An adventure game is by
definition a video game in which the player assumes the role of a
protagonist in an interactive story driven by exploration and
narrative that includes puzzle solving. Adventure games are
considered today a genre of the past, with only a few new
releases here and there, mainly by indie developers. Of course,
we have also seen some remakes of old classics, like HD
versions of Monkey Island or Grim Fandango and some new
series that were created in latter years, like Deponia
. But
all in all, the adventure games genre is in decline for decades
now. However, if we go back during the 80s up until the mid
90s, this type of video games was dominating the market,
especially in the personal computer gaming scene. This
series of documentaries will focus on the rise and fall of
the adventure games, as we will try to show the birth and first
steps of the genre, its golden years, and their declined to obscurity.
Along with that, we will try to follow the history of some key
d
evelopers of adventure games like Sierra and LucasArts. Join
me as we take a trip to the past in order to revisit old classics
and some iconic games that have helped shape the gaming industry
as it is today. We will begin with the early years of
adventure games, how they were conceived and evolved to become
a standard for the industry. We need to also specify that we are
going to focus in the Western Hemisphere. I'm saying that
because along with the evolution of the adventure games in the
Weste
rn markets, a similar genre was created in Japan. I'm
talking about visual novels, a type of game that should not be
mixed with our topic, since they focus more on the narrative and
less on puzzle solving. Back to our subject, the term adventure
game originated from the 1970s text computer game Colossal Cave
Adventure, often referred to as simply as adventure, which
pioneered a style of gameplay which many developers imitated
and which became a genre in its own right. It was developed
between 19
75 and 1977 by Will Crowther and Don woods for the
PDP-10 mainframe. Will Crowther was a programmer and
experienced caver having previously helped to create
vector map surveys of the Mammoth Cave in Kentucky in the
early 1970s for the Cave Research Foundation. In
addition, Crowther enjoyed playing the tabletop role
playing game Dungeons and Dragons. Crowther wanted to
connect better with his daughters and decided a
computerized simulation of his cave exploration with elements
of his role playing
games would help. He created a means by
which the game could be controlled through natural
language input so that it would be a thing that gave you the
illusion anyway that you typed in English commands and it did
what you said. Crowther's original game consisted of about
700 lines of Fortran code, which portrayed 78 different map
locations of the actual Mammoth Cave in Kentucky, and 193
vocabulary words, travel tables and miscellaneous messages. Once
the game was complete, Crowther showed it o
ff to his co workers
for feedback and then consider his work on the game complete,
leaving the compiled game in a directory before taking a month
off for vacation. During that time, others had found the game
and it was distributed widely across the ARPANET
network. Although titled in game as Colossal Cave Adventure, its
executable file was simply named Advent, which led to this
becoming an alternate name for the game. One of those
who had discovered the game was Don Woods, a graduate student at
Stanford University in 1976. Woods wanted to expand upon the
game and contacted Crowther to gain access to the source code.
Woods built upon Crowther's code in Fortran, including more high
fantasy related elements based on his love of the writings of
JRR Tolkien. He also introduced a scoring system within the game
and expanded Crowther's game to approximately 3000 lines of code,
140 Map Locations, and 293 vocabulary words. Other
programmers created variations of the game and ports to other
syste
ms in the following years like the MS DOS version by Level
9 Computing which also included images and not just
text as the original. A new video game genre was born and
eager talented programmers from around the world would jump
on the adventure game train. One of those young and aspiring
programmers was Ken Williams. At the end of the 1970s Ken
Williams sought to set up company for enterprise software
for the market dominating Apple II computer. One day he took a
teletype terminal to his house
to work on the development of an
accounting program. Looking through a catalogue, he found an
executable named Advent, which was of course, the Colossal Cave
Adventure. He bought a game and introduced it to his wife
Roberta, and they both played through it. They began to search
for something similar but found the market under developed.
Rebecca decided that she could write her own and conceived the
plot for Mystery House. Recognizing that, though
she knew some programming, she needed someone els
e to code the
game she convinced her husband to help. Kenn agreed and
borrowed his brother's Apple II computer to write the game on.
