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This is an article on the computer game subcategory. For the UK children's television series, please see The Adventure Game.
An adventure game is a type of computer game. The definition is very broad in scope, but fundamentally an adventure game can be defined as a game where the story is developed through gameplay, as opposed to other genres where the story (if there is one) is developed through the use of cut-scenes between sections of gameplay. There is a slightly grey area between role-playing games (RPGs) and Adventure games. In general, if a game involves the use of player attributes/stats (whether visible to the player or not) it is an RPG, otherwise it is an adventure game. 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) labelling action-adventure games as belonging to neither the action nor adventure genres rather than to both.
In general adventure games tend to have a lot more in common with other narrative-based artforms (e.g. films, novels and comic books) than other styles of computer game. They encompass many genres and styles, both of story and story-telling. They are driven primarily by a narrative through which the player moves as the game progresses. The fundamental elements of the adventure game model include a protagonist, a game environment, and objects; the player controls the main character, and can interact with the other elements. Adventure games are also often based around puzzles, which are solved through these interactions, and interaction with non-player characters, who are often integral to the puzzles. More generally, adventure games heavily emphasise exploration, thought and problem-solving abilities over the fast reflexes of more action-styled games.
In 1972, William Crowther, a programmer, RPG-lover, and caver working at Bolt, Beranek and Newman (BBN), a Boston company involved with ARPANET routers, developed a program called Colossal Cave Adventure on BBN's PDP-10. The game, which simulated a player's trip inside a cave where he had many encounters, used many textual messages. It was written in Fortran, the language available on the machine, which wasn't ideal because of the language's weaknesses in the treatment of character strings. The program required almost 300 kb of main memory to be executed, which was tremendous at that time. However, the first adventure game was born, and it would immediately spread like a wildfire on all machines connected to the ARPANET.
Four years later, Don Woods, another programmer, discovered the game on his company's machine and made a number of improvements to it, with Crowther's blessing. A big fan of Tolkien's universe, he introduced several elements from it, such as elves, trolls, and a volcano.
The same year, Jim Gillogly of the Rand Corporation spent several weeks on porting the code from Fortran to C under Unix, with the agreement of Woods and Crowther.
The "armchair adventure" had just made a smashing entry into the gaming world, but it still remained limited to those fortunate enough to have access to a minicomputer. With the explosion of microcomputing starting in 1977, the game would be able to reach a much larger market. Serious talent was needed for this migration. Enter Scott Adams.
One of the programmers who had the opportunity to explore the Colossal Cave was Scott Adams. After ten days of traversing the underground, he solved the entire game and became a great master. The game sparked a passion. Owning a TRS-80 and knowing that not everyone had access to a PDP-10, he decided to create an adventure on his microcomputer. However, the problem of storing a lot of information on the small memory of machines of that time remained. Remembering that he had written several interpreters, he realized that that type of software was exactly what he needed. Furthermore, once an interpreter was developed, it could be reused for other adventure games.
Scott Adams's adventure game series—produced from 1978 to 1985—was born, and the company Adventure International soon followed. The first adventures were written in BASIC. Then, for reasons of response time, Adams translated them into assembly. They were entirely text-based. With the advent of graphical adventures, the series was put to this new standard and expanded to twelve adventures. With this feat, the genre was started and rapidly expanded.
The great advance which immediately followed was the introduction of images. 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. The company Infocom hardly wrote purely text-based adventure games any more, as excellent as those may have been.
However, the surprise having faded away, basic graphics, clumsy white lines on a uniformly black background, didn't remain a must for long. The graphical style, to reach maturity, required true aesthetic quality, the means to make use of it, and graphic designers, artists to fulfill these requirements.
After this advance, games using the available graphic resources to their full capacity were put on the market. Examples include Sherwood Forest (1982), Dale Johnson's Masquerade (1983), or Antonia Antiochia's diskettes for installation, which would be the case until the CD-ROM made its appearance.
This storage problem would make the industry hesitate between vector graphics and bitmap graphics for a few years. The latter type, allowing finer representation, would win.
In the end of the 1970s, Ken Williams sought to set up a company for enterprise software for the Apple II, the computer that dominated the market. 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 then called his wife Roberta and they both played it. Their encounter with Crowther's game would have a strong influence on video-gaming history. Thanks to the terminal, they started to play a version of the game, which was on all the country's minicomputers, from 2,000 km away. The Williamses were hooked; they played all the way through the game.
Having finished it, they began to seach for something similar, but at that time, the market was underdeveloped. Roberta Williams then began to think of her own game. She liked the concept of a textual adventure very much, but she thought that the player would have a more satisfying experience with images. She thus conceived Mystery House, the first graphical adventure game, a detective story inpired by Agatha Christie's Ten Little Niggers.
