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This is an article about the computer and video game genre. For the British children's television series, please see The Adventure Game.

An adventure game is a type of computer entertainment program or video game, characterized by investigation, exploration, puzzle-solving, interaction with game characters, and a focus on narrative rather than reflex-based challenges. It is important to note that this term is unrelated to adventure films, and adventure novels, and is not indicative of theme or subject matter. 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 media, 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 Longest Journey, The Secret of Monkey Island, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, Gabriel Knight, Myst and The Last Express. Nearly all 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. While few developers continue to produce adventure games, some are still being released, and the adventure game genre has had some elements carry over into other genres. Games that fuse adventure elements with action gameplay elements are sometimes referred to as adventure games (a popular example is Nintendo's Legend of Zelda series). Adventure game purists regard this as incorrect and call such hybrids action-adventures. In Europe, games which fuse action and adventure elements are called "arcade adventure" games. The term "adventure game" is used with the same meaning in North America, Europe, and Japan, and is regarded as pure genre in all regions.

History

Colossal Cave Adventure

Main article: Colossal Cave Adventure

In the mid 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 routers, 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 combination of realistic cave descriptions and 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 knockoffs and variations on Colossal Cave Adventure (which eventually came to be known as simply Adventure) appeared throughout the late 1970s and early 1980s.

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 executable could be divided into code written in a high-level language and an interpreter, much like the way BASIC is often implemented. Furthermore, once an interpreter was developed, Adams realized that it could be reused to develop other adventure games. (For more information: 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.

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:

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.

Infocom

Main article: 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, wouldn't 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 solved this problem by breaking up the game into three episodes.

They wrote a special programming language called ZIL (Zork Implementation Language), which could function on any computer by using an emulator (the Z-machine) 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.

Douglas Adams produced two games with Infocom, the first based on his popular Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series and a lesser known venture game titled Bureaucracy after his attempt to go on a vacation.

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.

Sierra

Main article: Sierra On-Line
Mystery House for the Apple II was the first adventure game to use graphics in the early home computer era.

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.

King's Quest I used colorful graphics which were much more immersive than the line drawings of the earlier adventure games. Below the image the command prompt can be seen, waiting for a command by the player.

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.

Soon after, Sierra had multiple successful series of adventure games running, including King's Quest, Police Quest, Space Quest, Leisure Suit Larry, and Hero's Quest (Quest for Glory), with each containing numerous games. A few years after these series had started, the classic graphics above the command cursor was fully replaced with "point and click" game-play and VGA graphics. Other notable series include Phantasmagoria and Shivers; Sierra's last and most critically acclaimed series was the Gabriel Knight series, which began in 1993 and ended with Sierra's last adventure game in 1999.

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.

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 game era; as 3D became the dominant graphics format, the mostly 2D adventure market began to shrink.

Through its almost 20 year involvement with the adventure game business, Sierra employed several notable game designers, including Roberta Williams, Jane Jensen, Al Lowe, Scott Murphy, Jeff Tunnell, and Lori Ann and Corey Cole.

LucasArts

Main article: 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 (though the FM Towns version of Zak was 256 color), and the point-and-click engine still had vestiges of text parsing, 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 more modern point-and-click engine, a dialogue system with optional responses, puzzles solved with items, original graphics, atmosphere music, and a characteristic sense of humor. 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, including the very influential Sam & Max Hit the Road as well as the acclaimed Full Throttle, which also heralded the beginning of the end of the Golden Age of adventure games.

Steven Spielberg collaborated with LucasArts in the creation of The Dig — a science fiction adventure game that the director had envisioned turning into a film.

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.

First-Person 3D Adventure Games

File:Myst screen.jpg
Myst used high-quality 3D rendered graphics to deliver images that were unparalleled at the time of its release. It became so popular that for many years it was the greatest selling computer game of all time, until it was dethroned by The Sims in 2000.

In the early 1990s, some independent adventure-game makers began taking advantage of the greater storage capacities of CD-ROMs to create games with pre-rendered three-dimensional graphics. These were usually first-person, unlike the third-person games created by Sierra and LucasArts, and more photorealistic than games with two-dimensional graphics. This gave them a greater emphasis on immersing the player in the virtual environment. The earliest examples of this type of adventure game include The Journeyman Project and Myst, both released in 1993. As computer hardware became more powerful, later adventure games containing real-time rendered three-dimensional graphics were possible, giving the player more freedom of movement.

