Developed/Published by: Sierra On-Line
Released: 1986
Completed: 02/12/2025
Completion: Well, it’s not really a video game. Watched it until I was pretty sure I’d seen everything.
Christmas is drawing ever closer, so let’s relax, let’s have those Christmas party vibes, and let’s just watch Sierra’s 1986 “Christmas Card” A Computer Christmas together:
(For maximum vibes, I suggest running it for real–well, at least with emulation. You can do so, easily, at archive.org!)
Sierra are a company that I’ve not really dug into here on exp.–I’ve really only played King’s Quest I and II–and I have to admit I’m a bit disappointed that in 2025 I didn’t get to King’s Quest III or Space Quest (especially considering their release dates land right around the time of other games I’ve been writing up, like Pro Wrestling and Alex Kidd in Miracle World.) But I got a bit stuck in an earlier PC game I was playing by another historically important developer and did that thing where you put it down for slightly too long, and I loathe to start something else.
But I think it’s alright that we’re getting to enjoy A Computer Christmas together, now. For such a beloved company, with quite a lot of history written about it, and even though Sierra’s Christmas “cards” would become a regular occurrence–there are four between 1986 and 1992–I’m surprised by how little information is online about any of them, and especially not this first one. There’s a bit of irony to that, because it seems that essentially all the information that there ever was about Sierra’s Christmas cards was uploaded to the Sierra On-Line BBS–BBSes, of course, filling the market before internet access went mainstream.
BBSes are not well archived and I can’t exactly ring up (209) 683-4463 to get the details, so really all I’ve got to go on for context is a random Facebook post from an Aaron Micah Wester (dug up for me by ftb1979 on the Gaming Alexandria Discord–thanks!). It’s unsourced, so I’m a bit unsure about calling it the gospel, but he notes these were something “the Williams family were very fond of” while being a “a low-pressure way for developers to experiment with various features they wanted to potentially add into their games.”
I think it’s fair to assume that this first card was intended specifically for stores (it does, after all, say in the intro it’s intended to promote “the Christmas spirit within your store”) though Wester notes that these cards would go on to serve double duty as a way to draw more users to Sierra’s BBS (a 1988 Sierra Newsletter claims the BBS was getting 6000 calls a week, and had 25,000 active users). But this is a marketing tool first and foremost. Distributed to computer stores on disk (“Egghead Software, The WHEREHOUSE, LECHMERE, FEDCO, B Dalton Software Etc, Electronics Boutique, Babbage’s, Walden Software, or RadioShack” Wester seemingly exhaustively states) the staff were more than likely to leave the demo running running across the festive period, and as at the end of each loop of festive scenes there’s an advert for a Sierra game–here Space Quest and King’s Quest III (the ones I haven’t been able to play yet, boo!)–this was a cheeky, very Sierra way to try and push more product.
(The card also mentions The Black Cauldron as part of the default text scroll, but doesn’t seem to include a demo for it. I forgot all about Sierra making a game for The Black Cauldron.)
That A Computer Christmas includes ads does sour the experience of playing it, just a little–the games aren’t festive at all! I mean at least just put a Santa hat on the character sprites or something–but it doesn’t exactly ruin it. And that this card is limited to the PC beeper… well… let me just say I’ve heard a lot of horrible beepy version of Christmas music thanks to the BBC Micro by now, and this is the worst.
Still, A Computer Christmas is a charming object, one you won’t regret leaving playing while you open your advent calendar or something. Unless you forget to mute it, I guess.
Festive vibes ranking: HIGH (unless it’s an ad break.)
Will I ever play it again? Onward and upwards: perhaps next Christmas I’ll try the 1988 version, which, thankfully, includes a Roland MT-32 option.
Final Thought: Sierra’s computerised Christmas cards as stealth marketing, are, of course, not the only example of such a phenomenon. There are examples such as “Seasons Greetings from Thoughtware” from as early as 1984. Strangely, that’s as hard to find much online about as A Computer Christmas, though it is covered briefly on LGR as part of their longer video on the commercial “Jingle Disk” it turned into. Is this where Sierra got the idea? Probably not, but I suppose you never know.