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, which they put in the local software shop. To their great surprise, Mystery House was an enormous success, and even though Ken thought that the gaming market was much less of a growth market than the professional software market, he persevered. 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.
But Sierra went further. Until then, 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. However, the commands were still entered on the keyboard and analysed by a syntax interpreter, as with text adventure games.
Sierra would not stop developing new games and pushing the boundaries of technology until its purchase by Cendant in 1998.
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 think about the creation of 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.
Their studies coming to an end, the students decided to stay together and to form a company. Tim Anderson, Joel Berez, Marc Blank, Mike Broos, Scott Cutler, Stu Cutler, Stu Galley, Dave Lebling, J. C. R. Licklider, Chris Reeve, and Al Vezza created Infocom on 22 June 1979. The idea of distributing Zork came to mind very soon, but the size was too prohibitive 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 dreamt up a special programming language called Z-machine, which could function on any computer by using an emulator as an intermediary. Then they made a few cuts and finished by putting the game on microcomputers.
In November 1980, Zork I: The Great Underground Empire, the new version, was available for the PDP-11; one month later, it came out for the TRS-80, and more than 1500 copies were sold between that date and September 1981. That same year, Bruce Daniels finalised the Apple II version and more than 6,000 additional copies were sold. Zork I sold over a million copies all told.
The company continued developing text adventure games even as it opened a section for development of professional software, a section which would never be profitable. High-quality games, with massive, intelligent plots, unequaled syntax analysers, and meticulous documentation as integral parts of the game, succeeded in all genres. Unfortunately for Infocom, the power of microcomputers increased, and the appearance of graphics, which it refused to include in its works, would do the company much harm. Sales declined. In 1989, Infocom had no more than 10 employees, compared to an entire hundred game developers at its apogee.
The games developed after 1989 under the name Infocom have no link with the original team.
In 1987, when nobody seemed able to overcome the Sierra's power, a programmer named Ron Gilbert working for the company Lucasfilm Games—which has since become LucasArts—made a fundamental advance: the script-writing system SCUMM and the point-and-click interface. Instead of having to type a command to the syntax analyser, 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. The era of text adventure games was definitively over. This system was used for the first time in the game Maniac Mansion.
LucasArts would also differentiate itself from its main competitor, the giant Sierra, by rethinking certain adventure game concepts. They made it no longer possible to die in the course of the game, as was common until then, requiring the player to develop a strategy for saving. Similarly, 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.
Then came the golden age of adventure games. 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. 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.
The collaboration of Steven Spielberg and LucasArts in the creation of The Dig should be noted. It was a science-fiction adventure game that the director had envisioned filming.
Again 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.
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 means of a Macintosh Quadra battery, 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 was the most profitable game ever; it sold over nine million copies on all platforms.
Myst gave way to two sequels, Riven and Myst III: Exile, as well as Myst IV: Revelation, which has an estimated release date of 1 November 2004. 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.
Broadly speaking, adventure games can be divided into the following categories, based on the style of gameplay they offer.
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 adventures were Adventure International, Infocom, Level 9, and Melbourne House.
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. In 1987 a second major developer entered the field, LucasArts, with the release of Maniac Mansion, a game that replaced the text-based parser with a point-and-click interface. The classic example of LucasArts work is the Monkey Island series.
The only remaining popular and commercially successful genre of adventure gaming, action-adventure games typically emphasis combat or other reflex-based forms of gameplay as well as puzzle-solving and exploration. The most prominent example of action-adventure is the Legend of Zelda 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".
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 (particularly first person shooters like DOOM) took a greater share of the market, particularly ones like Half-Life that feature strong story structured solo games, leading many publishers and developers to see adventure games as financially unfeasible in comparison.
During the 1980s and early 1990s several adventure games were usually published per year. The average in the 2000s is only one or two prominent adventure games per year. Well-known names like Sierra and LucasArts have left the market of adventure games. In reaction to this trend, many fans have taken on the challenge of developing their own adventure games, called fan adventures. 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 and Visionaire .
Few recent commercial adventure games have been hits. It has been suggested that the reason for this change in gamers' tastes results from more gamers having been weaned on console video games and first person shooters rather than traditional computer games as the original crop of adventure gaming enthusiasts were. Another explanation is that MMORPGs, which offer a persistent, multiplayer world, have at least partially supplanted the genre.
Although traditional adventure games are rare today, action-adventure game 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 adventures 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 adventures are also suitable for PDAs, because they have very small computer system requirements.
Originally translated from the article on the French BambooWeb, which cites the following sources:
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