Adventure game

• 1. Introduction

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  Adventure games begin with a simple premise: you are the protagonist, and the world is waiting to be explored. In 1976, a programmer named William Crowther sat down at a PDP-10 computer at Bolt, Beranek and Newman - a Boston company building the routers that powered ARPANET - and wrote a text adventure drawn from his own experience exploring the Mammoth Cave system in Kentucky. That program, which he simply called Adventure, used 300 kilobytes of memory. It spread across ARPANET, reached a Stanford researcher named Don Woods, who expanded it into what we now know as Colossal Cave Adventure, and in doing so launched an entire genre of video games.

  What makes an adventure game distinct from every other genre? How did a cave-mapping hobby project become the foundation for decades of commercial games, Japanese visual novels, and crowdfunded revivals? And what nearly killed the genre entirely in the early 2000s, before a single Kickstarter campaign helped bring it back to life? Those are the questions this documentary will answer.

• 2. Defining the Genre

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  Marek Bronstring, former head of content at Sega, characterized adventure games as puzzles embedded in a narrative framework - a definition that cuts to the heart of what separates them from everything else on the shelf. The genre takes its very name from Crowther's original program, which means the word "adventure" carries a specific gameplay meaning quite apart from the literary genre that shares the name. Where the literary genre is defined by its subject matter, the video game genre is defined by how you play it.

  Combat and action challenges are limited or absent. The authors of the book Andrew Rollings and Ernest Adams on Game Design put it plainly: the reduced emphasis on combat does not mean there is no conflict, only that combat is not the primary activity. That distinction separates adventure games from action games, from role-playing games with their numeric skill systems and internal economies, and from pure puzzle games where exploration and story take a back seat.

  Character development in adventure games follows literary conventions of personal and emotional growth rather than the power upgrades that define RPG progression. Designers have long wrestled with what writer Ernest W. Adams called the "Problem of Amnesia" - the challenge of controlling a protagonist who must begin the game without their knowledge and experience. It is a structural challenge unique to the genre, one that has driven designers toward mysteries, quests, and gradual revelations as their preferred narrative shapes.

• 3. Text Adventures and Their Craft

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  Early text adventures used a simple verb-noun parser: type "get key" and the game would try to oblige. Scott Adams launched Adventure International specifically to publish text adventures, including an adaptation of Colossal Cave Adventure itself. A group of MIT students formed Infocom to bring their mainframe game Zork to home computers, and the result was a commercial success.

  Inforcom later pushed the form further. Their 1982 release Deadline introduced a more complex text parser alongside non-player characters who acted independently of the player. Deadline also shipped with "feelies" - physical documents unique to the game that helped players solve its mystery. Those physical props also served as an early form of copy protection. The practice spread across the text adventure genre.

  The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, an Infocom text adventure, became notorious for one particularly unforgiving design choice: failing to pick up a pile of junk mail at the very beginning of the game could prevent the player, much later, from completing it at all. That kind of dead-end situation divided the adventure game community in lasting ways. LucasArts deliberately built their games to avoid such traps. Some fans, however, actively wanted the risk. That philosophical split over player death and dead ends never fully resolved, and it shaped two distinct schools of adventure game design.

• 4. Going Graphic

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  Mystery House, released in 1980 by Sierra On-Line (then called On-Line Systems), is the first known graphical adventure game. Roberta Williams designed it, and her husband Ken programmed it, layering static vector graphics over a command line interface. Roberta had been directly inspired by Colossal Cave Adventure and the text games that followed it. Sierra continued releasing similar titles under the Hi-Res Adventure label.

  The point-and-click interface arrived piecemeal. A 1983 Japanese release called Planet Mephius, authored by Eiji Yokoyama and published by T&E Soft, introduced a keyboard-driven cursor for clicking on objects. Then Enchanted Scepters, released in 1984 from Silicon Beach Software, became the first true point-and-click game in the sense that its cursor was controlled through a mouse, combining a graphics window with clickable hotspots, drop-down menus, and a text log. In 1985, ICOM Simulations released Deja Vu, which built a more complete point-and-click interface - including the ability to drag objects around the screen - and was a commercial success.

  LucasArts' Maniac Mansion, released in 1987, introduced a "verb-object" interface that displayed all possible commands alongside the player's inventory. That design became a staple of LucasArts' own games and spread widely across the genre. By the mid-1980s, graphical adventure games were considered a primary driver of the personal computer market, offering storytelling that the graphics hardware of the era simply could not support in any other format.

• 5. Myst and the Peak Years

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  Myst, released in 1993 by Cyan Worlds, broke records in ways the games industry had not anticipated. The game sold over six million copies across all platforms, a number that stood as the computer game sales record for seven years - until The Sims surpassed it in 2000. Part of its appeal was the audience it aimed at: rather than the adolescent male demographic that dominated gaming, Myst appeared to address a mainstream adult audience. It also arrived as one of the first games distributed solely on CD-ROM, forgoing floppy disks entirely, which made it a significant factor in driving mainstream adoption of CD-ROM drives.

  American market research firm NPD FunWorld reported that adventure games were the best-selling genre of the 1990s overall, ahead of strategy games. Writer Mark H. Walker attributed that dominance in part to Myst. The CD-ROM format also enabled a new kind of voice acting. Games with full spoken dialogue were called "Talkies" by companies including LucasArts and Sierra, a term that endures. King's Quest V in 1992 and Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis in 1993 were among the games that released revised talkie editions.

