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 trong, 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 adventure games and possible try to predict a future for them as well.

In our third installment we take a look at the revival of adventure games, their current state and their various spin-off genres.

In the last article we looked at why the adventure game genre took a sudden downfall around the onset of the console era ushered in by the release of Sony’s PlayStation. Full 3D graphics were becoming the norm across all gaming platforms, with a strong focus on fast movement rather than graphical detail, allowing the action game to supplant the adventure game. There was also the matter of gameplay to consider, and most adventure games involved dragging various assorted knick-knacks in between moments of exposition and rubbing them against everything else, hoping the story would continue. The gaming industry itself was evolving as well, Sierra in particular had grown from a small company founded by Ken Williams and his wife Roberta, to a multi-billion dollar corporation.

Things looked rather grim for the adventure game in the beginning of the 2000’s. LucasArts’ last adventure game, Escape from Monkey Island, was met with a generally favorable reception, though it did receive some criticism for the difficulty of manouvering the game with keyboard controls rather than a mouse. Following the release of Escape, LucasArts put three more adventure games into development, but all three were later canceled as the company moved on to create and release games based on the Star Wars franchise.

Yet while things did indeed look grim, the adventure game genre did what it could to remain relevant, refusing to die out. The story heavy focus the adventure game lived and breathed on went on living through RPGs, a genre that still holds strong today with a style of storytelling split between two major branches; the WRPG and JRPG. The choice between bad gameplay and a good story or vice versa eventually fell away as limitations became less of an issue for developers. You could have satisfying gameplay and be able to tell a good story at the same time, so adventure games merely evolved, creating new sub genres.

Looking at genres like survival horror, it’s easy to see the underlying heritage of the adventure game; solving puzzles using various objects that also double as keys, not to mention the strict adherence towards telling a story. This is especially evident in the Silent Hill series which uses atmosphere, symbolism and careful exposition to craft their storylines. The less said about Resident Evil, however, the better.

There’s also the action adventure to consider, obviously a subgenre of both action games and adventure games, effectively created by games like The Legend of Zelda and Metroid. The action adventure genre still holds strong today, mixing together tropes, storytelling and gameplay variations from both genres, almost creating an umbrella term for games that include reflex gameplay (which adventure games don’t have); puzzle solving (which action games don’t have) and the occasional jumping puzzle (which both genres usually don’t have). The same physical skills required in an action game are usually present, but also offers a storyline, numerous characters, an inventory system, dialog and other features of adventure games. Action adventures can also be a lot faster paced than your typical adventure game. It’s not particularly easy to determine when a game stops being an adventure game and becomes an action adventure game. Justadventure.com describes action adventures as “‘…a game that has enough action in it not to be called an Adventure game, but not enough action to be called an Action game.’ Action/Adventures are very hard to define, since they are the gray area between Adventure and Action games. It would be safe to say that if you have a game with 2/3 action and 1/3 puzzle solving, in any form that requires thinking rather than reflexes, you got yourself an Action/Adventure game.”

But even to this very day, adventure games in their purest form remain, albeit not as strongly as they used to. Since its heyday the genre has branched out onto newer platforms. Adventure games on consoles are far from a new thing, as previously mentioned with Broken Sword 1 and 2 on the original Playstation. The Nintendo Wii and DS are arguably tailor made for adventure games, something certain developers have decided to act upon. Capcom’s Ace Attorney series, originally debuting in Japan on the GameBoy Advance, was ported to the DS for a western release. The “visual novel” is a Japanese subgenre of the traditional adventure games, almost universally played from a first-person perspective and driven primarily by dialogue, but features similar point and click mechanics to its originator. The last game in the Ace Attorney series features a more standard adventure game setup with the player controlling an avatar and collecting items to progress the story.

Cing, Inc. another Japanese developer has had successes with adventure games, teaming up with Nintendo in order to be able to fully take advantage of the gameplay options offered by the DS and Wii. In early 2005, the company released Another Code: Two Memories (Trace Memory in the US) for the DS, taking advantage of all of the DS’ capabilities without making it feel tacked on. The game was praised for its creative use of the DS hardware for puzzle solving, graphics and characterisation. Cing followed the moderate success of Another Code with another adventure game for the DS; Hotel Dusk: Room 215. Players took control of Kyle Hyde, a policeman turned salesman, as he’s tasked with finding some lost items at the titular Hotel Dusk. The game featured a unique film-noir art style and plot progression, which garnered a lot of praise from reviewers as well as the game’s layered characters and well-written script. Since then, Another Code gained a sequel and Cing is still hard at work with creating new and exciting titles for Nintendo’s two platforms.

On the western side of the globe, the adventure game is slowly being brought back to the fold, in part thanks to Telltale Games. One of the three cancelled LucasArts adventure games of the 2000’s was a sequel to Sam & Max Hit the Road (1993). Upon the cancellation, a group of LucasArts employees headed by Dan Connors, Kevin Bruner and Troy Molander founded Telltale Games. Telltale’s first few games were a poker sim, two adaptations of Jeff Smith’s graphic novel series Bone and a game based on the CSI tv series, but the company soon moved on to pursue episodic gaming with Sam & Max: Season One. Originally released as downloadable episodes for PC, the games spun off to the Wii and Xbox 360. Telltale has since then focused on episodic games, aiming to have a presence on as many platforms as possible, having released games through GameTap, Steam, WiiWare, Xbox Live Arcade and their own online store. Apart from the Sam & Max games, Telltale is also responsible for Strong Bad’s Cool Game for Attractive People and Wallace & Gromit’s Grand Adventures. The recent revival of the Monkey Island series can also party be attributed to Telltale Games, who recently released the third episode of the Tales of Money Island series.

LucasArts have somewhat returned to adventure games, but Star Wars still remains their bread and butter. The Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition is a remake of the original game with updated graphics, music and voice work, and the Wii version of Indiana Jones and the Staff of Kings contains an unlockable port of the original Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis. LucasArts has also begun re-releasing a number of their classic games like Fate of Atlantis and LOOM on Steam. Since then the company has expressed a desire to “revitalize [their] deep portfolio of gaming franchises”. President of LucasArts Darrel Rodriguez said in an interview with GTTV that LucasArts were looking to go back to their roots and be more open to experimentation when it comes to game development. If this new direction turns successful, who knows, we might see some more classic adventure games reskinned and re-released. We might even see some new adventure games.

This concludes our third and final look into the history of adventure games. For all intents and purposes, the genre is far from dead, even though installments seem to be few and far apart. But consider the fact that the young gamers of the 90’s are now growing up, bringing memories of their favourite games with them as they become writers, programmers, developers and producers of video games.