Posted on

Falcon Designs is Officially Live!

Hey everyone, welcome to Falcon Designs!

Falcon Designs is the official home of “Ultima – The Ultimate Collector’s Guide”, and the upcoming “Sierra Collector’s Quest” series. Researching and preserving gaming history is what we do. Thanks for checking out the site! Please excuse the rough edges, they’ll evolve and improve over time. I’m honestly not sure where to start, so let’s take the tried and true route of starting at the beginning…

About the Author

Stephen Emond has a long history of video game experience. By the age of 5 he was already fascinated with the unlimited potential that gaming had for interactive storytelling. In elementary school he wrote game lists to keep track of his favorite Sierra and Sega games. By high school he was writing hundred page game design documents, for which he earned a very nice rejection letter from Sega of America. Years later he became a Managing Editor for Stratics, the premier MMORPG community site for its time. Eventually doing some freelance design work for Electronic Arts on Ultima Online. His proposal for an Ultima: 25th Anniversary Collection was green-lit, but regrettably shelved.

He is best known for publishing the most comprehensive collector’s guides available for the Ultima game series (and likely any other series, at least thus far). Through his research he’s had the pleasure of meeting industry legends Richard Garriott, Warren Spector, Denis Loubet, George “The Fat Man” Sanger, Dr Cat, Starr Long, and many others. He is recognized internationally as an authority on Ultima history. His books are often used as the primary information source for serious collectors, as reference material for other scholarly works… and to settle fan group debates.

  • Ultima:  The Ultimate Collector’s Guide  (Nov 2011)  (826pg)
  • Ultima Online:  The Ultimate Collector’s Guide  (Sep 2012)  (460pg)
  • Ultima:  The Ultimate Companion Guide  (Sep 2012)  (282pg)

“This book is nothing short of amazing. Every box, every disc, every map, every ad, every poster, every t-shirt… everything (well, nearly everything) Ultima is included and illustrated. I can’t even imagine the research and years of collecting materials that went into this Guide.” 

– Warren Spector, Origin Systems

“This is a better source than most game series will ever have. The amount of research that went into this book is probably comparable to the amount of work we put into making one of the Ultima games to begin with!” 

– Dr Cat, Origin Systems

Sierra Collector’s Quest

Sierra Collector’s Quest is our next highly ambitious project. It is a labor of love that has been in development for almost two decades now – there are obvious reasons that projects on this scale aren’t typically attempted. This will be the most exhaustively complete collector’s resource ever assembled. Challenges aside, the ‘Quest’ to preserve Sierra’s history is a worthy endeavor. It has been fascinating to learn the extensive influence Sierra had, and continues to have on generations of gamers.

On September 29th, 2020 we launched a Kickstarter to fund the development of Volume I & Volume 0 of the upcoming series. It was an overwhelming success, and managed to achieve over $100,000 in pledges. The funding will go a long way to ensure the books attain the level of quality worthy of the Sierra legacy. The books are currently in development with a projected release of Spring 2021 – roughly May for my friends south of the equator 😉

The Future

Following the release of Volume I & 0, the plan is to conclude the “core” Sierra series with Volume II & III in early 2022. If there’s sufficient interest we will happily adapt the rest of our research into detailed guides for Dynamix, Coktel Vision, Impressions, Blizzard, and all of Sierra’s other divisions and affiliates some point down the road.

In honor of the 15th Anniversary of the original Ultima guide, I WOULD like to do a complete Origin Systems series… Beyond that? Probably Sega, Camelot, BioWare, Bethesda, Working Designs… A lot of great options 🙂

All the best!

Steve