Adventure game: Encyclopedia - Adventure game

Adventure game

Adventure is a genre of video game typified by exploration, puzzle-solving, interaction with game characters, and a focus on narrative rather than reflex-based challenges. The vast majority of adventure games are computer games, though console-based adventure games are not unheard of. Unlike many other game genres, the adventure genre's focus on story allows it to draw heavily from other narrative-based art forms, such as literature and film. Adventure games encompass a wide variety of literary genres, including fantasy, science fiction, mystery, horror, and comedy. Notable adventure games include Zork, King's Quest, The Secret of Monkey Island, and Myst.

Adventure games are similar to computer role-playing games (CRPG's), except that the game play is more focused on problem-solving rather than combat and statistics. In general, games that involve the management of player attributes and statistics are considered to be CRPG's, while those that focus solely on puzzles and narrative are considered to be part of the Adventure category. It should be noted, however, that this distinction is an extremely loose one, and many games blur the line between the two categories. In particular, the status of what are sometimes called action-adventure games as members of the category is largely in doubt, with adventure gaming purists (And, to a lesser extent, action gaming purists) labeling action-adventure games as belonging to neither the action nor adventure genres rather than to both.

Most adventure games are designed for a single player, since the heavy emphasis on story and character makes multi-player design difficult.

The adventure genre was quite popular during the late 1980s and early 1990s, and many considered it to be among the most technically advanced genres. Indeed, adventure companies like Sierra pursued technologies for their games (such as hand-drawn backgrounds, rotoscoped animation, and in-game video) that were more advanced than most other genres at the time. However, the release of the Sony Playstation marked the end of the adventure era; as 3D became the dominant graphics format, the mostly 2D adventure market began to shrink. Though a few developers continue to produce adventure games, the genre is now almost entirely confined to sub-genres such as survival horror.

Adventure game - History

Adventure game - Colossal Cave Adventure

In the early 1970s, programmer, caver, and role-player William Crowther developed a program called Colossal Cave Adventure. An employee at Bolt, Beranek and Newman (BB&N), a Boston company involved with ARPANET router's, Crowther used BBN's PDP-10 to create the game. The game used a text interface to create an interactive adventure through a spectacular underground cave system. Crowther's work was later modified and expanded by programmer Don Woods, and Colossal Cave Adventure became wildly popular among early computer enthusiasts, spreading across the nascent ARPANET throughout the 1970s.

The unique combination of Crowther's realistic cave descriptions and Woods' addition of fantastical elements proved immensely appealing, and defined the adventure game genre for decades to come. Swords, magic words, puzzles involving objects, and vast underground realms would all become staples of the text adventure genre.

The "Armchair adventure" soon spread beyond college campuses as the microcomputing movement gained steam. Numerous home-brew knockoff's and variations on Colossal Cave Adventure (which eventually came to be known as simply Adventure) appeared throughout the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Adventure game - Scott Adams

One of the many fans of the Colossal Cave was programmer Scott Adams. Upon his first introduction to Adventure, Adams spent almost ten days traversing the game before he achieved Grand Master status. Once he had completed the game, Adams began to wonder how a game like Colossal Cave Adventure could be developed on a home computer like his TRS-80. The main obstacle was that home computers such as the TRS-80 did not actually have sufficient memory to run a large game like Adventure. However, Adams hit on the idea that an adventure game could be described as an interpreter, much like the BASIC language. Furthermore, once an interpreter was developed, Adams realized that it could be reused to develop other adventure games.--Details of Adams's early work.

In 1978, Adams founded Adventure International and produced twelve adventure games before the company went bankrupt in 1985. His first games were text-based and written in BASIC, but during his third game (Mission Impossible), Adams began programming in assembly language to improve the speed of his software.

Adventure game - Graphical progress

The great advance which immediately followed was the introduction of images. With the use of machine language allowing shorter programs, and computer memory increasing, it became possible to use the graphical potential of a computer like the Apple II and some companies soon switched from producing pure text-based adventure games.

Soon the clumsy basic vector graphics gave way to more aesthetic imagery drawn by professional artists. Examples include:

• Return of Herakles by Stuart Smith (1982) (which faithfully portrayed Greek mythology)
• Sherwood Forest (1982),
• Dale Johnson's Masquerade (1983),
• Antonia Antiochia's Transylvania (1982, re-released in 1984)
• Stuart Smith's follow-up to Herakles, Adventure Construction Set (1985), one of the early hits of Electronic Arts. The full-length adventure that came with the software, Rivers of Light, was based on the legend of Gilgamesh.

