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by Joe Gandolfo-
jgand@pcfootball.net
06-06-02
It’s been over three years
now, and it still stings.
In late
1998, Sierra’s Front Page Sports: Football Series showed signs
of catching up to Madden in the area of graphics, and looked to
surpass them in the off-field simulation. Sierra’s newest
release in their football series was totally rebuilt from the
ground up, and it promised to surpass anything they had ever
done up until that time.
Well, yes
and no.
When the
game was finally released in early 1999 I was one of the first
people out there who plunked down the $39.99 it cost for the
game. I was surprised that the game manual didn’t go into detail
about how the game was to be played, but I figured that it
should play like the others that came before it.
Not quite.
You see with this version what Sierra had tried to do was to
out-Madden Madden. The game looked a lot like a Madden
interface, unfortunately it didn’t play like it. See, some
nameless executive at Sierra trying to cover his ass decided
that the game was going to be released no matter what state it
was currently in. The game was usually released at the beginning
of the football season in late August – early September. This
version was not released until the end of the season in January.
Truth was
the programmers were having difficulties getting the game up to
speed and working the bugs out. The way the game was released,
the bugs were still there, mostly dealing with graphics and
having to deal with the way statistics in leagues were compiled,
or in some cases, lost.
Then the incredible
happened. As fast as the game appeared on the shelves, it
disappeared off of the shelves. No, the game was not selling
like hotcakes, the game had been recalled. Read what John
Burgess wrote about it in The Washington Post:
…Last month, citing "errors in
the program's code," the company recalled all of the nearly
50,000 copies of NFL Football Pro '99 game it had sent out the
door. Stores were told to take the game off the shelves; anyone
who had bought one (it had a suggested price of $29.95) was
offered a full refund and free game, or patches and a discount
toward buying the next version.
Company President David
Grenewetzki all but flagellated himself in public: "I want to
apologize to all our loyal customers for releasing a product
before it was ready," he said in a statement. "We let the
impending end of the football season influence our decision
process. We . . . dropped the ball."….
…The version in question was a
ground-up rebuild that the company launched about 18 months ago.
Like most every software development project, this one fell
behind schedule. The marketing people had aimed for a release
timed to the late-summer start of the football season, Gleason
said. That deadline wasn't made, and the weeks went by, with the
development team rushing to get things ready. The holiday season
came and went; still no game on the market.
Software sales, especially for
games, are very seasonal. If you miss the time of the year
that's relevant to your product, you're in big trouble. So
someone in Sierra made the decision to push the game onto the
market in the final days of the football season -- it reached
the store shelves in the last week of December.
The complaints started coming in
quickly. Through postings on the company's Web boards, the
message was delivered loud and clear that something was
seriously wrong, Gleason said. There were problems no one in the
development team had known about. On Jan. 20, the company bit
the bullet and issued the recall.
Owners can get a full refund,
plus a credit for a purchase of another Sierra game at $30 or
less.
For those who opt to keep the
game, Sierra has established what it's calling the Football Pro
Home Team. Members get patches to fix deficiencies in the
program, and a $20 rebate toward purchase of NFL Football Pro
2000, the next version of the game, which Sierra hopes to get on
the market in August, but swears won't go out until it's ready.
Full details of the recall are
available by calling 1-800-757-7707…
So okay,
the game was recalled and we were being offered refunds for the
defective disks. I however wanted to play the game and I choose
curtain number two, Monte. I kept the game and joined the Home
Team, hoping to receive patches that would fix the game and
other tips on how to make it more playable. Sierra rolled out
with patch 2.008 in an effort to fix some of the bugs. They put
up a Home Team section on their website, which included BOA
files that could be used for different teams in the game. The
BOA files were art files you could import into the game which
were special for certain teams. People were sending BOA files
into Sierra left and right, and Sierra posted them on the
website. It looked like we were on our way to making the perfect
PC Football game.
Yeah well,
shit happens.
David Grenewetzki
announced on Monday, February 22, 2000 that the entire Sierra
Sports department was being “restructured”. From Brett Todd’s
editorial on gamesdomain.com:
After leading hopeful gamers on
with the promise of a better and brighter NFL Football Pro
2000, Sierra may now be jettisoning the whole ball of wax.
The company announced a major reorganization on Monday that saw
a number of sorta-independent design studios dissolved. Most
noteworthy among the casualties as far as sports fans are
concerned is Synergistic, which oversaw the somewhat awful
Football Pro '98 and the completely hopeless Football Pro '99.
