Adventure Game

Adventure is a genre of video game typified by exploration, puzzle-solving, interaction with game characters, and a focus on narrative rather than reflex-based challenges. The vast majority of adventure games are computer games, though console-based adventure games are not unheard of. more...

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Adventure
Adventure Game
Broken Sword
Colossal Cave Adventure
Day of the Tentacle
Full Throttle
Indiana Jones and the...
Indiana Jones and the...
King Quest
Last Rose In A Desert Garden
LOOM
Maniac Mansion
Monkey Island
Myst
Sam Max Hit the Road
Schizm: Mysterious Journey
Sentimental Graffiti
Simon the Sorcerer
Skyborg: Into the Vortex
Space Quest
The 11th Hour (computer...
The 7th Guest
The Colonel Bequest
The Dig
The Infinite Ocean
The Longest Journey
The Neverhood
Zak McKracken and the...
Zork
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Arcade styled
City building games
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Online browser based games
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Player Controlled
Programming game
Puzzle games
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Real-time strategy
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Rhythm video game
Roguelike
Shoot up
Shooters
Space simulation
Sports game
Survival Horror
Third person games
Turn-based game
Turn-based strategy
Turn-based tactics
Vehicle-based

Unlike many other game genres, the adventure genre's focus on story allows it to draw heavily from other narrative-based art forms, such as literature and film. Adventure games encompass a wide variety of literary genres, including fantasy, science fiction, mystery, horror, and comedy. Notable adventure games include Zork, King's Quest, The Secret of Monkey Island, and Myst. Most adventure games are designed for a single player, since the heavy emphasis on story and character makes multi-player design difficult.

The adventure genre was quite popular during the late 1980s and early 1990s, and many considered it to be among the most technically advanced genres. While few developers continue to produce adventure games, some still are being released, and the adventure game genre has had some elements carry over into other genres. Games that fuse adventure elements with other elements are sometimes referred to as adventure games (a popular example is Nintendo's Legend of Zelda series). Adventure game purists regard this as incorrect and prefer such hybrids to be called action-adventures.

History

Colossal Cave Adventure

In the early 1970s, programmer, caver, and role-player William Crowther developed a program called Colossal Cave Adventure. An employee at Bolt, Beranek and Newman (BB&N), a Boston company involved with ARPANET routers, Crowther used BBN's PDP-10 to create the game. The game used a text interface to create an interactive adventure through a spectacular underground cave system. Crowther's work was later modified and expanded by programmer Don Woods, and Colossal Cave Adventure became wildly popular among early computer enthusiasts, spreading across the nascent ARPANET throughout the 1970s.

The unique combination of Crowther's realistic cave descriptions and Woods' addition of 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 home-brew knockoffs and variations on Colossal Cave Adventure (which eventually came to be known as simply Adventure) appeared throughout the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Scott Adams

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 Grand Master status. Once he had completed the game, Adams began to wonder how a game like Colossal Cave 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. However, Adams hit on the idea that an adventure game executable could be divided into code written in a high-level language and an interpreter, much like the way BASIC is often implemented. Furthermore, once an interpreter was developed, Adams realized that it could be reused to develop other adventure games. (For more information: Details of Adams's early work.)

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