The introduction of such high-quality bitmap graphics required more substantial storage capacity with many adventure games requiring several diskettes for installation, which would be the case until the CD-ROM made its appearance.

Adventure game - Infocom

In 1977, two friends Dave Lebling and Marc Blank, who were students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Laboratory for Computer Science, discovered Crowther and Woods's game Colossal Cave Adventure. After completing the adventure game, they were joined by Tim Anderson and Bruce Daniels and began to develop a similar game. Their first production, Zork, also started on a PDP-10 minicomputer and spread quickly across the ARPANET. Its success was immediate, and the game, which would reach the size of a megabyte, enormous for the time, would be updated until 1981.

On graduation, the students decided to stay together and to form a company. Tim Anderson, Joel Berez, Marc Blank, Mike Broos, Scott Cutler, Stu Galley, Dave Lebling, J. C. R. Licklider, Chris Reeve, and Albert Vezza created Infocom on 22 June 1979. The idea of distributing Zork came to mind very soon, but the game was too big to port to the microcomputers of the time: the Apple II and the TRS-80, the potential targets, each had only 16 kb of RAM. They wrote a special programming language called Z-machine, which could function on any computer by using an emulator as an intermediary.

In November 1980 the new Zork I: The Great Underground Empire was made available for the PDP-11; One month later, it was released for the TRS-80, with more than 1,500 copies sold between that date and September 1981. That same year, Bruce Daniels finalized the Apple II version and more than 6,000 additional copies were sold. Zork I would go on to sell over a million copies.

The company continued developing text adventure games even as it opened a department for the development of professional software, a department which would never be profitable. High-quality games, with massive, intelligent plots, unequaled syntax analyzers, and meticulous documentation as integral parts of the game, succeeded in all genres. However, with the power of microcomputers increasing and the demand for graphics (which it refused to include in its games), Infocom saw sales decline and in 1989, it had shrunk to a mere 10 employees, compared to 100 employees at its peak, and games developed after 1989 would have no link with the original team.

Adventure game - Sierra

At the end of the 1970s, Ken Williams sought to set up a company for enterprise software for the market-dominating Apple II computer. One day, he took a teletype terminal to his residence to work on the development of an accounting program. Rummaging through a catalogue, he found a program called Colossal Cave Adventure. He and his wife Roberta both played it all the way through and their encounter with Crowther's game would have a strong influence on video-gaming history.

Having finished Colossal Cave Adventure, they began to search for something similar, but found the market underdeveloped. Roberta Williams liked the concept of a textual adventure very much, but she thought that the player would have a more satisfying experience with images and began to think of her own game. She thus conceived Mystery House, the first graphical adventure game, a detective story inspired by Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None.

Ken spent a few nights developing the game on his Apple II, and in the end they made packets with ziploc bags containing the game's 5¼-inch disk and a photocopied paper describing the game. They sold it via a local software shop and to their great surprise, Mystery House was an enormous success. Though Ken believed that the gaming market would be less of a growth market than the professional software market, he persevered with games. Thus, in 1980, the Williamses founded On-Line Systems which would become Sierra On-Line in 1982. The company would be a major actor in the video-gaming of the 1980s.

Sierra soon took things further. Until this point adventure games were in the first person; images presented the décor as seen through the eyes of the player. Williams's company would introduce a new feature in the King's Quest series: a game in the third person. Taking advantage of the techniques developed in action games which had progressed in parallel, Ken introduced an animated character who represented the player in the game and whom the player controlled. With the 3D Animated Adventures, a new standard was born, and nearly all the industry latched onto it. The commands were still entered on the keyboard and analyzed by a syntax interpreter, as with text adventure games.

Sierra would develop new games and push the boundaries of adventure gaming until its purchase by Cendant in 1998. Then in 1998, Cendant sold off their entire interactive software branch for $1 billion to Havas Interactive, a subsidiary of Vivendi Universal.

Adventure game - LucasArts

In 1987, when nobody seemed able to overcome Sierra's power, a programmer named Ron Gilbert working for the company Lucasfilm Games — which has since become LucasArts — created the script-writing system SCUMM which used a point-and-click interface similar to ICOM Simulations' MacVenture games first introduced in 1985. Instead of having to type a command to the syntax analyzer, this system was controlled by means of text icons. To interact with his environment, the player clicked on an order, on an icon representing an object in her inventory, or on a part of the image. This approach was first used by LucasArts for the game Maniac Mansion to great effect.