Ken suggested that adding graphical scenes to the
otherwise text based game would make it more interesting for
players. The resulting game is a text based adventure, with
depiction of the characters location displayed above the
text. The game's code was completed in only a few days and
was finished on May 1980. The couple took out an
advertisement on Micro magazin
e as OnLine Systems and mass
produced Ziploc bags containing a floppy disk, and a set of
instructions to be sold at $24.95 which in
today's money is the equivalent to a bit more of $77. To the
couple's surprise, the game sold more than 15,000 copies through
mail order. The Williams saw the opportunity and founded the
company Online Systems to further develop adventure games
for the personal computers of the time. Mystery house became
the first of their High Res adventure series, which
continued
with Mission Asteroid and then with Wizard and the
Princess, considered a prelude to the later kings Quest series in
both story and concept. High Res adventure series kept strong
through the early 80s with the release of Cranston Manor,
Ulysses and the Golden Fleece, Timezone and the adult only
Soft-porn Adventure, leading to the unsuccessful Dark Crystal, a
licensed game based on the movie with the same title by Jim
Henson of the Muppets fame. This game however, led to another
young programmer
stepping up inside the company, now rebranded
to Sierra with a new logo inspired by the Sierra Nevada
mountain range. This man was Al Lowe who re-wrote the Dark
Crystal for a younger audience and renamed the game to Gelfling
Adventure. The success of Gelfling Adventure established
Al Lowe as one of the best programmers of Sierra. The
advancement of the personal computer technology led to the
development of Sierra's new adventure game engine that
featured better graphics and a depiction of the ga
me's
character on screen, giving a third person perspective to the
genre. In 1983, Sierra OnLine was contacted by IBM to create a
game for the new PC Jr. IBM offered to fund the entire
development and marketing of the game paying royalties. Ken and
Roberta Williams accepted and started the project. Roberta
created a story featuring classic fairy tale elements. Her
game concept included animated color graphics, a pseudo-3d
perspective where the main character is visible on the
screen, a more comp
etent text parser that understands advanced
commands from the player and music playing in the background
through the PC Jr sound hardware. In the mid 1984,
King's Quest: Quest for the Crown was released to much
acclaim, beginning the King's Quest series. The King's Quest
series chronicles the saga of the royal family of the Kingdom
of Daventry through their various trials and adventures.
The story takes place over two generations and across many
lands as the heroes and heroines fight villains su
ch as evil
witches and wizards. Following the success the first
installments the series, it was primarily responsible for
building the reputation of Sierra. Unfortunately, the PC Jr
struggled in the market, threatening the whole Sierra
project as IBM decided to cut the funding of other games.
Thankfully, other personal computers dominated the
industry, such as the Apple II and the highly successful Tandy
1000. Sierra decided to port their King's Quest games to
those systems, further establishing
their position as
market leaders. The sequels of the First Kings quest game where
huge commercial successes leading to the creation of more
Sierra franchises. Al Lowe was asked by Ken Williams to write a
modern version of the soft porn adventure, and the Leisure Suit
Larry series was born with the release of Leisure Suit Larry,
in the land of the Lounge Lizards, a huge hit of the time
that led to a lot of sequels and remakes. The Black Cauldron is
another adventure game designed by Al Lowe of S
ierra OnLine and
released in 1986. The game is based on the Disney film The
Black Cauldron, which was itself based on the Chronicles of Prydain
novel of the same name by Lloyd Alexander. It was made
shortly after the first King's Quest game, so it resembles that
adventure in many ways. Along with the Dark Crystal, it remains
one of the only few adventure games by Sierra to be based on
films. While working to finish the Black Cauldron, programmers
Mark Crowe and Scott Murphy began to plan for an
adventure
game of their own. After a simple demonstration to Ken
Williams, he allowed them to start working on the full game,
which was named Space Quest: The Sarien Encounter. The game
was released in October of 1986, as an instant success, spawning
many sequels in the Space Quest series in the following years.
The games parodied both science fiction properties, such as Star
Wars and Star Trek (The theme song itself is a parody of the
Star Wars theme) as well as pop cultural phenomena. The ser
ies
featured a silly sense of humor, heavily reliant on puns and
wacky storylines. Roger Wilco, a perpetual loser is often
depicted as the underdog who repeatedly saves the universe,
often by accident, only to be either ignored or punished for
violating minor regulations in the process. In the meantime,
Ken Williams befriended a retired highway patrol officer
named Jim walls and asked him to produce an adventure series
based on the police theme. Walls proceeded to create Police Quest:
In Pursuit
of the Death Angel, which was released in 1987.