Sierra president David Grenewetzki claims that it is a
"strategic move that will help us continue our mission to
develop and bring to market the most creative and most
technologically advanced products that are fun, innovative, and
provide a wide range of appeal." Which, when translated from
corporate bafflegab, means something like "Gzornaplat."
What the rumor mill is getting
out of all this is a story that the entire Football Pro 2000
design team has been let go as part of the reorganization.
Usenet and other online sources have been rife with tales of
screwed-up code and other problems with the programming of the
recalled game, so such a thing is certainly possible. Nothing
about specific titles has been confirmed or denied by Sierra
management as of right now, though. One has to think that just
about anything could happen here, in consideration of the soap
opera that Sierra Sports has become over the past couple of
years…
…Oddly enough, it seems that
quite a few people were happy enough with both the product and
Sierra's efforts to improve it that they signed on with the Home
Team. No patches have been released yet, but apparently the
message board has been alive with criticism -- both constructive
and otherwise -- and things have been proceeding as planned.
Now, however, the corporate restructuring puts everything in
doubt. Home Team members are understandably worried about the
fate of the ongoing project and even less confident in Sierra as
a company than they were when they purchased Football Pro '99…
…At this point, there's nothing
that Sierra can do to save its reputation in this case. Pulling
out of the Home Team and Football Pro 2000 would anger
and upset a lot of fans hoping to help design the next game.
Keeping things moving would be taken with a grain of salt and
require many questions to be answered. Who's going to be in
charge of developing the new game if Synergistic no longer
exists? How can an already troubled development process weather
even more internal turmoil? With any luck, some of these
questions will be cleared up in the near future. Realistically
speaking, though, it's hard to imagine this continuing melodrama
not being renewed for another season.
Well, it
was hard for us to imagine as well, but that’s exactly what
happened. All of us loyal fans were being told to take what we
were given and if we didn’t like it we could go to hell. I, like
many others joined the “Home Team” in the hope that my voice
would be listened to. Sadly, it was not to be. Mr. Grenewetzki
announced that not only would the game be recalled, but that it
would not be supported by Sierra and that there would be no
further additions to the series. What really got me was that we
were told that no questions about the game or its predecessors
would be answered as Sierra would be moving on in a new
direction as far as their Sports games were concerned. We began
to see this on Sierra’s message boards as questions about the
FBPro series were deleted almost as quickly as they were
posted.
Needless to
say I was pissed off. Not only because a buying choice was being
taken away from me, but also because I was being told that my
wants and desires did not matter. More importantly I was being
told that I had no choice in the matter, and that I should just
shut up and play whatever they put out. Well I had a choice and
I decided to exercise it. I vowed then and there that I would
never purchase another product put out by Sierra ever again
under any circumstances.
It’s been
over three years later and I am happy to say that I have kept my
vow. I have bought other sports products, but they were all from
Sierra’s main competition EA Sports. I have seen what Sierra has
put out over the years and I am still convinced that I made the
right decision. Now I am a sports fanatic, but somehow taking
aim at a computer generated buck or casting a simulated rod and
reel in an effort to catch an AI bass does not appeal to me.
However the possibility of playing as the Quarterback for the
Raiders or even the LA Express does have a certain Walter Mitty
appeal. It is true that Sierra does put out many other fine
products, but I will never buy one of them. I can find
alternatives from Microsoft, EASports, Jane’s, Mindscape and
Access that are the equivalent if not better than anything that
Sierra puts out.
Three years
ago Sierra made a very bad business decision. They decided to
put out what appealed to them, and they put people on the
unemployment line and lost a lot of customers in the process. We
have all moved on to other products and we have all moved on
with our lives. We all deserved better than what we got from
Sierra, and the way the franchise ended was just sad, it
deserved a better fate.
Sierra will
pay for their selfishness for a long, long time, and they will
pay in their pocketbook.
But some of them will pay
in other ways….
Sierra might be
re-releasing some of its older titles like Leisure Suit Larry
and King’s Quest. There has been no mention of any sports titles
like the FBPro or Baseball Pro series. But there is some hope as
Sierra canned David Grenewetzki and replaced him with Mike Ryder
back in 2001.
Karma is a wonderful
thing. Isn’t it?
Until next
time…
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