Someone should make an indie game about Sierra's rise and fall. It should be made with the classic Sierra engine (the late-'80s EGA one used in Space Quest 3 and others).
The player would be a game designer who joins Sierra, gets to design her own series of Quest games and faces all sorts of absurd puzzles (often in the form of trying to herd artists and programmers). Sudden death would lurk around every corner. At the end, the protagonist would try to fight the takeover by corporate criminals. You could call it "Quest Quest".
The early Sierra games with non-interrupting text input were notable for this.
I recall playing Police Quest 1 and if you didn't walk around the car to do an inspection, you'd crash and die. All in the first 5 minutes of the game. I think you could also lose really early by not attending the police briefing that morning as well.
I like the angle Lucasarts took with the genre (no dying), but the absurdity and difficulty of the Sierra games also has a place.
> gets to design her own series of Quest games and faces all sorts of absurd puzzles
Haha, that would be awesome. Leaving for work in the morning? You need to make coffee (not the decaf kind) otherwise you'll miss your stop and get fired. Don't forget your laptop and badge at home either, and you'll need to make lunch. If you bring milk you'll die because it's spoiled (you need to throw it away, and also take the garbage out - if you just throw it away, it'll smell up your apartment and you will fail your date that night).
If you let someone tailgate you, they end up stealing a bunch of stuff, including your laptop.
At that morning's standup, you have to ask george about the feature he's working on, otherwise he'll spend the day playing solitaire and won't be able to help you tomorrow on the presentation.
I always felt the absurdly easy methods of dying at the beginning of the games was useful for getting new users into the mindset of taking time to explore everywhere rather than just trying to sprint through the screens. It was early enough where you didn't lose all sorts of progress, but being forced to rewatch the intros and navigate the initial screens each time was a small enough punishment that you'd start to play the game more seriously to avoid that.
IIRC in Kings Quest III (or, the one where you start in a shack at the top of a mountain) I got down the mountain (after falling to my death a hundred times) and across some body of water only to discover I had missed picking something up in the shack that was required to continue. Of course there was no way to go back...
Well... there's this guy called Neil Cicierega who's making a game about computers in the early 1990s, will full 256 colors, palette cycling, VGA - https://twitter.com/iconarchitect10
The player would be a game designer who joins Sierra, gets to design her own series of Quest games and faces all sorts of absurd puzzles (often in the form of trying to herd artists and programmers). Sudden death would lurk around every corner. At the end, the protagonist would try to fight the takeover by corporate criminals. You could call it "Quest Quest".