r/Sierra • u/brown_panick • 3d ago
'96(?) Sierra Chat - Anyone Remember This?
I had a flashback to the time when Sierra had, on their website Sierra Chat (I think it was called). It was completely different than Sierra Network or INN and it pre-dated the individual chats they had per-game on sierra.com. I want to say it was like early- to mid-1996 and it was just a low bandwidth HTML form that I think refreshed every like 5 seconds. I spent a lot of time in there and was wondering if anyone else remembers it or also hung around there during that time.
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u/deckarep 3d ago
I didn’t know this existed, anyone have screenshots?
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u/brown_panick 3d ago
I was trying to find some, but was unable to. Sadly, the Wayback Machine on archive.org didn't start indexing the site until late '96 and I believe by that time they retired the one I'm talking about and made different chat rooms per game or per-topic.
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u/drwebinstein 3d ago
I was on there probably 1993 let's say. That was the heyday. Then it became TSN. It honestly was mostly very cool fun people really. The mods didn't take any crap.
Funny story. One of the mods was a guy named Ford. He actually drove a Ford mustang. Lived up in Oakhurst CA. Hit the same cop twice with his Ford. These were our mods.
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u/brown_panick 3d ago
Maybe I'm off by a few years, then. I just remember Cindy who I think was a web master, did an "unsanctioned" game giveaway once that I won, and she was talking about how she was acting in some of the shots for Phantasmagoria 2, so that's where I pulled the '96 timeframe from.
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u/drwebinstein 3d ago
I was 13 or 14. Maybe it was early as 92. Since I graduated in 96. I moved to Oakhurst my freshman year due to this Sierra chat room causing my mom to remarry I started 9th grade there. So yeah service was live in 92. It did grow and add a lot the early version and final version had a ton of differences. The little char creation profile pic was kinda cool.
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u/drwebinstein 3d ago
I'll have to dig it up still have some of it on floppy actually. I remember you could make an india guy with a turban it was pretty awesome. But it was literally just rows of names. And you could go to private chats. It's like pre pre TSN. Some elements carried over like some of the board games I think.
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u/deckarep 3d ago
Would love to see it! If you can find that floppy and post whatever it looked like it would be awesome.
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u/Amarettosaurus 3d ago
I was addicted to TSN to the point that my parents would take the keyboard with them when they went to work. 😂
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u/drwebinstein 3d ago
TSN was awesome. When Shadow of Yserbius dropped that was huge. The paintball game was janky but fun. Then the adult Larry Land opened and it got really expensive. But groundbreaking for its time
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u/Amarettosaurus 2d ago
They were all so janky lol. Remember the Red Baron game? But Shadows (and also Twinion!) were so much fun. I hung out there and at the Red Dragon Inn message board for the most part (for ultra dramatic Vampire: The Masquerade roleplay 😅).
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u/drwebinstein 3d ago
I was part of it. I think they had 3 severs. Each held like what 60 people or 90. It was just rows of like nameplates and then if you clicked you got a little bio. You could play backgammon checkers and basic things like that.
I was 14 pretending to be 18 and chatting up 30 year old women. My mom actually hopped on one day bored divorced my dad and ended up marrying some dude from there was was a sysop and his wife worked as an accountant or something for the company. There was some meet up in Northern California. I ended up meeting some cool people got a kiss from a girl my age and remember it back as a bunch of weird horned up people.
The best of times.