Myst, in particular, was a highly atypical game for the time. It was highly successful, and therefore had a profound influence on many adventure games that came after it. Myst and games like it have little personal or object interaction, and a greater emphasis on exploration, and on scientific and mechanical puzzles. Part of the game's success was because it did not appear to be aimed at an adolescent male audience, but instead a mainstream adult audience. Myst for many years held the all-time record for computer game sales (it sold over nine million copies on all platforms), a feat not surpassed until the release of The Sims in 2000.

There is debate among adventure gamers as to whether or not Myst and similar puzzle games should be considered at all a part of the adventure genre, as their focus on abstract puzzle solving and exploration in the place of character interaction and development sets them apart from what previously characterized adventure games.

Most adventure games today have three-dimensional graphics, but how much they adhere to the Myst tradition varies. Some, like the Journeyman Project series, have more practical puzzles and more object interaction. Others, like those created by LucasArts and Telltale Games, are still third-person, with a more cartoonish style.

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'.

Text based

Main article: Interactive fiction

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 Computing, Magnetic Scrolls and Melbourne House, with Infocom being the most well known.

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.

A number of games were released on 8-bit home computer formats in the 1980s that advanced on the text adventure style originated with games like Colossal Cave Adventure and, in a similar manner to Sierra, added moveable (often directly-controllable) characters to a parser or input-system similar to traditional adventures. Examples of this are Gargoyle Games's Heavy on the Magick (1986) which has a text-input system with an animated display screen, and the later Magic Knight games such as Spellbound (1985) which uses a window-menu system to allow for text-adventure style input.

In 1984 a new kind of adventure games emerged following the launch of the Apple Macintosh with its point-and-click interface. First out was the innovative but relatively unknown Enchanted Scepters the same year, then in 1985 ICOM Simulations released Deja Vu that completely banished the text parser for 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 point-and-click adventure that gained a strong following. A prime example of LucasArts' work is the Monkey Island series.

CRPG-like

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.

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 and Beyond Zork.

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.

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, Atlantis: The Lost Tales, Riddle of the Sphinx and Myst, which pioneered this game style.

Japanese adventure game

The Japanese branch of adventure games, amongst many other terms, includes the genre known as visual novels and have for over a decade been a staple of PC software sales in Japan and other east-asian countries (so much so that popular titles are open ported to consoles, and some even have manga and animé based upon them). Many (those belonging to the visual novel genre) are more of an interactive novel than a conventional game, and as such have a tighter focus on narrative and more limited puzzle features than their western counterparts. Instead of point-and-click or text parser interfaces, Japanese adventure games are characterised by the use of on-screen menus for everything from interaction to navigation, and the story-lines usually have a strong romantic aspect (with "dating sims" being the main subcategory of the genre). Konami's classic Policenauts and Snatcher games were for a long time, the highest regarded games of this type in the west, and it is only very recently that they started to be released here in any significant number (particularly on the Nintendo DS console, and with mystery-solving titles such as the Ace Attorney series and Hotel Dusk). The cultural differences between western and Japanese adventure games are closely related to those in role-playing games (i.e. more linear).

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.

  • The Prisoner (Edu-Ware): Designed by David Mullich, this 1980 game, loosely based upon the television series of the same name, purposefully broke all the conventions of text-based adventures with its abstract "text graphics", hypnotic melodies, intellectual themes, conversational language parser, and attempting to trick the player with deceptions such as simulated game errors. Its 1982 high-resolution graphics remake, Prisoner 2, poked fun at classic adventure games like Colossal Cave Adventure and Mystery House.
  • King's Quest VIII: The Mask of Eternity (Sierra): Although it could be labeled 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.
  • Hampstead and Terrormolinos (Melbourne House): Written by Trevor Lever and Peter Jones, these games introduced a new element of satirical humor to adventure games in the mid-80s. Although Hampstead contained no graphics, it was of its time in lampooning social climbing. Terrormolinos required the player to survive a two-week family holiday in Spain, and contained simple Donald McGill-style graphics which imitated Polaroid photographs by 'developing' on-screen.
  • 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 back-story. 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 (Lucasfilm Games): 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 of physical objects and puzzles that relied on combining those 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.
  • The Last Express (Brøderbund): Designed by Jordan Mechner, the designer of Prince of Persia, Express differed from an ordinary adventure game in that it took place in almost complete real-time, meaning that the player had to make split second decisions. In addition, the non-player characters were semi-intelligent, and moved around on their own schedules regardless of the player's progress. The game took place within the crowded confines of the Orient Express and featured a few action sequences that did not require much dexterity to complete. As well, the game mostly lacked inventory items and most of the game required the player to advance by talking to the other passengers and learn about their back-stories, rather than solving traditional puzzles.

