Once upon a time, adventure games were the proverbial kings of PC gaming, entertaining gamers everywhere with a heavy focus on well-written stories and strong, realistic characters. Adventure games had their best run during the late 80′s and early 90′s, before suddenly dying out.

So what happened to the adventure games, and where are they now?

In this three part series, we’ll be taking a look at the history of the adventure game and possibly try to predict a future for them as well. We begin, obviously, with the early development and subsequent rise of adventure games.

Almost every kind of fiction is based off of something else, and the adventure games were no different. In the mid 70′s, before gaming was an actual term and computer hardware would cover an entire room, the first seeds of the adventure game genre were sown by way of Interactive Fiction.

Back then computers had little, to no, graphical capabilities, so the entire user interface was text based. The first of these IFs, Adventure (a.k.a. ADVENT), was created in 1975 by Will Crowther. Crowther was a computer programmer and spelunking enthusiast who based the game on his explorations of the Mammoth system in Kentucky.

Adventure consisted of a massive network of caves for the player to explore using short sentence commands such as “look at stone”, “pull lever” or “kill dragon”. Since its inception Adventure has survived on the internet to this very day, and has been ported to a slew of operating systems.

After the creation of Adventure several companies producing interactive fiction popped up, the largest of which was Infocom, which created the legendary Zork series.

Zork was originally MIT hacker jargon for an unfinished program and the name stuck to the final product. Not unlike Adventure before it, Zork was set in a sprawling underground labyrinth stocked with various creatures, objects and locations, not unlike Adventure.

What set Zork apart from its contemporaries was the sophistication of its text recognition. The player was not limited to simple commands like “hit grue”, but could use prepositions and conjunctions in addition to verbs and nouns; “hit the grue with the elvish sword”. Infocom’s later games could understand multiple sentence input. More interactive fiction would be developed during the 80′s and 90′s, letting the genre run its course parallel with its offspring; the adventure game.

Unfortunately the commercial IF market had its demise in the 1990s, but several online communities have survived to this very day.

In the early 80′s graphics were steadily introduced to the adventure game by a little company called On-Line Systems. If that sounds familiar you’re far from mistaken, as On-Line Systems would later change its name to Sierra On-Line.

Founded by Ken and Roberta Williams in 1979, Sierra’s rise to fame was its graphic adventure games, usually with the word “Quest” in the title. Ken Williams worked as a contract programmer for IBM when he downloaded a program labelled Adventure from the IBM mainframe. Ken showed this to his wife who began to play with great enthusiasm. Roberta realised that modern computers had the potential for more than simply presenting text descriptions on the screen.

The two began development on Mystery House, which was inspired by parlour game Clue and Agatha Christie’s “And Then There Were None”.

Mystery House’ graphics, motionless, crude vector lines though they were, was something completely unseen in computer adventure games, which made Mystery House an instant hit. The game sold 15,000 copies and earned the couple $167,000.

Sierra would later take adventure games even further, with the third person viewpoint. This wasn’t a new feature in gaming as a whole, but up to this point adventure games were rendered in the first person perspective. King’s Quest: Quest for the Crown put players in the shoes of Graham, a young knight tasked with the rescue of the princess of the realm.

The game was rendered in a pseudo 3D environment and featured moving objects and characters instead of merely static images, another innovation for the genre. The player character’s actions were still controlled through short text commands, influenced by Roberta Williams’ initial love for Adventure.

In a few years Sierra had developed a multitude of successful series of adventure games with King’s Quest, Police Quest, Space Quest, Leisure Suit Larry and Quest for Glory, each franchise spanning numerous games. Graphically the earlier games played out like blocky animation, which is credited to Sierra’s adventure game development system “AGI”.

AGI was short for Adventure Game Interpreter and was created during the development of King’s Quest as a way of bringing together all of the graphics, text and logic code for the game. This, in turn, made it easier to writer other games for the same interpreter.

As computers became more powerful, Sierra eventually decided to develop a new interpreter called SCI, with improved graphical capabilities and mouse support. The adventure games had now gone from being text based to the point’n'click interface most current fans are used to.