Several sequels followed, and the series was touted for
adherence to police protocol, several parts of which were
explained in the game's manuals, and presenting some real life
situations encountered by Walls during his career as an officer.
The lack of traditional puzzles made the game stand out at the
time of its release, although it also resulted in some criticism
of the dry police work. Unlike many games on this genre, their
style of play depe
nds largely on a strict adherence to standard
police rules and procedures. Failure to abide to proper
procedure typically leads to the player being penalised on points
or having his character killed. Another notable Sierra franchise
is the Quest for Glory or Hero's Quest as it was originally
known. Quest for Glory is a series of hybrid adventure - Role
Playing video games, which was designed by Corey and Laurie
Ann Cole. The series combines humor with puzzle elements, themes
and characters borro
wed from various legends, puns and
memorable characters, creating a five part series in the Sierra
stable. The series was originally titled Hero's Quest. However,
Sierra failed to trademark the name. The Milton Bradley company
successfully trademarked an electronic version of their
unrelated joint Games Workshop board game called Hero Quest,
which forced Sierra to change the series title to Quest for
Glory. The series consisted of five games, each of which
followed directly upon the events of th
e last. The new games
frequently referred to previous entries in the series, often in
the form of cameos by recurring characters. The objective of
this series is to transform the player character from an average
adventurer to a hero by completing non linear quests. The
game was also considered revolutionary in its character
input system. This allowed players to import their
individual character, including the skills and wealth they had
acquired from one game to the next. Sierra grew through the
80s, making the company one of the main driving forces of the
adventure game genre, entering strong in the 90s, with a new
generation of games upgraded both visually and in their
narrative quality. Sierra, of course, was not alone during the
early days of the adventure games. Other companies and
developers emerged, building and expanding on this gaming genre
that led to adventure games dominating the sales charts of
that decade. As computers gained the ability to use pointing
devices, and point
and click interfaces, graphical adventure
games moved away from including the text interface, and simply
provided appropriate commands the player could interact with
on screen. The first known game with such an interface was
Enchanted Scepters of 1984 from silicon beach software, which
used drop down menus for the player to select actions from
while using a text window to describe the results of those
actions. The gameplay is much like a text adventure game. The
screen shows a picture of the roo
m that the player is currently
in and to the right is a description of the room. The
description mentions any items that can be used or picked up,
but to do that, the player must click on the item in the
picture. The picture change as the player moves to a new scene.
There is no movement in the picture but enemies are inserted
when encountered, accompanied by sound effects. The player
can then choose from the drop down menu whether to flee, in which
way north south, east or west, and occasionall
y up or down, or
to fight and with which weapon. Enchanted Scepters was created
with the World Builder adventure authoring system, which was later
released to consumers in 1986. Similar to Enchanted Scepters,
another adventure game of the early 80s focused on a more
point and click interface. Deja Vu was released in
1985 for Macintosh and later ported to several other systems
including the Amiga. Initially, the game featured black and
white graphics and later releases introduced color. This
game
and its sequel Deja Vu 2: Lost in Las Vegas, require
significant lateral thinking. Some situations are based in
common detective techniques, while others require simple
violence. Point and Click interface gradually grew and
received wider acceptance from consumers even though the
market was full of Sierra games that used a different interface
focusing on written commands. It grew so rapidly that later on,
the genre was directly associated to that interface, leaving the
legacy of many gamers ref
erring to adventures as point and click
adventure games. The turning point came in the late 80s
through a company founded by a true legendary figure of all
narrative forms, George Lucas. Lucas wanted to explore other
areas of entertainment and created the Lucasfilm Computer
Division in 1979, which included a department for computer games,
the Games Group, and another one for graphics. The early charter
of Lucasfilm games focus was to make experimental, innovative and
technologically advanced vid
eo games. Habitat, an early online
role playing game, and one of the first to support a graphical
front end was one such title. Lucasfilm games began to design
its first adventure, titled Labyrinth: the computer game in 1985.
