I read Ken’s book and it seems he always painted himself in the best of lights. At the same time, even from his own POV, he always came off as screwing his workers.
Excellent article. When combined with the previous expose on Williams over on Vice, the evidence seems overwhelming that Ken was nothing more than a fairly heartless new money asshole who readily got caught up in the hard right, and sought nothing more than wealth and the spoils of it.
Back when the Two Guys from Andromeda (Mark Crowe and Scott Murphy, creators of Space Quest) were doing a live stream for SpaceVenture, Ken Williams joined the chat. Upon confirming that it really was him, Scott Murphy was visibly still embittered at Ken, and when Ken mentioned that Space Quest was his favorite series, Scott simply responded “I really doubt that.” (If I recall correctly). In a comment elsewhere, he said that as their games became more successful and made more and more money, Ken would always try to pay them less.
Later, Scott got cancer and did a gofundme to help pay for his medical expenses. Ken, a multi millionaire traveling the world on his yacht thanks to the wealth the creatives at Sierra generated, and directly responsible for Murphy losing his job, donated $500.
A few years later, he had a new yacht built from scratch for himself.
Ken should have been keelhauled on that yacht, but that article was deeply interesting and i gotta thank you for it. I kinda want to see a deep dive on police quest just to see the psychology of the broken minds behind it.
While not a super deep analysis, the Space Quest Historian did a retrospective on the first Police Quest that deconstructs somewhat how Jim Walls seemed view police work, or at least his idealized version of it. It’s also pretty funny :p
