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This article has now been incorporated into Adventure game and should no longer be edited. All edits should be made to the live article instead. This has been retained for reference purposes only. --HappyDog 19:00, 24 Sep 2004 (UTC)

For an October 2004 deletion debate over this page see Wikipedia:Votes for deletion/Adventure game/Translation from French

An adventure game, from the player's point of view, is not just a video game but a work of interactive fiction. That phrase conveys the essence of all there is to say about adventure games. First of all, they are works of fiction. Like a film, a novel, or a comic book, an adventure game tells a story.

They are also interactive; unlike films, novels, and comic books, which have linear plots, adventure games allow the player to interact with her environment. Because of their narrative character, they approach works of art.

From the programmer's point of view, an adventure game is a type of database. The information stored by the software describes the world the player inhabits. This database is interactive, as the player modifies the information by his interations with the world. Insofar as a world or a part of a world must be described, the amount of information required is considerable.

Note that adventure games are sometimes incorrectly called role-playing games (RPG's).

Early history

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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.

Scott Adams, pioneer

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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.

Scott Adams's twelve adventure games were

  • Adventureland,
  • Pirate Adventure (also called Pirate's Cove),
  • Secret Mission (originally called Mission Impossible),
  • Voodoo Castle,
  • The Count,
  • Strange Odyssey,
  • Mystery Fun House,
  • Pyramid of Doom,
  • Ghost Town,
  • Savage Island parts I & II, and
  • The Golden Voyage.

Graphical progress

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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 Transylvania (1982, re-released in 1984).

Another problem then arose: the introduction of images into adventure games required more substantial storage capacity. The first graphical adventures required a great number of 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.

Sierra, innovator

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Screenshot of Mystery House

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.

Screenshot from King's Quest I. Note the pointer waiting for a command.

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.

Sierra developed the following adventure games:

  • Mission Asteroid (1980, re-released by SierraVenture, 1982))
  • Mystery House (1980, produced in 1979, re-released by SierraVenture in 1982)
  • The Wizard and the Princess / Adventure in Serenia (1980, re-released by SierraVenture in 1982)
  • Cranston Manor (1981)
  • Ulysses and the Golden Fleece (1981, re-released by SierraVenture in 1982)
  • Softporn Adventure (1981)
  • Time Zone (1982 (produced in 1981, re-released by SierraVenture in 1982)
  • Dark Crystal (1982)
  • Gelfling Adventure (1984)
  • Mickey's Space Adventure (1984)
  • The Black Cauldron (1984, re-released en 1986)
  • Winnie the Pooh in the Hundred Acre Wood (1986)
  • Dragon's Keep
  • Troll Tales
  • Gold Rush! (1988)
  • The Colonel's Bequest (1989)
  • Codename: Iceman (1989)
  • Conquests of Camelot: King Arthur, The Search for the Grail (1989)
  • Laura Bow II: Dagger of Amon Ra (1991)
  • Eco Quest 1: The Search for Cetus
  • Eco Quest 2: Lost Secret of the Rainforest (1991)
  • Conquests of Long Bow: The Adventures of Robin Hood (1992)
  • Freddy Pharkas
  • Frontier Pharmacist (1993)
  • Urban Runner (1995)
  • Rama (1996)
  • Lighthouse (1996)
  • Shivers (1996)
  • Shivers II: Harvest of Souls (1997)
  • Betrayal in Antara (1997)

They also developed the following series:

  • King's Quest
    1. King's Quest: Quest for the Crown (1984, produced in 1983, re-released in 1987, improved version 1989)
    2. King's Quest II: Romancing the Throne (1985)
    3. King's Quest III: To Heir is Human (1986)
    4. King's Quest IV: The Perils of Rosella (1988)
    5. King's Quest V: Absence Makes the Heart go Yonder! (1990, CD-ROM version 1991)
    6. King's Quest VI: Heir Today, Gone Tomorrow (1992, CD-ROM version 1993)
    7. King's Quest VII: The Princeless Bride (1994)
    8. King's Quest VIII: Mask of Eternity (1998)
  • Space Quest
    1. Space Quest I: The Sarien Encounter (1986, improved version 1990)
    2. Space Quest II: Vohaul's Revenge (1987)
    3. Space Quest III: The Pirates of Pestulon (1989)
    4. Space Quest IV: Roger Wilco and the Time Rippers (1991)
    5. Space Quest V: Roger Wilco in the Next Mutation (1993)
    6. Space Quest VI: The Spinal Frontier (1995)
  • Leisure Suit Larry
    1. Leisure Suit Larry I: In the Land of the Lounge Lizards (1987, improved version in 1991)
    2. Leisure Suit Larry Goes Looking for Love (In Several Wrong Places) / Leisure Suit Larry II (1988)
    3. Leisure Suit Larry III: Passionate Patti in Pursuit of the Pulsating Pectorals (1989)
    4. Leisure Suit Larry V: Passionate Patti Does a Little Undercover Work (1991)
    5. Leisure Suit Larry VI: Shape Up or Slip Out (1993)
    6. Leisure Suit Larry VII: Love for Sail
  • Police Quest
    1. Police Quest: In Pursuit of the Death Angel (1987, improved version in 1991)
    2. Police Quest II: The Vengeance (1988)
    3. Police Quest III: The Kindred (1990)
    4. Police Quest IV: Open Season (1993)
    5. Police Quest: S.W.A.T. (1995)
    6. Police Quest: S.W.A.T. 2 (1998)
  • Hero's Quest / Quest for Glory
    1. Hero's Quest/Quest for Glory I: So You Want to be a Hero (1989, enhanced version in 1991)
    2. The Quest for Glory II: Trial by Fire (1990)
    3. The Quest for Glory III: Wages of War (1992)
    4. Quest for Glory IV: Shadows of Darkness (1994)
    5. Quest for Glory V: Dragon Fire (1998)
  • Gabriel Knight
    1. Gabriel Knight: The Sins of the Fathers (1993)
    2. Gabriel Knight: The Beast Within (1995)
    3. Gabriel Knight: Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned (1999)
  • Manhunter
    1. Manhunter: New York (1988)
    2. Manhunter 2: San Francisco (1989)
  • Phantasmagoria
    1. Phantasmagoria (1995)
    2. Phantasmagoria II: A Puzzle of Flesh (1996)
    3. Phantasmagoria Stagefright (1997)

The case of Infocom

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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.

Infocom developed the following games:

  • Zork I: The Great Underground Empire (1980)
  • Zork II: The Wizard of Frobozz (1981)
  • Zork III: The Dungeon Master (1982)
  • Beyond Zork (1987)
  • Zork Zero: The Revenge of Megaboz (1988)
  • Enchanter (1983)
  • Sorcerer (1984)
  • Spellbreaker (1985)
  • Deadline (1982)
  • Starcross (1982)
  • Suspended (1983)
  • The Witness (1983)
  • Planetfall (1983)
  • Infidel (1983)
  • Seastalker (1984)
  • Cutthroats (1984)
  • The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1984)
  • Suspect (1984)
  • Wishbringer: The Magick Stone of Dreams (1985)
  • A Mind Forever Voyaging (1985)
  • Ballyhoo (1985)
  • Trinity (1986)
  • Leather Goddesses of Phobos (1986)
  • Moonmist (1986)
  • Hollywood Hijinx (1986)
  • Bureaucracy (1987)
  • Stationfall (1987)
  • The Lurking Horror (1987)
  • Nord and Bert Couldn't Make Head or Tail of It (1987)
  • Plundered Hearts (1987)
  • Border Zone (1987)
  • Sherlock: The Riddle of the Crown Jewels (1987)
  • James Clavell's Shogun (1989)
  • Journey (1989)
  • Arthur: The Quest for Excalibur (1989) (only the last three were graphical)

LucasArts comes out of the blue

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A 256-color landscape in Monkey Island

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.

LucasArts produced the following games:

  • Labyrinth (1986)
  • Maniac Mansion (1987) + improved edition
  • Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders (1988) + improved edition
  • Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989)
  • Loom (1990) + CD edition
  • The Secret of Monkey Island (1990)
  • Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge (1991)
  • Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis (1992)
  • Maniac Mansion 2: Day of the Tentacle (1993)
  • Sam & Max: Hit the Road (1993)
  • Full Throttle (1994)
  • The Dig (1995)
  • The Curse of Monkey Island (1997)
  • Grim Fandango (1998)
  • Indiana Jones: Infernal Machine (1999)
  • Indiana Jones: Emperor's Tomb (2003)

Myst comes out of nowhere

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Screenshot of Myst

In 1991 when the world of adventure games seemed forever dominated by LucasArts, a small team of nine from the company Cyan Worlds, 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.

French production

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Delphine Software International

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  • Les voyageurs du temps, la menace
  • Operation Stealth
  • Croisière pour un cadavre

Coktel Vision

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  • Gobliiins
  • Gobliins 2 - The Prince Buffoon
  • Goblins 3
  • Woodruff and the snible of Azimuth

incomplete...

The future

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incomplete...

Some memorable adventures

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Sources

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  • 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
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de:Adventure fr:Jeu d'aventure nl:Adventure ja:アドベンチャーゲーム zh-cn:冒险游戏

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