A History of Adventure Games

When William Crowther wrote the game Colossal Cave Adventure, or Adventure for short, which also gave the name for a new genre of games, he didn't do it for money. He did it as a re-creation of his own caving hobby mixed with some old-fashioned Dungeons and Dragons, but more importantly, he created it to have something fun to do with his kids amid a divorce. I don't think there was a personal reason for creating something like Pong.

After a couple of years, in 1977, Don Woods found the game and expanded upon it, porting it to other systems as well. Thus, from a game set in the Mammoth Caves in Kentucky and created for entertainment and distraction for kids, was born a genre that was at one time the biggest, the most beautiful, and the most technically advanced in the world.

The original Adventure was a pure text adventure. All the locations were described in the text and the game was controlled with a parser interface. Some of the later versions got a graphical presentation of the locations and mouse-driven UIs. In all, there are dozens of different versions of the game, ranging from old 8-bit computers to cellphones and web browsers. That is quite a legacy for a game that is, in the end, just a treasure hunt originally written to give Crowther's kids something fun to do.

William Crowther didn't do other games himself. I doubt he even guesses how big of an effect his game would have on other people. Some of the first were Time Anderson, Marc Blank, Bruce Daniels, and David Lebling who wrote Zork, which was a launch for their own company Infocom, through which they released several text adventure games throughout the 80s. Infocom worked hard, improving their parser system, turning it into one of the best in the business.

After some failed business ventures, Activision ended up buying Infocom in 1987 only to have it close down in 1989. The name was still used by Activision to sell the back catalog as a thematic collection. Infocom moniker was also used later on for games like Return to Zork and Leather Goddesses of Phobos! 2, which both were rather far removed from the old text adventure style of Infocom.

No more typing involved in the 1993 entry to the Zork series. 

Another developer inspired by Adventure was Scott Adams, who with Alexis Adams founded Adventure International in 1979 to bring out text adventures for home computers. While their games haven't really remembered as much as some others from the era, they did sell well at the time, but by 1986 the company went bankrupt, most likely because their engine couldn't keep up with the improvements made by other developers, making their games look and feel antiquated in comparison. Even after re-releases with added graphics, their engine didn't improve enough to stay relevant and is nowadays more of a footnote in history.

A more prominent name had found Adventure as well. Ken Williams was a mainframe programmer, who had brought a computer home to do some work when he discovered the game from the mainframe. He found it amusing and called in his wife, Roberta, who was enthralled by the interactive experience.

Roberta went on to play other text adventures and came to the conclusion, that she could do something similar, maybe even something better. The end result of her planning was Mystery House, the first graphics text adventure game. The game sold well and proved to the couple there was a future in making games, thus they founded Sierra On-Line.

Sierra grew and the games poured out. The engine used for Mystery House spawned 7 titles altogether, some designed by Roberta, and some by other developers. Among those titles was also The Wizard and the Princess, a game sometimes thought of as King's Quest 0.

After the success of the Mystery House, other developers jumped on board the graphics train. Many new developers started doing graphical text adventures right from the bat whereas others started enhancing their old games with graphics to stay relevant.

Roberta and Ken were thinking bigger though. Roberta had designed increasingly complex games, including an insanely massive, and commercially failed, Time Zone when IBM marched into the picture. IBM had noticed the advent of home computing and driver games, so they wanted a piece of the action as well. Their answer was IBM PC jr, but in order to sell it, they needed the killer game.

The game Ken and Roberta pitched was an adventure unlike any other. The world would be presented in fullscreen colour and the characters were on the screen for the player to see. The characters would move around on their own with the player having full control over the main character, to move him all around the world, including behind and in front of objects like trees, stones, and buildings.

IBM PC jr ended up as a business failure, but the game, being IBM PC compatible, ended up being a huge success story for Sierra. This game was, of course, King's Quest: Quest for the Crown. It was an adventure game like no one had ever seen. If Mystery House had put Sierra on the map, it was King's Quest that made them the most prominent game company of the 80s and early 90s, constantly pushing the boundaries and technological advancements.

King's Quest was a game unlike any other when it was released. It might not look much now, but back in the 80s, it was a technical marvel that pushed the envelope of what could be done in games.

