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A truly graphic adventure: the 25-year rise and fall of a beloved genre

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2011/01/h ... dventures/

Nice. A good read. The only qualm I have is that there was absolutely zero mention of the fangames that really kept the genre alive for almost a decade.

That is probably more significant than most realize. I remember when, then Tierra, first released their KQ1VGA MoE suddenly became VU's best selling game, even though it had been on the market long enough that it was ending up in bargain bins. Of course VU never saw the connection.

I doubt that traditional adventure gaming will ever return to the "pinnacle" of gaming, but is it fallen? Never. Not even fan-games alone are keeping it afloat. There's still plenty of commercial games in the works.

Something that would keep the genre "buried", so to speak, would be its segregated community. There's the purist aspect, where adventure games stopped evolving in 1993. Then there's the Myst crowd, who hasn't even heard of Sierra or LucasArts. Then there's people who think adventure games are actually RPGs. Then there's the crowd who, when they hear the words "adventure games" immediately think of Uncharted, Portal, and Mass Effect.

On the whole, I think adventure games are still more alive than we give them credit for. Even outside the genre, wall-climbing puzzles are many, we can explore an open-world, stock up anything that isn't nailed down (mostly ammo), get achievements for not killing things (i.e. the no-guns achievement in Mirror's Edge), and help NPCs with their problems.

Datadog wrote:I doubt that traditional adventure gaming will ever return to the "pinnacle" of gaming, but is it fallen? Never. Not even fan-games alone are keeping it afloat. There's still plenty of commercial games in the works.

Kickstarter and digital distribution have both helped the Adventure genre a lot. The former by making it possible to create a game without a heavy-handed publisher, and the latter for making distribution more widespread and less expensive.

Datadog wrote:There's the purist aspect, where adventure games stopped evolving in 1993.

Yeah, I've never gotten along with this crowd. These are the same people who, back in the late 90s, attacked me for suggesting that a new GK game be built with the then-modern Max Payne engine. It wasn't even that they hated the engine or felt that 2D was better than 3D. Their argument -- or rather, their knee-jerk response -- was to scream and yell at me, telling me that "Gabriel can't be turned into an action hero!"

Apparently they didn't understand that a game's engine can be redesigned for different genres. As far as they were concerned, since Max Payne used guns, so would Gabe if the same engine was used.

Datadog wrote:Then there's the Myst crowd, who hasn't even heard of Sierra or LucasArts.

Honestly, I see this as a product of ignorance. Note that's ignorance, not stupidity, the two of which people often confuse.

Many of these fans became gamers after both Sierra's and LucasArts' heyday. In fact, I'd bet a lot of them played Myst (or some clone of it) as their first game, period.

Datadog wrote:Then there's people who think adventure games are actually RPGs. Then there's the crowd who, when they hear the words "adventure games" immediately think of Uncharted, Portal, and Mass Effect

Yeah, just about anything is labeled "adventure" today. They're not really wrong in doing so, since almost every game's plot involves an adventure of some sort, but there's a difference between "adventure" and "Adventure." One means the game has some adventure aspects in it, whereas the other is defined by its genre.

That said, the RPG genre is a very close relative of Adventure, so I could see how some people might confuse the two. Even Sierra combined the two with their QFG series, although admittedly those were more Adventure than RPG.

Datadog wrote:Even outside the genre, wall-climbing puzzles are many, we can explore an open-world, stock up anything that isn't nailed down (mostly ammo), get achievements for not killing things (i.e. the no-guns achievement in Mirror's Edge), and help NPCs with their problems.

Bethesda's games are notorious for allowing you to pick up any object. It took me a long, long time to get over the "grab anything that's not nailed down" mindset. At the time I was convinced that a random fork I stole at the beginning of the game would be needed later on (and it wasn't).

As for non-violent, or at least non-lethal, approaches, I'd direct you to Deus Ex: Human Revolution. The game is actually designed to reward non-lethal methods.

DeadPoolX wrote:Kickstarter and digital distribution have both helped the Adventure genre a lot. The former by making it possible to create a game without a heavy-handed publisher, and the latter for making distribution more widespread and less expensive.

And both bypass the traditional "gate keepers".

That said, the RPG genre is a very close relative of Adventure, so I could see how some people might confuse the two. Even Sierra combined the two with their QFG series, although admittedly those were more Adventure than RPG.

I liked the way QFG was handled in terms of RPG elements. By training your character, you could open up additional solutions to puzzles. And the action factor allowed some realism in the sense that your character could now defend themselves in a dangerous encounter and escape with a few scratches.

Bethesda's games are notorious for allowing you to pick up any object. It took me a long, long time to get over the "grab anything that's not nailed down" mindset. At the time I was convinced that a random fork I stole at the beginning of the game would be needed later on (and it wasn't)

Sounds like Fallout all right. I was so hesitant to get rid of anything once I started hording. Still, you never knew when you might run into someone who needed that fork.

Is it just me or are they using hq2x or something to smooth out the fonts in the screenshots?

Yes they are. It seems they should use the original graphics for an article that is an historical look at these early games.

It's weird, I don't remember ever having a hq2x-like option when playing Sierra games. Is this something you can do in recent emulators? Weirdly, the article doesn't have the same effect on some of the LucasArts games and those were the ones I always associated with that scaling effect (on Mac their games had the option).