SierraVault
The definitive documentation archive for Sierra On-Line’s gaming legacy.
sierravault.net | GitHub | Quartz Mirror
Overview
SierraVault is a comprehensive Obsidian-based wiki documenting Sierra On-Line’s complete gaming history — from the earliest Hi-Res Adventures in 1980 through modern fan remakes and spiritual successors from Sierra alumni.
What started as a personal Obsidian vault turned into a full research project with a custom toolchain for crawling sources, generating content, and enforcing quality standards. Every page is backed by 15–40 citations from original sources: interviews, magazine reviews, postmortems, and developer commentary.
By the Numbers
- 511 games documented
- 56 designer biographies
- 28 studio profiles + 23 publisher histories
- 46 years of history (1980–2026)
- 24,000+ research sources
- 19 guides covering everything from parser commands to Sierra deaths
Flagship Series
| Series | Games | Years | Creator |
|---|---|---|---|
| King’s Quest | 10 | 1984–2015 | Roberta Williams |
| Space Quest | 7 | 1986–1995 | Two Guys from Andromeda |
| Leisure Suit Larry | 12 | 1987–2020 | Al Lowe |
| Quest for Glory | 6 | 1989–1998 | Lori & Corey Cole |
| Police Quest | 5 | 1987–1993 | Jim Walls |
| Gabriel Knight | 5 | 1993–2014 | Jane Jensen |
| Laura Bow | 2 | 1989–1992 | Roberta Williams |
Coverage
| Category | Count | Examples |
|---|---|---|
| Core Sierra | ~200 | King’s Quest, Space Quest, LSL, Police Quest, Gabriel Knight |
| Dynamix | 50+ | Tribes, The Incredible Machine, flight sims |
| Impressions | 20+ | Caesar, Pharaoh, Zeus |
| Coktel Vision | 16 | Gobliiins, educational titles |
| Sierra Partners | 30+ | Valve, Relic, Monolith |
| Fan Games | 15+ | VGA remakes, fan sequels |
| Alumni Successors | 15+ | Hero-U, SpaceVenture, Gray Matter |
| Designers | 56 | Roberta Williams, Al Lowe, Jane Jensen, the Coles |
Guides & Reference
Beyond individual game pages, the vault includes curated guides:
- Playing Sierra Games Today — modern compatibility and setup
- Buying Guide — where to legally purchase classics
- Parser Commands — comprehensive verb reference for parser-era games
- Sierra Deaths — the infamous death catalog
- Easter Eggs and Secrets — hidden content across the catalog
- Voice Acting in Sierra Games — the transition from text to speech
- Sierra Music and Composers — from PC speaker to MT-32 to General MIDI
- Protagonist Guide — every playable character across the library
- Cancelled Games — projects that never shipped
- Engine Index — AGI, SCI, and everything in between
Content Pipeline
The project uses a custom Python toolchain (58 scripts) to research, generate, and validate content:
Discovery → Crawling → Enrichment → Generation → Scoring → Review → Publish
- Discovery — Brave Search, MobyGames API to find sources for each game
- Crawling — ScraperAPI and custom scrapers to extract content
- Enrichment — Cross-reference and verify across multiple AI models
- Generation — Claude Opus drafts comprehensive pages from research
- Scoring — Dual-model quality check (Claude + GPT, both must pass 90%)
- Review — Human editorial approval before publishing
- Validation — Link checking, reference deduplication, frontmatter standardization
Scripts include specialized tools like hallucination detection, orphan page discovery, parallel enrichment, and automated series navigation generation.
Quality Standards
- 15+ citations per page — every claim backed by sources
- No duplicate URLs — each source used once
- Structural score 90%+ — follows template format
- LLM score 90%+ — accuracy verified by Claude + GPT
- 95%+ for flagships — higher bar for major series entries
Tech Stack
- Content: Obsidian vault (Markdown + wikilinks)
- Live site: Obsidian Publish
- Mirror: Quartz (self-hosted, auto-rebuilds from GitHub every 5 min)
- Source: GitHub (CC BY-NC)
- Pipeline: Python 3.10+, Brave Search, ScraperAPI, Claude, GPT-4o
- Hosting: Self-hosted (Caddy + Node.js)