Screaming Penguin

Ada Lovelace Day has come back around. This year I would like to draw your attention to someone who certainly had a big impact on my childhood and certainly the industry, if not Computer Science: Roberta Williams along with her husband, founded Sierra Online, and was a primary designer and programmer on a number of now classic games, not the least of which was King's Querst, which might be Sierra's signature title. These were the heady young days of the personal computer revolution. Ken and Roberta started producing games for the Apple II. Their frist game, "Mystery House" was a Christie-style murder mystery and was the first game to combine the play of a text adventure with graphics. It sold 11,000 copies and netted the couple a cool $300,000. While that might be a rounding error for the modern gaming industry, it was hugely successful for the time. Roberta went on to create TWENTY EIGHT more games over the next 24 years and established Sierra as one of the leading game developers in the world. She also posed as the titlular character on the cover of "Mixed-Up Mother Goose", below.