History of Adventure 1: Text-based Interactive Fiction (1977?)

Written by TAG reviewer team

Notable Titles: Adventure, Zork, Adventureland, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, A Mind Forever Voyaging, Trinity, Curses, Photopia, Anchorhead, Spider and Web, Varicella, Galatea
Notable Creators and Companies: William Crowther and Don Woods, Infocom (Dave Lebling, Steve Meretzky, Brian Moriarty and many others), Adventure International (Scott Adams), Graham Nelson, Andrew Plotkin, Adam Cadre, Emily Short

Very literally, were it not for the games in this industry we would not be talking about these things today. When Crowther and Woods let Adventure out of the bag in 1977, the gaming world was irrevocably changed for every man, woman and wildebeest who have ever read the words "It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.” (Well, it might be possible that it all began a couple of years earlier with a mainframe text adventure creation system called Wander, but since it's unclear whether at least later versions of Wander were heavily influenced by Adventure, we'll just stick to the old story.) Adventure gaming in and of itself has always been one of the easiest things to do – you need a story, which more or less everyone can at least come up with, a reason to go on an adventure (treasure, damsel in distress, need to get your frog into a frog contest with frog steroids while winning a video gaming championship) and a way in which to influence what you're dealing with.

The notion of a simple parser was the real joy that came out of all of this. By giving gamers a way to influence what was on the screen with simple words (PICK UP TORCH, LIGHT TORCH, LOOK, RUN FROM GRUE) there was suddenly a market to be had. The main problem with this genre was, as more or less anyone who has played even some of it knows, that a parser can never be perfect. It's all well and good to know that you need to have the four pieces of pocket lint from all around the galaxy, but not realising that you have to LOOK in your POCKET to get it? It's going to leave some extremely aggravated people! Of course, this is largely down to the quality of the company who creates the game.

A good, descriptive block of text can make all the difference

Game 54: Space Quest IV - WON!

By: Joe Pranevich

Roger Wilco’s Janitorial Log #5 - At long last, Vohaul’s evil reign of terror has ended! Or, perhaps it never started? All this time traveling has made me very confused and somewhat hungry. In any event, I infiltrated Vohaul’s fortress, passed a laser trap, purchased a computer accessory, broke into his mainframe, and rescued my son. I didn’t even know that I had a son until right before I rescued him, so that has to count for something when Father's Day comes around. The guy tells me that I won’t remember this later, but that’s why I have this spiffy Janitorial Log.

And now, I’m back! From outer space!

Where we left off last week, Roger had successfully traveled back in time to Space Quest I, but found almost nothing to do there except pick up a book of matches and dodge a couple of under-colored motorcyclists. Without having any better ideas, I traveled back to Space Quest XII, where we started the game, to see if anything had changed. Well, it had! For no readily apparent reason, the Sequel Police guards were not manning their posts when I arrived and I could start to re-explore the future. Is this where I need to go or another dead end? I guess I will find out soon enough!

Game 55: Leisure Suit Larry 1 (VGA) - The Holy Bond(age) of Matrimony

Written by Alex

Before picking up where we left off, I need to address the quiz I complained about last post. In a comment, Aperama reminded me that pressing CTRL+ALT+X bypasses the quiz and gets right to the game. So thanks, Aperama! Bonus CAPs coming your way.

Yeah? Well, your mother! Or something . . .

Aw gee, thanks Al Lowe.

Game 56: Timequest (1991) - Introduction

Written by Reiko

Evocative, meaningful, but a little campy. Much like the game, actually.

I have good memories of the Gateway games, produced later on by the same Legend Entertainment company that started out with Spellcasting 101, which we've already seen back in January, courtesy of Aperama. Timequest is Legend's second game, which I may have poked at briefly some years ago, but certainly never finished, so I'm looking forward to it. The layout and gameplay are very similar to those other games, so I should be able to jump right in. They're very much a hybrid between pure-text interactive fiction and graphical adventure games, a big step up from pure text, and they're basically the successor to what Infocom was doing with interactive fiction. I grew up with interactive fiction, although I didn't play very many Infocom games at the time, but I still follow the modern IF scene now and have been trying to go back and play some of the classics I missed as well. So I quickly volunteered for Timequest when it came up on the list.

History of Adventure - Introduction

Written by TAG reviewer team

Special thanks to Aperama for the idea, lot of the research and the first draft of the whole thing

With the Adventure Gamer -blog having recently decided to come up with the designation of a 'Missed Classic' – a game that didn't actually fit in properly with Trickster's original motives in creating this fine place we all know and love now, there was a little discussion on where adventure games have actually come from and what they've become. It's almost always going to be a thing of conjecture, with lots of debate of pros and cons in listing a game as being unique enough to warrant its own 'section'. For instance, 'hybrid RPG/adventure' could be a section in and of itself, but we're more talking about the interface that we play through than the nature of the game. If we're to be pedants, there are also some games that don't directly fit into a category (like Below the Root, the first game that was ever covered by this blog).

Was this just a dead end in adventure game history?