LucasArts would come to differentiate itself from its main competitor, the giant Sierra, by rethinking certain adventure game concepts to improve playability. Gone was the possibility to die during the course of the game and everything was done to ensure that the player was never completely stuck. Finally, LucasArts abandoned the system of points indicating the player's progress in the adventure. These innovations were immediately taken into account by the competition, especially Sierra.

Gilbert's attempts, Maniac Mansion and Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders, however, remained in 16 colors, and the point-and-click engine wasn't completely integrated since the player would still have to construct sentences using clickable keywords combined with objects in the game. It was The Secret Of Monkey Island that was finally a complete work, with 256 colors, a complete point-and-click engine, a dialogue system with optional responses, puzzles solved with items, original graphics, atmosphere music, and a characteristic sense of humour. Above all, the script was written as for a film (which could be done in-house) and the dialogue and inventory served the needs of the script. The 1993 release of Day of the Tentacle, a remarkable success, began a line of cartoon-style games.

Steven Spielberg collaborated with LucasArts in the creation of The Dig — a science-fiction adventure game that the director had envisioned filming. It met with limited commercial success coming at a time when the gaming public was enticed by high-speed action games.

Taking advantage of advances in action games and integrating an engine similar to those of first-person shooters, the company took a new turn in 1998 with the game Grim Fandango, where it abandoned the cartoon style and its SCUMM scripting environment for a new 3D game system named GrimE.

Adventure game - Myst

In 1991 when the world of adventure games seemed forever dominated by LucasArts, a small team of nine from the company Cyan, Inc., headed by the brothers Rand and Robyn Miller and run out of a garage in Spokane, Washington, began to push the limits of Apple's HyperCard software. By utilizing several Macintosh Quadra computers to generate the graphic images, they invented a new type of adventure game, transforming the genre. Their game Myst was a first-person game with few animations, but the images completely left behind the prevailing cartoon style in favour of ultra-realism. The game was intriguing and captivating, and allowed a level of immersion never previously attained.

The adventure began on an island; the player knew nothing. There was no inventory any more; the player could only carry one object at a time. The game's puzzles were rather classical in their conception. However, thanks to its detailed graphics where everything could be important, the game captivated the player.

Part of its success also seemed linked to the fact that, for the first time, a video game didn't appear to be aimed at an adolescent male audience, but a mainstream adult audience. Released in 1993, Myst for many years was the most profitable computer game ever; it sold over nine million copies on all platforms. It wasn't dethroned until the release of The Sims in 2000, currently the most successful computer game ever.

Myst gave way to several sequels, Riven, Myst III: Exile, Myst IV: Revelation, as well as Myst V: End of Ages. There is also a massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG), Uru: Ages Beyond Myst, which isn't actually part of the Myst series. Three derived novels found their origin in its world: Myst: The Book of Atrus, Myst: The Book of Ti'ana and Myst: The Book of D'ni. The game was also parodied by Parroty Interactive's Pyst.

Adventure game - Types of adventure games

There are many types of adventure games, depending on the criteria. Adventure games vary in their subject, interface, setting or plot. A definite categorization can't be done since some of them may belong to 2 or more of the below mentioned 'types'.

Adventure game - Puzzle adventure

Adventure games that do not rely on obtaining items, their use, and character interaction belong to this genre. It emphasizes exploration, reading logs, and deciphering the proper use of complex mechanisms, often resembling Rube Goldberg machines.

These mechanisms are often deliberately labeled with confusing symbols for two reasons: as a form of "copy protection" in that the translation is in the booklet that came with the game, and hence copyrighted just like any book, such as in the Space Quest series; or to make the machines more difficult to figure out. Rhem, for example, has a machine labelled with three subtly different swirling patterns; Schizm has the numerals of its machine deliberately convoluted.

The plot of these games is usually obscure, and relies on the player's interpretation of the setting and the scenery, and information from the logs in order for him to understand the background scenario. Almost all of these games are played from a first person perspective with the player "moving" between still pre-rendered 3D images, sometimes combined with short animations or video. Typical examples include Schizm, Mystery of Sphinx and Myst, which pioneered this game style.

