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I review free adventure games for Adventure Gamers each month. Many of them are made in Adventure Game Studio. These run perfectly in wine on the Mac. I hardly ever have to reboot into Windows to be able to play a free adventure game.

Surprised nobody here has mentioned Adventure Game Studio yet. It's free, runs on Windows. Ports are available for linux and mac. Some pretty great games have been made with it, including the excellent Sierra classic remakes by AGD Interactive. If you want something more old school, there is also ScummVM. It's mainly used to run old games by enthusiasts, but it can probably be used to develop new games as well.

A lot of you seem to be forgetting Adventure Game Studio.

http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/

It's mostly free games (a few demos here and there), made in the old style by fans of adventure gaming.

Most are merely average (amateur work after all), but there are some gems to find. They also have them separated into short, medium, and "full" length catagories, so you can better decide how to fit them into your schedule if necessary.

Specifically in regards to the OP's request, there is a "multiplayer" game there called "Two of a Kind". you play two characters (one at a time) that you can switch back and forth to at any time (similar I suppose to Day of the Tentacle with it's 3 main player characters). It's not too bad actually for amateur work.

A few other AGS games I would recommend are:
  - A Tale of Two Kingdoms (similar to King's Quest, but slightly better in my opinion)
  - Spooks
  - Art of Theft (stealth-action game by Yahtzee of Zero Punctuation fame)
  - Nanobots (one-character-at-a-time teamwork game like Two of a Kind)
  - Maniac Mansion Deluxe (a fan remake of the original using the AGS engine)
  - Saturday School (not an adventure game, but a puzzle game made using AGS)

That's not all though, so look around for other gems.

So perhaps the crux lies in open source game development tools. Blender 3d and AGS are fairly good examples of what I mean. Perhaps a tool similar to Kodu but have it open source instead.

His only reason for that, as spelled out in the FAQ, seems to be that he once had someone cheat him in an earlier free software project he had and now he's afraid of ever doing it again.

Pretty lame. It's akin to getting burned by a match and then never wanting to be near a campfire.

AGS is free.

There are a significant amount of Sierra and LucasArts style new-release games coming from hobbyists using Adventure Game Studio. There are only a couple of re-makes of classics, but if you just appreciate adventure games in general give it a try. Windows only? I remember someone there talking about Linux games a while back but don't know what the support is like for that.

Adventure Game Studio has been around forever. It's the toolkit used to build Maniac Mansion Deluxe.

The problem isn't the lack of programming tools - free or otherwise. The problem lies in assembling and supporting all the other talent you need: Story. Production design. Set Design. Characters and Props. Art and animation. Music. Dialog and Vocal Performance.

The generic game engine may be all you need to animate the underworlds of Grim Fandango or Bioshock.

But first they have to imagined, populated and given direction.

How the hell can a submission titled "The Return of (Old) PC Graphic Adventures," on a geek oriented website, no less, leave out the amazing Adventure Game Studio project and associated community? There is so much original, independent, and FREE adventure gaming awesomeness coming out of of here, I recommend any fan of the genre check it out.

Adventure Game Studio

In particular, I have to give a hearty recommendation to "No Action Jackson." The graphic style is a dead ringer for DoTT, and it's amazing on it's own merits.

"The game centres around Jackson, a young, role-playing obsessed nebbish who's got a D&D game scheduled with two of his friends. The only problem is that his mother refuses to let him leave the house because his grandparents are visiting. Jackson's first task is to somehow get out of the house without his mother and grandparents noticing. After finally escaping, Jackson is horrified to discover that his two friends have completely stood him up. You spend the rest of the game trying to track them down and convince them to play D&D as planned."

No Action Jackson

The dialog and puzzles are all what you would have expected out of a quality Lucas or Sierra game old. Do yourself a favor and check it out! There is plenty more where that came from. I mean, I love what the ScummVM team has done, but AGS is way more interesting to me, as it's delivering a lot more new and original gaming content.

Try Adventure Game Studio. It's perfectly able and there are many great games that have been created with it.

Check out this site for fan-made adventure games (I believe they are mostly free) - http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/ . Some of them are quite good!

http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/

It is Libre not gratis, but it is there all the same.

If you want graphics, there are lots games being made with Adventure Game Studio http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/

  Of course most aren't on the same level as commercial games, but there are some gems to be found.

I'm pretty sure it was built with AGS:

http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/

• http://www.tads.org/
• http://brasslantern.org/
• http://www.xyzzynews.com/
• http://www.ifcomp.org/
• http://www.ifarchive.org/

• http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/
• http://www.adventuredevelopers.com/

Just because nobody's selling them, doesn't mean nobody's making them. Actually, its easy to make adventure games with AGS. Anybody can do it. So go make one, sell it, and make money. Revitalize the genre instead of complaining about it.

Check the games done by hobbyists at AGS and other "homemade adventure systems"... There's a huge pile of garbage there, but some are real gems :-)

Adventure Game Studio provides an extremely simple way of doing old-style adventures quickly and has an active community behind it, which is rather friendly.