  The decade also saw adventure games emerge from countries with previously quiet gaming industries. Poland and Czechoslovakia released popular titles in the mid-1990s, and in Russia a subgenre informally called "Russian quest" emerged following the success of Red Comrades Save the Galaxy in 1998. Israel's Piposh, released in 1999, became so popular that a reboot was released roughly twenty years later on the strength of a grassroots fan movement.

• 6. The Collapse and the Survivors

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  The very success of Myst planted the seeds of the genre's decline. With many companies attempting to copy that success, the market flooded with similar games. Computer Gaming World reported that a respected designer believed it was impossible to design new and more difficult adventure puzzles because Scott Adams had already created them all in his early games. The saturation led to a drop in consumer confidence, and first-person shooters - particularly Doom and Half-Life - demonstrated that strong story-driven games could exist within an action framework.

  Sierra was sold to CUC International in 1998. Its subsequent attempts to update the adventure format with 3D graphics, in King's Quest: Mask of Eternity and Gabriel Knight 3, fared poorly. The studio was closed in 1999. LucasArts released Grim Fandango the same year Sierra was sold, to positive reviews but poor sales; its one final adventure game, Escape from Monkey Island in 2000, was followed by the cancellation of Sam and Max: Freelance Police. Key developers including Grossman and Schafer left the company during that period.

  In 2005, designer Ron Gilbert wrote that if you even uttered the words "adventure game" in a meeting with a publisher, you might as well pack up your concept art and leave. In 2012, Tim Schafer said publishers would laugh in his face at such a pitch. Even during the lean years, the Nancy Drew Mystery Adventure Series quietly sold 2.1 million copies of its games by 2006, prospering while the broader genre was seen as finished. Europe sustained the genre in ways the United States did not, with Funcom's The Longest Journey and Benoit Sokal's Syberia finding both critics and audiences.

• 7. Crowdfunding and the Return

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  Tim Schafer founded Double Fine Productions after leaving LucasArts in 2000, and spent years being turned away by publishers who would not fund adventure games. In 2012, he turned to Kickstarter with a goal of raising $400,000. The month-long campaign closed with over $3.4 million pledged, making it one of the largest Kickstarter projects at the time. The resulting game, Broken Age, was released in two parts in 2014 and 2015. That campaign signaled to developers across the genre that audiences still wanted adventure games, sparking sequels, remakes, and spiritual successors to classic titles throughout the crowdfunding era.

  Telltale Games, founded by former LucasArts employees after the cancellation of Sam and Max: Freelance Police, found its own path to revival through episodic distribution. Their Walking Dead series, released in 2012, won numerous game of the year awards and replaced traditional puzzle-heavy design with a story and character-driven experience where on-the-spot decisions affected not just the current episode but future episodes and sequels. The model dispensed with the conventional dialogue tree in favor of more natural language progression. Telltale's subsequent mismanagement and rapid overexpansion led to a majority studio closure in mid-2018, with most staff laid off. By the end of 2018, LCG Entertainment had acquired many of the former Telltale assets and relaunched the company.

  Beyond crowdfunding, new platforms extended the genre's reach. The Nintendo DS touch screen proved well-suited to point-and-click play, and the Professor Layton series, which began worldwide distribution in 2007, went on to sell over 18 million units globally. Capcom's Ace Attorney series, originally a 2001 Game Boy Advance game released only in Japan, crossed to Western audiences via the Nintendo DS in 2005 and has since sold more than 13 million units worldwide.

• 8. Japan's Separate Thread

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  Japanese adventure games developed along a distinct path, shaped by the hardware realities of the PC-9801, which dominated Japan's computer market from 1982. Its resolution of 640x400 was higher than Western computers at the time, designed to accommodate Japanese text - but its lack of hardware sprites and limited video RAM made games run slowly. That constraint pushed Japanese developers toward detailed color graphics and text-heavy storytelling, which gradually evolved into visual novels and dating sims.

  The most famous early Japanese computer adventure was The Portopia Serial Murder Case, a murder mystery developed by Yuji Horii and published by Enix in 1983. The Famicom version, released in 1985 and developed by Chunsoft, sold over 700,000 copies and replaced the original text parser with a command selection menu. That game directly inspired Hideo Kojima to enter the game industry. His first graphic adventure, Snatcher, was released by Konami in 1988 and was highly regarded at the time for its cinematic cutscenes and mature cyberpunk content.

  Chunsoft went on to produce the Sound Novel series from the early 1990s, which sold a combined total of more than two million copies. Kojima's 1994 release Policenauts introduced summary screens that refreshed the player's memory of the plot upon reloading a save - a feature he later carried into Metal Gear Solid. Japanese visual novels now make up nearly 70% of PC games released in Japan, a dominance that reflects how thoroughly the adventure genre and the visual novel tradition merged in that market. Sega's Shenmue, released in 1999, attempted something different still: an open-world adventure with day-night cycles, fully voiced non-player characters, and fighting game elements that its creator Yu Suzuki called "FREE" - Full Reactive Eyes Entertainment. Despite commercial failure, it has remained influential.