Adventure game - Action-adventure

A popular and commercially successful genre of adventure gaming, action-adventure games typically emphasize combat or other reflex-based forms of gameplay as well as puzzle-solving and exploration. The most prominent example of action-adventure is the Prince of Persia series. The popular Resident Evil series and other similar survival horror games can also be considered action-adventure games. Action-adventure games are common on video game consoles, and have spawned subgenres like "survival horror" and "stealth action games".

Adventure game - Text based

The first adventure games to appear were text adventures (later called interactive fiction), which typically use a verb-noun parser to interact with the user. These evolved from early mainframe titles like Hunt the Wumpus (Gregory Yob) and Adventure (Crowther and Woods) into commercial games which were playable on personal computers, such as Infocom's widely popular Zork series. In recent years, a vibrant and creative community of interactive fiction authors has thrived on the internet. Some companies that were important in bringing out text adventure games were Adventure International, Infocom, Level 9, Magnetic Scrolls and Melbourne House.

Adventure game - Graphical adventure

Graphical adventure games were introduced by a new company called On-Line Systems, which later changed its name to Sierra On-Line. After the rudimentary Mystery House (1980) they established themselves with the full adventure King's Quest (1984), appearing on various systems, and went on to further success with a variety of strong titles. 1985 saw the release of a new kind of interactive adventure with Deja Vu from ICOM Simulations that replaced the text-based parser with a point-and-click interface. In 1987 the well-known second follow-up Shadowgate was released, and LucasArts also entered the field with Maniac Mansion – a game of this new kind that gained a strong following. The classic example of LucasArts work is the Monkey Island series.

Adventure game - RPG-like

Some adventure games rely equally on the common adventure elements, but also on the 'character building' of RPGs. The main character(s) usually has a certain "Hit point" meter and a chart of skills. Some puzzles and feats need a minimum amount of skills in order to be solved (like Climbing above 5 to climb a tree and obtain a lost ring) so the player may have to choose one character over another to solve it, or spend time building the skills of the first character. As in RPGs, the games involve battles, the result of which depends on his character's skills and health (and on the player's reflexes in the case of real-time combat). However, these kinds of games don't belong to the 'Action adventure' above. Typical examples include Quest for Glory, Fallout and Final Battle.

Adventure game - Other

A few adventure games have defined themselves as "original" because they distanced themselves from the main adventure genre and put focus on other elements. They are considered unique because they didn't develop into genres.

• King's Quest VIII: The Mask of Eternity (Sierra): Although it could be labelled as an action-adventure, KQ8 was hard to define because the genre was not popular when it was released. Rather than relying solely on action, it combined many other elements including first-person and over-the-shoulder third-person views (the latter similar to that used in Tomb Raider), riddles, dialogue, inventory and RPG elements such as an extensive array of weapons and collecting experience.
• The Colonel's Bequest (Sierra): Bequest contained riddles and interaction with items and objects like an "ordinary" adventure, but the game focused primarily on communication with other characters and obtaining as much information as possible. The game advanced when the player was present at certain times and places that might reveal information on the plot and backstory. The full score would be attained not for only solving riddles, but for perceiving "suspicious" elements like the relationship between the characters, objects that changed position or traces of information about the killer's identity.
• LOOM (LucasArts): This game was widely hailed as original and innovative, not only because of the plot, but for the entire concept. Unlike other adventure games, this one did not have an inventory and puzzles that relied on combining objects. Aside from basic movement and object-examining actions, the only interactions the player had with the game world was in casting spells, which was performed by playing musical notes in certain sequences.

Adventure game - Modern adventure games

For much of the 1980s, adventure games were one of the most popular types of computer games produced. But in the mid-1990s their market share drastically declined, as action games took a greater share of the market, particularly first person shooters such as Doom and Half-Life that feature strong, story-structured solo games. This slump in popularity led many publishers and developers to see adventure games as financially unfeasible in comparison. Text adventures met the same fate much earlier, but their simplicity has allowed them to thrive as non-commercially developed interactive fiction.

Few recent commercial adventure games have been hits. It has been suggested that this is because the "average" gamer today was weaned on console video games and first person shooters rather than the "traditional" computer games cherished by the original crop of adventure gaming enthusiasts. Another explanation offered states that MMORPGs, which offer a persistent multiplayer world, have at least partially supplanted the genre.