This must be a pretty encouraging article if you are a small company or single person about to embark on developing your first 2D adventure game, but honestly, how many people is that? The article is interesting for its insight on budgets (other people have already mentioned the tiny testing budget) and other nastiness in the games industry, for sure. But most Slashdotters interested making their own adventure game would be well advised to check out something like Adventure Game Studio, which has a friendly interface and very handy scripting language. Sorry if this seems like an offtopic plug for AGS, but really, there's a lot of good adventure game creation tools out there (not just AGS), and they're probably more useful in practical terms than this article.

That said, it's nice to hear that Ron Gilbert still has adventure games on his mind...

As much as I love ScummVM, it won't work on this game. It's a fan remake of Maniac Mansion with new graphics and was created using AGS. There does exist a linux interpreter for AGS which can be used to play this game however. It can be downloaded from here The original versions of MM will work in ScummVM of coursem

I'm glad to see such a strong community that has centred around adventure games. It's hopeless commercially, it seems, with many small projects still looking for a publisher. But free games keep getting cranked out!

I think this is because there is so much fun to be had in actually making these games. There are dozens of engines that can handle virtually all of the programming work for you. What's left is the art, dialogue, story, puzzles and witty responses. For a creative group of people this kind of thing enables them to do what they do best without being boggled down in engine specifics. That's why recent games seem to reach almost LucasArts quality with much less work.

I feel that the only issue is the number of one-man projects there are. It's very hard to collaborate on these projects with no source control or commercial incentive. People have their own independent visions for how the game will come out, and most of these guys are artists or writers, not leaders. With the tools that are already there, a group of 20 or so people could apply the open source methodologies and develop a game that would even surpass LucasArts standards, and be just as long and fun to play. I think - well, I hope - that this is the way forward for adventure games, because the results would be really promising.

Those looking to quench their thirst for the PC graphic adventures of the mid-90's need look no further than Adventure Game Studio, the freeware adventure game creation software.

No, I'm not suggesting that you make your own adventure game. There are plentyof great ones already. The "Games" section of the AGS website is full of extremely inventive titles made by ambitious adventure game fans. I recommend Six Day Assassin and Five Days a Stranger (which, despite both titles starting with numbers, are not at all related) if you're looking for something reminiscent of 1990ish Sierra/LucasArts.

The artwork is pretty lackluster with most AGS titles, but the design, puzzles, writing, and story are completely top quality for many of the games. Of course, after looking at Slashdot all day they probably won't look that bad to you anyway.

Although the game was written in Adventure Game Studio (which has a Linux client) the Linux client requires the raw .dat file, which the author hasn't supplied.

The win32 version 'runs' under WINE but the mouse code in win32 AGS doesn't play nice with WINE, to the point of making the game unplayable. :(

No you won't be able to run this under ScummVM, it uses the closed source Adventure Game Studio system not SCUMM/SPUTM or any other engine we support. That said there is a Linux port or the AGS interpreter available, although going on what others have said I believe that doesn't work with this remake for whatever reason.

There's a Linux port I believe so you can run the game itself, check out the engine's site;

http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk

The FAQ says that the game was remade in AGS (Adventure Game Studio), a no programming required adventure game creation tool. Check Here.

I would suggest you take a look at the engines used by the "underground" adventure game writers.

Adventuregamers.com recently ran a feature showcasing some of the best of these .

The engines used are amongst others
AGS and SLUDGE

I think these are the kind of things you're talking about, rather than SCUMMVM which as the name implies is a VM, not a dev kit.

The graphical adventure on the PC isn't quite dead... not yet.
Perhaps commercially it is - but look how long the text adventure has been dead, and that's got a thriving fan/development community producing some outstanding stuff.. (To learn more about that google around for "Interactive Fiction", "Inform" or "TADS")

And as for graphical adventures - there's some really neat free graphical adventure development systems (SLUDGE Adventure Game Studio) - and of course, if you just want to play the games, there's plenty of those two, including some very polished efforts, such as Out of Order

In short, don't wait for Lucasarts to make the next great adventure - get stuck in and do it yourself! :)

What happened to the wit and just plan fun of old adventure games. Space quest, Kings quest, Freddy Farkas, Lesuire Suit Larry, Monkey Island, etc, etc. I want them all back. Dammit Sierra come out with some good adventure games. While the majority of you are playing quake, i'm over at Adventure Game Studios downloading the lastest homemade VGA games.

I really wish they would start (re)making some cool adventure games

While not a 3D remake, some people are remaking classics using the freeware Adventure Game Studio (AGS). King's Quest I and II have been redone (very well I might add) by Tierra Entertainment (and they're working on Quest for Glory II), and there's a fan-made Space Quest 7 in the works as well as a fan-made Quest for Glory 6.

The Adventure Genre LIVES!

What hasn't been mentioned yet is that there are more than a few free tools in development for creating graphic adventures, as well. Possibly the most well-known is the SCRAMM project, which looks like it could be *VERY* promising once released. Adventure Game Studio _is_ released and works great, though it's somewhat outdated. A quick walk through SCRAMM's link page shows plenty more tools, both available now and in development.

From my standpoint, it looks as if there's a growing community of people who want to create their own graphic adventures, and a growing number of people working to make it happen. My guess is you can expect an upsurge in interest in independant graphic adventures Real Soon Now...