What's an adventure game?Text-adventuresA bit of historyThe evolution of adventure games
| What's an adventure game? | Text-adventures |
| A bit of history | The evolution of adventure games |
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Adventure games (or adventures), part of the Interactive Fiction (IF) genre, are games in which a story is told as part of the game. The player’s actions have a direct impact on the game and its outcome. Actions often include solving puzzles, seeking treasure and interacting with ingame characters, usually referred to as Non-Player-Characters (NPCs).
Other examples of Interactive Fiction are Multi-User-Dungeons (MUDs) and Rogue-like games, but we’ll stick to adventures here. A brief description of these games follows:
The first Rogue-like game was "Rogue", which was very simplistic, and used an ASCII display, allowing the character to control an adventurer. The popularity of this game spawned a long list of variants, and whole new games using a similar idea. These in turn spawned variants and new games, and there are now many of these games in existance.
Typical features:
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Interactive Fiction has its roots in 1976, when the first text-adventure game was made by Willie Crowther and Don Woods: ADVENT, better known as The Colossal Cave Adventure. This game introduced many features of adventure gaming such as the noun/verb parsing (e.g. OPEN DOOR).
Soon thereafter, a group of MIT grad students wrote Dungeon, now known as Zork. This group also founded Infocom, which produced a version of Zork for the TRS-80 Model I and other machines. This led to great popularity of Interactive Fiction and was later called the Golden Age. Infocom flourished.
However, as the capabilities of computers increased, the trend in computer games became "arcade" instead of text. By 1989, Infocom had been destroyed, absorbed by another company.
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If you’ve never played a text-adventure before, this section is for you.
To give you an idea about how text-adventures work, a sample Zork game is shown below:
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West of House You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door. There is a small mailbox here. > |
The " > " symbol is the command line. You can order your character to take action by giving him commands here. For example, if you would like to take a look at the mailbox, the proper command would be:
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> LOOK AT MAILBOX |
The game will respond accordingly. For example:
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The small mailbox is closed. |
Aha! A hint. Well...
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> OPEN MAILBOX Opening the small mailbox reveals a leaflet. |
It’s always wise to take an item if you see one. However, there usually is a limit to the amount of items you can carry. You aren’t carrying anything yet, so:
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> TAKE LEAFLET Taken. |
That should give you an adequate view of how an adventure game works. If you'd like to practice playing an adventure, use our on-line guide to adventure playing: Xyzzy: An introduction to adventure games, in which people who haven't played a text-adventure before can learn the basic actions.
If you want to play Xyzzy or another text adventure online, visit the Playing adventures on-line page.
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The first adventure game created was The Colossal Cave Adventure, a text-adventure. As described in A bit of history, soon thereafter came Zork, and the Golden Age began. The Golden Age ended with the creation of arcade games. Adventure game production decreased.
The answer to Infocom's success was Magnetic Scrolls, a European company founded by a small team of British programmers. They could only produce 7 games before they perished in the multimedia age. These games were so-called graphical text-adventures. The input and parser is very much the same as in text-adventures, but in these games, a graphical representation of the scene is shown instead of a text description. Examples of Magnetic Scrolls are The Pawn and Jinxter.
Then came Sierra with graphical adventure games using parsers (text-oriented interfaces). This includes King’s Quest 1 to 4, Lesiure Suit Larry 1 to 3, Space Quest 1 to 3 and Police Quest 1 and 2.
Following the success of Sierra’s adventures, other companies began making adventures too. LucasFilm (now known as LucasArts) was such a company. Their games had yet another interface: the SCUMM (Scripting Utility for Maniac Mansion), which was eventually used for most of their games, not just Maniac Mansion. The basic difference with Sierra’s graphical text-oriented games is that SCUMM doesn’t require any text input. The lower half of the screen contains verbs, and the upper half contains graphics. If you would want to open the door, click the "open" verb, and then the door in the upper half of the screen. Examples of games using this interface are Maniac Mansion 1 and 2, Indiana Jones & the Last Crusade and Monkey Island 1, 2 and 3.
Sierra’s and other companies’ response to SCUMM was the Point-and-Click interface. The P&C interface uses 4 basic commands: walk, look, action and talk (Action represents a number of physical actions: climb, take, push, open etc.). These commands are represented by a mouse icon. Right click changes the mouse icon, and left click interacts with an object using the selected command (if the talk command is selected, and you click on a person, you will talk to him/her).
A variant on the P&C interface is an interface in which the mouse icon changes automaticcaly. For example, if you move your mouse icon over a door, it will turn red, or to another icon representing an "open" command. This interface has no specific name.
The various Point-and-Click interfaces are presently the most widely used interface in adventure games.
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