Company head George Lucas had requested a tie in video game
for the movie of the same name, which was in production at
Lucasfilm. As was common with Lucasfilm games projects, Lucas
himself provided very little direction to the team, leading
to the game having a different pl
ot compared to the actual
movie it was based on. Labyrinth the computer game is a graphic
adventure game, in which the player maneuvers a character
through a maze while solving puzzles and evading dangers. The
players goal is to locate and destroy Jareth within 13 real
time hours. Otherwise, the protagonists will be trapped in
the maze forever. Unlike other adventure games of the period,
Labyrinth does not require a command line interface. Instead
of typing commands, the player selects them fro
m two scrolling
word wheels, one for verbs and one for nouns. For instance, if
the user wants to open a chest, he will have to select the verb
"open" from the first wheel and the noun "chest" from the second one.
In the end, Labyrinth was more commercially successful than the
film upon it was based, as the users enjoyed its plot and
pazzles. Its biggest legacy, however, was the influence it
had on the next game developed by Lucasfilm games. Maniac
Mansion was a 1987 graphic adventure video game
developed
and published by Lucasfilm games. It follows teenage
protagonist Dave Miller, as he attempts to rescue his
girlfriend Sandy Pants from a mad scientist whose mind has
been enslaved by a sentient meteor. Gameplay is nonlinear, and the
game must be completed in different ways based on the
player's choice of characters. The game was conceived in 1985
by Ron Gilbert and Gary Winnick, who sought to tell a comedic
story based on horror films and b-movies. They mapped out
the project as a pape
r and pencil game before coding
commenced. While earlier adventure titles have relied on
command lines, Gilbert disliked such systems and he
developed Maniac Mansion's simple point and click interface as a
replacement. To speed up production he created a game
engine called S.C.U.M.M, which was used in many later LucasArts
titles. S.C.U.M.M, which stands for Script Creation Utility (for)
Maniac Mansion falls somewhere between a game engine and a
programming language, allowing designers to create
locations,
items and dialogue sequences without writing code in the
language in which the game source end up. This also
allowed the game script and data files to be cross platform ie. to
reuse across various platforms. Most S.C.U.M.M games feature a
verb - object design paradigm. The player controled
character has an inventory and the game world is littered with
objects with which the player can interact using a variety of
verbs. Puzzles generally involve using the right verb action with
the ap
propriate object. "Talk to" commonly produces dialogue
sequences in which the player selects from the list of
predefined questions or comments and the character they are talking
to replies with a predefined response. Maniac Mansion was
critically acclaimed. Reviewers lauded its graphics, cutscenes,
animation and humor. Writer Orson Scott Card praised it as a step
toward "computer games becoming a valid storytelling art". It
influenced numerous graphic adventure titles, and its
point and click in
therface became a standard feature in
the genre. The game's success solidified Lucasfilm as a serious
rival to other adventure game studios such as Sierra. The
success of Maniac Manson led to the creation of other famous
Lucasfilm games franchises. Zak McCracken and the Alien
Mindbenders, the second game to use S.C.U.M.M after
Maniac Mansion was released in 1988 for the Commodore 64 and
then ported to other systems. The project was led by David
Fox, with Matthew Allen Kane as a co-designer and
co-programmer.
The game was originally meant to be more serious, resembling the
Indiana Jones series, but Ron Gilbert persuaded David Fox to
increase the humorous aspects of the game. The game was
consequently heavily inspired by many popular theories about
aliens, ancient astronauts and mysterious civilizations. The
many places visited in the game are common hotspots for these
ideas, such as the Pyramids of Egypt and Mexico, Lima, Stonehedge,
the Bermuda Triangle and the Face on Mars. The game
received high scores in general press and was a bigger success
in Europe compared to the United States. Indiana Jones and the
Last Crusade: The Graphic adventure released in 1989, to
coincide with the release of the film of the same title, was the
third game to use the S.C.U.M.M engine. It expanded LucasArts'
traditional adventure game structure by including a
flexible point system, the IQ score, or "Indy Quotient" and
by allowing the game to be completed in several different
ways. The point sys
tem was similar to that of Sierra's
adventure games. However, when the game was restarted or
restored, the total IQ of the previous game was retained. The
only way to reach the maximum IQ of 800 was by finding
alternative solutions to puzzles, such as fighting a
guard instead of avoiding him. This was also an answer to the
criticism the whole adventure games genre received
due to the lack of replayability. Last Crusade was also
the first Lucasfilm game to include the verbs "look" and "talk".
