While Roberta Williams was creating King's Quest, Lori Ann and Corey Cole were falling in love to the rattle of a 20-sided-die.
As the couple came together at the birth of the digital age, it was only natural that their love of D&D would find its way onto computers. After Corey got a job as a programmer with Sierra, she got the chance to pitch them on Hero's Quest (later Quest for Glory when a HeroQuest board game beat them to the copyright.)
"I'm not a programmer, and it was very unlikely I could have gotten a design job anywhere else without experience. However, Sierra On-line was founded by a woman game designer who didn't program," Lori said. "Thus, the company was [structured] to work from non-programming designers."
Not only was her pitch accepted, the Coles would go on to create five Quest for Glory titles for Sierra.
Ken Williams insists that even though the company was founded by him and his wife, hiring women and couples wasn't necessarily intentional.
"It certainly wasn't my plan," Ken said. "I always just hired who seemed best for the job, regardless of whether they were male or female. A great writer is a great writer. I don't know that it's a sex-related issue."
If Sierra had a holy triumvirate of female designers, Jane Jensen was its third pillar. Originally working as a systems programmer for Hewlett-Packard, Jensen's affinity for storytelling and computers brought her to Sierra's by then well-established doors in 1991.
Two years later, Sierra released the first title in Jensen's Gabriel Knight series, which followed a New Orleans book store owner (voiced by Tim Curry) as he battled the forces of evil in this decidedly more gothic take on the adventure genre.
Over it's six-year lifespan, the series would receive countless industry awards and engender the love of an online community still active today, seven years after the curtain fell on the series, which Jensen later novelized. The change in medium was appropriate, as the series had been one of the most story-intensive of its time.
"I think the bulk of games are made by guys, for guys," Jensen told Adventure Classic Gaming in 2003. "Most women (and I say most with full knowledge of the fact that there are exceptions) do not like to play shooters or RPG games. If you don't like to play something, you're not going to end up designing it. Adventure games have always been an exception in the industry."
Unfortunately for adventure game lovers everywhere, the end of the Gabriel Knight series would also herald the end of an era. In 1996, Ken Williams sold Sierra to a firm called CUC International, which would later be charged with billions in fraud.
In 1999, 135 Sierra employees were laid off on a single day, now known to many fans as "Black Monday." A few months later, 105 more employees were let go, as Sierra shifted its focus from developing computer games to publishing.