While Sierra was working with graphical text adventures, other developers were thinking of something else. George Lucas, the director of a little-known sci-fi romp Star Wars, had noticed the advent of digital entertainment. The Lucasfilm Computer Division he had founded in 1979 included a games division, which later was known as Lucasfilm Games and then Lucasarts Games.

Their first games weren't adventures, but experimental and unique action titles. In 1986 they finally published their first adventure title, based on a Jim Henson movie Labyrinth, bearing the same name. The game, designed by David Fox, begins as a text adventure, but with simplified controls, where you can actually choose commands from menus instead of typing them. But when you finally reach the labyrinth itself, the game turns into a full graphical adventure, where you can control your character on the screen, again choosing commands from a menu system.

In general, Labyrinth was praised because of its simplified user interface, despite some people criticizing it for being too simplistic and some even questioning if it was an adventure game at all. Favorable reviews encouraged Lucasfilm to push the technology further, their next game laying the base for their adventure game line.

Maniac Mansion was built with an engine that came to be known as Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion, SCUMM for short. The horror adventure, designed by Ron Gilbert and Gary Winnick, was controlled with either a joystick or a mouse with verbs selected from a list. You could play with three different kids, choosing two of them from a roster of 6 kids. This had an effect on how some of the puzzles were solved, the kids had a different set of skills.

If you were wondering why Lucasart didn't do a Star Wars adventure game, the answer for that was licensing. Lucas had licensed the rights for Star Wars games to other developers, so his own game studio was forced to do other things.

The enhanced version of Maniac Mansion for DOS. All you have to do is point and click. The original 1987 version used the same engine and UI but had considerably lower-resolution graphics in comparison to the 1988 version.

Sierra and Lucasfilm were the most notable adventure developers of the 80s, but they concentrated on different things. Lucasfilm games were keen on advancing the gameplay, making it more player-friendly, and emphasizing the fun, Sierra wanted to make the games look and sound better, so they worked with hardware manufacturers to improve the sound and graphical quality of PCs, both of which benefitted the whole industry.

Thanks to the efforts made by Sierra, soundcard support for cards like AdLib and Sound Blaster as well as standards like General Midi found their ways to more games. PC and its capabilities grew closer to other computers such as Amiga and Atari ST, helped by the ambitions of Sierra with them pushing the boundaries and trusting the consumers to jump on the technology bandwagon if given good enough reason. Lucasfilm, on the other hand, showed that games could be both easier to approach, yet still challenging while having simpler ways of controlling them.

In the early 90s, Sierra began to push even more advancements in the form of multimedia. They had already gone to 256 colours with King's Quest V, but the advent of CD-ROM was coming, allowing better music, graphics, and even the inclusion of full-motion video. The new King's Quest V was their first attempt at providing full-scale voice acting thanks to the space provided by CD-ROM. Despite the voice acting being a full-scale amateur affair, it did set a new baseline for other developers.

With the terrible Police Quest 4: Open Season, Sierra brought full-scale FMV to the table. Of course, Sierra wasn't the first developer to play with FMV. Access Software had used small bits of FMV in Mean Streets (1989) as flavor during conversations, but still nowhere near the scale of what Sierra did with Police Quest 4.

With CD-ROM becoming more common, developers began fulfilling their FMV dreams. Cyan's Myst (1993) was a new breed of a game, which also sold millions of CD-ROM drives to people wanting to experience the puzzle adventure. While its world was built of pre-rendered scenes where the player could move around, the story was narrated through video clips. The 7th Guest (1993) by Trilobyte was another title with a similar approach. Even Return to Zork (1993), the new installment for the old text adventure series abandoned its old form and showed the world previously described only in text via a mix of pre-rendered graphics and FMV scenes.

Myst is often cited as the game that made the CD-ROM revolution. It showed what a developer could do with a whopping 650 megabytes of storage space at their hands and many people wanted to experience it, thus being forced to actually buy a CD-ROM drive.

There was a new presentation from brewing underneath the surface. In 1994 Access Software revealed a second sequel to Mean Streets, Under a Killing Moon. While it used extensive FMV scenes to tell its noir-themed sci-fi detective story, the game itself was played in a real-time 3D world, shown in a 1st person view.