Another contender for the crown of adventure game development at the time was LucasArts. LucasArts was founded in May of 1982 as the video game development group of LucasFilm. George Lucas wanted his company to branch out into other areas of entertainment.

In 1987, when it seemed like no one was able to overcome Sierra as the go-to creator of adventure games, a LucasArts programmer named Ron Gilbert developed the SCUMM engine. SCUMM stood for “Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion – Maniac Mansion being LucasArts’ (at the time Lucasfilm Games’) first adventure game.

SCUMM used a point-and-click interface similar to that introduced by ICOM Simulations in 1985 with the MacVenture series. With the SCUMM engine players didn’t have to manually type in every action the character had to make. They were already presented to them! All the player had to do was simply click on an action; “push”, “give”, “open” or “walk to” among others, then click on an item and watch the desired action unfold.

This greatly differentiated LucasArts’ games from those of Sierra, a concept LucasArts would take even further by removing the possibility of dying and eliminating dead-end situations.

Game death was nothing new by this point. Arcades had been killing player characters for years in order to get people to pump more money into them. Sierra was infamous for punishing the player whenever the player made a mistake. Several adventure games also contained dead end situations.

If the player had overlooked a certain item, usually something small and insignificant, like the apple in Leisure Suit Larry, the game could not be completed. The games did not end at this point either, leaving the player to restart, restore or just quit. LucasArts wanted to ensure that the player was never completely stuck.

LucasArts’ adventure games also became known for their humorous and sometimes downright silly characters and stories, as well as numerous in-joke references to other LucasArts games and LucasFilm productions, various cross-game cameos, the number 1138 and the ability to control several characters and switch between them.

While LucasArts’ library of adventure games wasn’t as expansive as Sierra’s, they gave Sierra a run for their money with their quirky, sometimes offbeat games. Titles such as Zak McKrachen and the Alien Mindbenders and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade: The Graphic Adventure helped LucasArts build a reputation as another leading developer of the genre.

The first half of the 1990′s was a heyday for LucasArts with games like Monkey Island 2, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, Sam & Max Hit the Road and

LucasArts and Sierra weren’t the only companies who began developing adventure games, though they were, arguably, the biggest companies who developed them.

Cyan Worlds’ Myst series gained notoriety for using pre-rendered 3D graphics, video and audio and being a fairly atypical adventure game series. There were no clear goals, little personal interaction and a much greater emphasis on exploration. The puzzle solving was also a lot more abstract than those of its contemporaries, which lead to Myst’s categorization as a “puzzle adventure”.

In the UK there were also two companies who gained notoriety for their adventure games. Revolution Software, founded in Hullin 1990, set out to focus completely on adventure games. The company would go on to create the masterful Broken Sword series which recently saw a remake on the Nintendo DS and Nintendo Wii.

Broken Sword was set in a much more realistic setting than LucasArts’ and Sierra’s games. The games revolved around the story of George Stobbart, an American tourist whose holiday in Paris is interrupted when a clown bombs the café he’s sitting in. While investigating he runs into Nicole Collard and the two set out on a journey around the world to solve a mystery connected to the Knights Templar. The following games centred on evil Aztec gods, solar eclipses and corruption in the Vatican.

At around the same time Adventure Soft was founded in Sutton Coldfield near Birmingham, and created the point-and-click series Simon the Sorcerer, which has been compared favourably to the Monkey Island series. Simon is a teenager who has been transported into a fantasy world as a sorcerer, complete with robes and pointy hat. Simon the Sorcerer parodied several fantasy novels and fairy tiles like The Lord of the Rings, The Chronicles of Narnia, Jack and the Beanstalk and Rapunzel.

That concludes our first look into the history of the adventure game. Seeing how the genre has developed, it’s good to see it continuously stay true to its roots by way of fiendishly clever puzzles embedded in a narrative framework.

Next time we’ll be taking a look at the unfortunate fall of the adventure game, as the market share began to shift towards a genre that still holds incessantly strong today….