Adventure games have ceased to be the flagship titles they once were, and high profile publishers like Sierra Entertainment and LucasArts have either disappeared or shifted towards publishing titles developed by other companies. However, adventure games continue to be made in the 2000s. The games Syberia and Syberia II by Microids garnered high critical acclaim and were published for the Xbox gaming console as well as for the PC. The Myst series came to a close in September 2005 with the release of Myst V: End of Ages by its original developer, Cyan Worlds. Adventure games based on the Nancy Drew books are published by Her Interactive and comprise a series of over twelve titles published since 2000. The Nintendo DS and its unique features have sparked a renewed interest in pure adventure game content, with the release of Trace Memory and Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney in 2005. IGN has noted that the Nintendo Revolution controller would be well-suited for the genre, and could see some ground-breaking releases in that vein.

Yet the genre is still easily found at retail and as a result many fans have taken on the challenge of developing their own adventure games. These "amateur adventure games" are in some cases remakes of old classics or sequels to established titles. Such games are either programmed from scratch or composed by using authoring tools. Examples for such graphical development environments for adventure games are Adventure Game Studio [1] and Visionaire [2].

Although traditional adventure games are rare today, action-adventure games that combine elements of adventure games with action games are quite common. There are also similarities between adventure and role-playing games, particularly those in a more modern, story- and character-based mold. Computer role-playing games in this vein have been published more frequently since the success of Baldur's Gate in 1998, and console role-playing games have generally been quite focused on plot and story, thanks in part to the success of the Final Fantasy series.

Many famous adventure games cannot be run on modern computers. Early adventure games were developed for the C64 or the Amiga, computers which are not in much use today. There are now emulators available for personal computers that allow these old games to be played. One Open Source project called ScummVM provides a free engine for the LucasArts adventure games. Text adventure games have survived much more readily. There are only a small number of widespread standard formats, and nearly all the classics can be played on modern computers. Even some more modern text adventure games can be played on very old computer systems. Text adventure games are also suitable for PDAs, because they have very small computer system requirements.

Adventure game - Common features

Adventure games, like RPGs, often feature "fetch quests": in order to advance, the player has to help a character in order to gain information or an important item as a reward. In fantasy-themed games, this character is often a healer or magician, and the secondary quest is to find artifacts or items, not uncommonly ingredients for a potion.

Adventure games have been criticized because some games adopt the attitude that 'the ends justify the means'. In such cases, the player must obtain an item from someone reluctant to cooperate, and the only way to progress is to distract him or her in order to steal the item. In contrast, however, many adventure games have quests or missions that urge the player help others; for instance, helping tormented spirits that seek deliverance, freeing a trapped animal, or otherwise performing benevolent, selfless acts. Often these characters will reward the player later in the game, often at a critical juncture. (Of course, this can be argued to deflate the "selflessness" of the good deeds.)

Early adventure games sometimes trapped the players in unwinnable, dead end situations. For example, if the player overlooked a key (or an important item early in the game), the game cannot be completed if he later finds himself trapped in a cell. Such games frequently did not end at this point since the player was not killed; with no indication that a vital object had been missed, the player was often reduced to trying increasingly outlandish actions until finally restoring to an earlier point or quitting the game altogether. Naturally, players rarely found this type of gameplay entertaining. Some companies, including LucasArts, deliberately and explicitly avoided dead-end situations in many of their games. Although some die-hard adventure purists scorned such practices as "dumbing down games for the masses", more games adopted the approach over time; even Sierra, who was infamous for a time for ruthlessly "punishing the player", eventually embraced the concept.

Some items are featured very often in various adventure games, and have many uses. Two examples are a rope and a crowbar. In some games, certain items are used as part of running gags; for example being used in many absurd situations far from their original intended purpose, or items which are seemingly useless for most of the game, such as the rubber chicken with a pulley in the middle in The Secret of Monkey Island.

Adventure game - Notable adventure games

• Colossal Cave Adventure
• The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
• Maniac Mansion
• Full Throttle
• Grim Fandango
• Day of the Tentacle
• Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders
• Hugo's House of Horrors
• Shadowgate
• The Dig

Adventure game - Series

• Zork
• King's Quest
• Leisure Suit Larry
• Space Quest
• Police Quest
• Indiana Jones
• Monkey Island
• Quest for Glory
• Alone in the Dark
• Gabriel Knight
• Myst
• Discworld
• Tex Murphy
• Broken Sword
• Simon the Sorcerer

See also

• Computer and video games
• List of graphic adventure games
• List of text based games
• MUD
• Roguelike
• For the Japanese style of adventure games, see visual novel.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Adventure game", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki