An adventure game is a video game in which the player assumes the role of protagonist in an interactive story that is driven by exploration and puzzle-solving instead of physical challenges such as combat. The term originates from the 1970s computer game Adventure and relates to the style of gameplay pioneered in that game, rather than the kind of story being told.
The adventure genre’s focus on story allows it to draw heavily from other narrative-based media, such as literature and film. Adventure games encompass a wide variety of literary genres, including fantasy, science fiction, mystery, horror, and comedy. Nearly all adventure games are designed for a single player, since the heavy emphasis on story and character makes multi-player design difficult.[citation needed] Because these games require strong characters and plots, character development tends to follow literary conventions of personal and emotional growth, rather than growth that affects gameplay.
In the Western world, the genre’s popularity peaked during the late 1980s and mid 1990s when many considered it to be among the most technically advanced genres, and it is now sometimes considered to be a niche genre.[4] According to the Entertainment Software Association, in 2007 Adventure Games comprised 4.3% of Video Game Super Genres by units sold in the US[5] (up from 3.4% in 2006[6]) and 5% of best-selling Computer Game Super Genres[5] (down from 5.7% in 2006[6]), although it is not clear how the Super Genre was defined. In East Asia on the other hand, adventure games continue to be popular in the form of visual novels, which make up nearly 70% of PC games released in Japan.
The first adventure games to appear were text adventures (later called interactive fiction), which typically use a verb-noun parser to interact with the user. These evolved from early mainframe titles like Hunt the Wumpus (Gregory Yob) and Adventure (Crowther and Woods) into commercial games which were playable on personal computers, such as Infocom’s widely popular Zork series. Some companies that were important in bringing out text adventure games were Adventure International, Infocom, Level 9 Computing, Magnetic Scrolls and Melbourne House, with Infocom being the most well known.
Older adventure games told the story as if the player himself inhabited the game world. The games did not specify any details about the protagonist, allowing the player to imagine him- or herself as the avatar.
In the mid 1970s, programmer, caver, and role-player William Crowther developed a program called Adventure. Crowther, an employee at Bolt, Beranek and Newman[8] (a Boston company involved with ARPANET routers) used the company’s PDP-10 to create the game, which required 300 kilobytes of memory.
The game used a text interface to create an interactive adventure through an underground cave system, based on part of the Mammoth Cave system in Kentucky.Crowther’s work was later modified and expanded by programmer Don Woods using the SAIL computer at Stanford, and the game became wildly popular among early computer enthusiasts, spreading across the nascent ARPANET in the late 1970s.
The combination of realistic cave descriptions and fantastical elements proved immensely appealing, and defined the adventure game genre for decades to come. Swords, magic words, puzzles involving objects, and vast underground realms would all become staples of the text adventure genre.
The “Armchair adventure” soon spread beyond college campuses as the microcomputing movement gained steam. Numerous variations of Adventure appeared throughout the late 1970s and early 1980s, with some of these later versions being re-christened Colossal Adventure or Colossal Caves.
Adventure International (1978-1985)
One of the many fans of the Colossal Cave was programmer Scott Adams. Upon his first introduction to Adventure, Adams spent almost ten days traversing the game before he achieved Adventurer Grandmaster status, the title bestowed on those who scored a perfect 350 in Crowther and Woods’ version.
Once he had completed the game, Adams began to wonder how a game like Adventure could be developed on a home computer like his TRS-80.The main obstacle was that home computers such as the TRS-80 did not actually have sufficient memory to run a large game like Adventure. Adams worked around this limitation by developing a high-level language and an interpreter written in BASIC, an approach that would also allow code to be reused to develop further adventure games.
In 1978, Adams founded Adventure International with his wife Alexis in order to sell his games. His first game, Adventureland, was a version of Adventure for the TRS-80 that would become the first commercially sold adventure game. His second game, Pirate Adventure, was an original game in a similar style to Adventure it’s source code, written in BASIC, was published in the December 1980 issue of Byte magazine. It wasn’t until his third game, Mission Impossible, that Adams began programming in assembly language to improve the speed of his software.
Adventure International went on to produce a total of twelve adventure games before a downturn in the industry led to the company’s bankruptcy in 1985.
In 1982, David Peugh discovered a print out of the original source code for the Adventure game taken of ARPNET while visiting the Stanford computer lab. At the time, he was working at the computer retailer Computerland in Tacoma, Washington. As an added value to prospective customers David Peugh modified the original program content to work on all of the computers that Computerland company sold. He offered each customer a special back door magical word to jump to different locations in the game. The password was “XYZZY” The Adventure game continued to be a free program passed on till he inserted in to the commercial retail realm, giving it away free to customers who bought computers from him. Adventure was one of the first games ever to be played on many of these systems. In the following months Microsoft Adventure was released at a price of $49.95 in a plastic folder shrink wrapped on 8 or 5 1/4 inch floppies. Interestingly, inside the Microsoft Adventure program code were the magic words.