But what really broke the bank was Tomb Raider (1996). While not a pure adventure game, Core Design's take on action-adventure changed the face of gaming as much as Doom had done 3 years prior. At that point, the developers noticed there was an appetite for free-roaming 3D games, be they FPSs, RPGs, or adventures.

While FMV had turned out to be a fad thanks to many poorly made FMV titles, the production values of games were going up. This was especially a problem for adventure games, which didn't sell as much as their easier-to-approach competitors. Simply put, more people opted to play games like Doom, Diablo, or Quake instead of something that required a slower and more reflective playstyle. 

Lara Croft with her pointed polygonal shape proved to many that the future of gaming was somewhere in the 3d dimension

Out of the old giants, Sierra died out and Lucasfilm stopped making adventures and concentrated on other genres like space simulators and action titles. Some good adventure games dropped here and there, like the fantastic Longest Journey by Funcom in 1999 or Benoit Sokal's Syberia series which began in 2002 developed by Microids. But in general, in the first decade of the 21st century, the genre known as adventure games was considered dead mostly thanks to lackluster games that didn't capture the interest of the gaming press or the players. (I wrote this article on the perceived death of adventure games a while back.)   

It took the entry of a new player to the field for adventure games to turn relevant again. This new player was Telltale Games. Their first entry to foray was based on Jeff Smith's comic Bone in 2006, but this wasn't yet enough to convince the masses. That honor was left on the shoulders of another comic adaptation, a rabbit and dog duo Sam & Max, based on a comic by Steve Purcell and which had already had a game adaptation under the wing of Lucasarts Games.

Their episodic format struck gold, their biggest hit being the fantastic The Walking Dead, 2012, which benefitted a lot from their new approach to making the game lean more on the story rather than puzzle-solving. Telltale did go under in 2018 and while another party is using their moniker I doubt the new owner will manage to produce similar success stories as The Walking Dead was.

Perhaps the most prominent adventure developer now is the Ukrainian studio Frogwares. While their first games were rather poor, they did manage to strike gold with their Sherlock Holmes titles. German Daedalic Entertainment is another developer that profiled as an adventure developer for a good while, publishing games like Edna and Harvey, The Whispered World, and the Deponia series among other things.

Deponia is far from being my favorite series, but it was a successful game that spawned three sequels. And I do have to admit, it has nice graphics, and the animations are well done. 

In general, adventure games have fragmented into several different categories. Many indie developers lie the Wadjet Eye frolic almost solely among old school, pixel graphics point-and-click adventures such as Tehcnobabylon or Blackwell series. Then there are those developers who do traditional games, but with more advanced graphics, be it in 3D or 2D. A good example of modern 2D would be Stuck in Attic's  Gibbous: Cthulhu Adventure and in 3D there are games like Life is Strange by DONTNOD and Dreamfall Chapters by Red Thread.

Another prominent subgenre is the walking simulators. They are games, which have few or no puzzles and revolve around the story being rolled open. This genre jumped into the wider consciousness when Dear Esther was published by the Chinese Room in 2012. Other notable titles in this genre are Layers of Fear (2016), Gone Home (2013), and The Vanishing of Ethan Carter developed by the Astronauts in 2014.

A subgenre of its own is the 1st person puzzle games, which often emphasize puzzle solving over story or narration. This is not to say, that games lack a story as such, but that it is often presented somewhat in the background as an excuse to throw as many puzzles towards the player as possible, them having very little to do with the actual story. A good example would be Valve's instant classic Portal (2007), Croteam's 2014 title The Talos Principle, The Witness (2016) by Thekla, and as a variation of them, a more story-focused detective adventure, the absolutely fantastic Return of the Obra Dinn (2018) by 3909. 

Return of Obra Dinn might look a tad peculiar with its 3D aesthetics set in the 1980s, but it is a fantastic game that should be played by anyone who enjoys a well-made detective game.

And this, I do believe, covers many of the broad strokes of the adventure genre. Starting from the humble, albeit very human origins of the genre to the rise and fall and re-emergence of it in its various forms. As a genre, it isn't at the top of the heap as it once was, but it also isn't dead on its deathbed. Far from it. And I didn't even mention how many of the adventure genre elements have found their way to other genres, like in RPGs or action games.

This is by no means a complete history of the genre, but I do hope it provides a sort of a starting point for anyone who might be interested in how the genre was formed and reshaped over the years.