Among all the companies who formed the Nintendo Ultra 64 Dream Team, Sierra is a most peculiar case. Nintendo has seemingly had an eye on the home computer market in some form or another for years by this point, from the Nintendo Entertainment System being branded the “Family Computer” (or “Famicom” for short) in its native Japan to offering peripherals such as proprietary floppy disc drives and mice to even trying to offer a keyboard with the NES when it was still the Nintendo Advanced Video System.
If that’s the market you’re going to chase, then it makes sense to bring in someone with plenty of experience in the field. Someone like Sierra On-Line, who was founded in 1979 and had spent more than a decade of experience with platforms such as the Apple II, Commodore 64, MS-DOS, Amiga, Macintosh, and more.
That said, Sierra On-Line had relatively little experience when it came to the home console market by the time Nintendo was seeking out developers and publishers to form its elite club of exclusives developers. King’s Quest V: Absence Makes the Heart Go Yonder! came to the NES, but only through Konami, who’d brought a number of other PC titles to the platform, as publisher. They would go on to act as a console publisher, but only for PC games developed by their subsidiaries such as Dynamix, whose The Adventures of Willy Beamish and Rise of the Dragon were brought to the SEGA CD.
When Nintendo Power announced the formation of the Dream Team, Sierra’s contribution was to be a port of Dynamix’s 1990 PC title, Red Baron:
One of the newest exclusive partners, Sierra Online (sic) pioneered online computer gaming. It also excels at flight simulations like Red Baron. The Nintendo Ultra 64 version of this WWI dogfight simulation will make use of Sierra’s legendary gaming expertise.
Via Unseen64
However, it was not to be. The game was cancelled, and no one seems certain as to why, or if development had ever even truly begun, with the screenshots above speculated to just as likely be from the original PC version than the would-be Nintendo 64 title.
And that was pretty much it for Sierra, as far as the Nintendo 64 goes. They never developed or published a single game for the Nintendo 64 over the course of the console’s life.
Sierra would continue to publish titles for various PC platforms, primarily Windows, while also expanding ever-gradually into the console space with the Sony PlayStation and Game Boy Color. The company would be bought and absorbed by several entities, and would see one studio shut down while under the umbrella of Vivendi Universal Games, and Vivendi would eventually go on to use Sierra as their publishing label for numerous platforms. Vivendi would merge with Activision in 2008 to form Activision Blizzard, with Sierra shut down and numerous titles in development (such as Ghostbusters: The Video Game and Brütal Legend) either being sold off or shuttered.
That wouldn’t be the end of Sierra, however, as the brand was revived in 2014 with an eye on reviving, re-releasing, and potentially even remaking some of the titles from their classic portfolio for downloadable services such as the PlayStation Network, Xbox Live, and Steam. Their latest release, Velocity 2X, was released on the Nintendo Switch in September 2018.
Lover of fine foods and felines, as well as comics, toys, and... oh yeah, video games. David Oxford has written about the latter for years, including for Nintendo Power, Nintendo Force, Mega Visions, and he even wrote the book on Mega Man!