Modern adventure games

For much of the 1980s, adventure games were one of the most popular types of computer games produced. However, their market share drastically declined in the mid-1990s; 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.

Still another possible cause of the genre's downturn may lie with the nature of 3D graphics themselves, which for much of the 90's and early 2000s tended to be more oriented toward fast movement than graphical detail. Conversely, however, if a game were to implement more detailed but static imagery, this could be perceived as technologically regressive. Some question therefore exists of the adventure game making a comeback with recent advances in technology.

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, primarily outside North America where the genre is still popular. Games such as The Longest Journey by Funcom and Microïds' Syberia with rich classical elements of the genre still garnered high critical acclaims. 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 fifteen titles published since 1998. 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 and the release of Hotel Dusk: Room 215 in 2006. IGN has noted that Nintendo's Wii controller would be well-suited for the genre, and could see some ground-breaking releases in that vein, such as the 2007 release of Zack & Wiki: Quest for Barbaros' Treasure.

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 and Visionaire.

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.

In 2005, Fahrenheit (titled "Indigo Prophecy" in the US and Canada) was released by Quantic Dream. An adventure game with a highly-original interface, many believe that the game will help renew interest in the adventure game genre. This followed the prior release of their own Omikron: The Nomad Soul and Sega's Shenmue games, which were also adventure games with direct character control interfaces.

Many classic adventure games cannot run on modern operating systems. Early adventure games were developed for home computers, most of which are not in use today. There are emulators available for modern computers that allow these old games to be played on the latest operating systems. One Open Source project called ScummVM provides a free engine for the LucasArts adventure games, the SCUMM-derived engine for Humongous Entertainment adventure games, early Sierra titles, Revolution Software 2D adventures, Coktel Vision adventure games and a few more assorted 2D adventures. Another called VDMSound can emulate the old sound-cards which many of the games require.

Text adventure games are more accessible. There are only a small number of standard formats, and nearly all the classics can be played on modern computers. Some modern text adventure games can even be played on very old computer systems. Text adventure games are also suitable for PDAs, because they have very small computer system requirements. Many classic Infocom games are completely playable via web browsers.

There is something of a revival of the adventure game online, in both a fairly traditional style, such as Mystery Of Time And Space, and in 3-dimensional games, such as Crimson Room.

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. From a programming point of view, this allows the adventure to be modelled as a finite state machine. Answers to problems in games are not usually plain to see, but the player must use their logic to figure out what to do next. For example, a character is usually not willing to volunteer their information, but must be convinced to talk, or given something that will benefit them.

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 to 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.

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. A famous example of a dead end situation is the plant in "Return to Zork". Early in the game a plant can be obtained. Most players just take the plant, but will find out later (much later) in the game their plant has died. Without the plant the game can't be finished. What they should have done is carefully dig out the plant, instead of just grabbing it. Naturally, players rarely found this type of game-play entertaining. Some companies, including LucasArts, deliberately and explicitly avoided dead-end situations in many of their games. Although some 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, or the combination of a clothesline, a clamp, and a rubber duck with a hole in it, which, when put between the clamp, can make it contract over time, and grab a certain item in The Longest Journey. Situations like these have been criticized, but such criticisms have only been minor.

Many graphic adventure games depicted or make reference to subject matter that would otherwise been censored or taboo in a video or computer game. Adventure games set in a gritty environment (e.g. Rise of the Dragon, Police Quest and Snatcher) would contain bits of profanity and include either depictions or allusions to mature sexual themes such as prostitution and illicit drugs. Adventure games that relied heavily on humor (e.g. Discworld, Blazing Dragons, The Adventures of Willy Beamish, The Secret of Monkey Island and Simon the Sorcerer) were often influenced by Monty Python-style satire and comedy.

Well-known adventure games

Graphic adventure games in a series

Graphic adventure games not in a series

Text-only adventure games

Japanese adventure games

References

Originally translated from the article on the French Wikipedia, which cites the following sources:

  • ANFOSSI, Gérald, La programmation des jeux d'aventure, Editions du PSI, Paris, 1985
  • MITCHELL, David, An Adventure in Programming Techniques, Addison-Wesley Publishing Co., London, 1986

See also

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