.  Oakhurst is not a huge city, so looking through the aerial terrain maps wasn’t terribly onerous.  Before long, I found this location that looks an AWFUL LOT like the Sierra building, though with a few renovations.  Could it be, that 48677 Victoria Ln was the actual address?

Here is the building from a few more angles.

A little more sleuthing and it turns out that the building is now being used as some sort of medical building.  A bit more searching yielded this tiny photo.

Alas, can this be all that’s left of Ken and Roberta’s gaming empire?  I’m probably taking a road trip up north this summer - I’m tempted to take a small detour and snap a few shots of this place for posterity. 

For those in the know, feel free to leave a comment to corroborate or debunk my findings.