In
several situations, the latter would begin a primitive
dialogue system in which the player could choose one of
several lines to say. This system was later expanded in the
release of the first Monkey Island. LOOM, released in
1990, was the fourth game to use the S.C.U.M.M adventure game engine and the first of those to
avoid the verb-object interface introduced in Maniac Mansion.
The project was led by Brian Moriarty, a former Infocom
employee and author of classic adventure games, like the
Wishb
ringer, Trinity and Beyond Zork. A departure from other
Lucasfilm adventure games in many senses, LOOM is based on
a serious and complex fantasy story. With its experimental
interface, it deviated from the traditional adventure games
norm, where puzzles usually involve interactions between the
game character, the environment and items the character has in
their possession. LOOM's gameplay centers instead around magical
four note tunes known as drafts that the protagonist can play on
his distaff.
Each draft is a spell that has an effect of a
certain type, such as "open" or "bleach". The drafts can also be
played backwards, resulting in the opposite action, such as the
draft of "open" once played backwards lead to "close". The
main character can learn drafts by observing an object that
possesses the quality of the desired draft. For example, by
examining a blade while it is being sharpened, he can learn
the sharpening draft. When the game begins, your character is
only able to play draft
s using the notes C, D, and E,
limiting his ability to reproduce more powerful drafts.
As the game progresses and additional notes become
available, so his ability to play new drafts increases. The
game can be played as at three difficulty levels, each one
different in how clearly the notes being played are labeled
The in game music consists of experts from the Swan Lake
ballet by Tchaikovsky arranged for MIDI. The original package
offered an audio tape with a 30 minute audio drama that
explaine
d the nature and history of the world of LOOM and
the circumstances that have led to the birth of the main
character. LOOM was a critical success but failed to sell in
sufficient numbers to warrant a sequel mainly due to its
unique gameplay design that did not appeal to a larger audience.
The next Lucasfilm game, however, was one of the best
adventure games ever, and a member of the video games Hall
of Fame. Ron Gilbert returned in 1990 and along with Tim
Schafer and Dave Grossman, created the S
ecret of Monkey Island a
point and click at graphic adventure game that takes place
in a fictional version of the Caribbean during the age of
piracy. The player assumes the role of Guybrush
Threepwood, a young man who dreams of becoming a pirate, and
explores fictional islands while solving puzzles. More
specifically, The Secret of Monkey Island is a 2D
adventure game played from a third person perspective, via
point and click interface, where the player guides protagonist
Guybrush Threepwood th
rough the game's world and interacts with
the environment by selecting from 12 verb commands. While
conversing with other characters the player may
choose between topics for discussion that are listed in a
dialogue tree. The game is one of the first to incorporate such a
system. The ingame action is frequently interupted by cutscenes.
Gilbert, Schafer and Grossman's primarily goal was to create a
simpler and more accessible gameplay model to those
presented in previous Lucasfilm titles. The Secr
et of Monkey
Island was the fifth Lucasfilm games project powered by the
S.C.U.M.M engine originally developed for Maniac Mansion. The company
had gradually modified the engine since its creation. The dialogue
tree was added which facilitated conversation options
and the sword fighting puzzles. Developers removed the "what is"
option (an input command that describes an on screen object to
the player) in favor of allowing the player to simply highlight
the object with the mouse cursor. The game's
improved interface
became the standard for the company's later titles. Critics
praised the Secret of Monkey Island for its humor, audio,
visuals and gameplay. Several publications list it among the
greatest video games of all time. The game spawned a number
of sequels collectively known as the Monkey Island series.
Gilbert, Schafer and Grossman also led the development of the
sequel, Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge. Those five adventure
games established Lucasfilm games as the main rival of
Sierra and one of the biggest players in the genre. Graphical
adventure games were considered to have spurred the gaming market
for personal computers from 1985 through the next decade, as they
were able to offer narrative and storytelling that could not
readily be told by the state of graphical hardware at the time.
Adventure games convinced consumers that personal
computers were not just bulky, ugly, grey spreadsheet devices,
but can also be used for serious gaming of the highest quality.
The
evolution of the available technology led to the heyday of
the genre in the 90s but this is the topic for our next part in
this documentary series. I hope you have enjoyed the first video
of this new gaming documentary. Please follow the channel as we
will have the next part of the series soon.
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