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The Rise and Fall of Graphic Adventure Games
The Opposable Thumbs blog has a detailed retrospective on almost three decades of history in the graphic adventure genre. While this type of game has fallen from favor in recent times, many classic titles made indelible marks on the memories and preferences of an entire generation of gamers. If you played video games in the '80s and '90s, you'll probably see something you recognize. Quoting:
"In its sometimes-turbulent thirty-year history, the graphic-adventure genre has driven technology adoption, ridden at both the crest and trough of the graphics and audio waves, touched the lives of millions of people, and shaped the rise (and, in some cases, fall) of several big-name people and companies in the gaming industry. It's a genre that has often been held back by its own insularity, suffering from an unwillingness to adapt to changing market conditions or to further push the boundaries of interactivity. Adventure games certainly did these things, but the efforts to truly innovate seemed to peak in the mid-'90s, before rapidly falling off—with only a few exceptions. The improving fortunes of adventure game developers in recent years may at least in part be attributable to their efforts to innovate—Telltale with the episodic structure, Quantic Dream with a new control system (for better or worse), and Japanese developers such as Cing with Nintendo DS titles that introduce elements from visual novels.
The Ace Attorney and the spinoff Perfect Prosecutor doesn't count?
I can't be bothered to login to complain, but please, change the link color in the story summary or at least underline it or something...
Right now links are invisible and you have to go pixel hunting to find them, which is strangely appropriate for a comment in a story about graphic adventures...
I recently purchased Myst, since I missed it the first time around. My machine back in the 90's wasn't up to the task. A ton of classic graphic adventure games on GOG.com! Worth checking out for those who missed the classics the first time around. Cheap too!
There are a lot of GAGs (graphical adventure games) I remember fondly. Of course there's Monkey Island, Maniac Mansion and Indiana Jones (sorry, I missed some of the other big names of that time) and a bit later, Ripley's Believe It Or Not: The Secret of Master Lu (or whatever it was called in the US).
Then there's modern adventures and even modern instalments of some of those I have named. I did see a fall from grace. It's the same fall from grace a lot of other games had: While graphics, gimmicks, gadgets and gizmos skyrocketed, creativity withered and died. What games, in general, nowadays often lack is a good story, humour, interesting characters etc. A combination of those things, any combination, will do to keep one interested.
This is, of course, a matter of opinion, but frankly, I think game makers should rethink their business strategies. Even though Indiana Jones was just a bunch of pixels in Fate of Atlantis, I still felt the somewhat oppressive and clammy atmosphere in the maze, trying to avoid encounters with similarly pixelated Nazis. That is called immersion, folks. It is what makes any kind of entertainment enjoyable. This proves that you don't need high class graphics to obtain a high level of immersion. It's not the photorealistic artwork, that will enrapture your audience. It's the story you are telling.
If the story sucks, if you don't care about the characters when planning the game, how can you expect us to care when playing? Perhaps I just haven't found the right games for me, but lately it feels like these studios are 60% management, 40% development and one dude in a basement to whom the script has been outsourced. Then again, that one dude in the basement just might produce better work than what I've been seeing...
The quickest way to cause me to roll my eyes and discount anything else you have to say is to use terms like "visual novel" or "genre film". It says to me that you're so insecure about the subject's ability to stand on its own two feet that you have to invent overwrought euphemisms (seriously, "visual novel"? Does anyone call a movie a "motion novel"?).
God. It's a comic book.
I was iffy on reading the article in the first place, as it seemed too self-congratulatory and nostalgic, but I lost all motivation once I ran into that stop phrase.
Old Man Murray made a compelling argument explaining the decline of adventure games:
http://www.oldmanmurray.com/features/77.html
Clicked through all 5 pages and decided I must be young... none of these bring back any memories. What about Alex the Kid?
I loved adventure games when I was a child and have fond memories of Deja Vu, Leisure Suit Larry and Zak McKraken. My young age and the new technology made those virtual environments so fascinating. The primitive graphics added to the charm of those games, as you had to use your imagination to believe that the wobbly mass of pixels was actually Indiana Jones (The Last Crusade, Amiga).
With no Internet and solutions being published only in some computer magazines, those games could last months, which you would spend on analyzing every single pixel for clues, trying every possible item/action combination and pestering your friends about hints.
Good times.
Hack your mind out of its sandbox.
It is just not the multi million dollar market anymore. The good news is, the big publishers have left the market but small studios thanks to better development tools have entered it and crunch out game after game.
The adventure game market is alive and kicking, and looks brighter nowadays than ten years before.
The funny thing is publishers currently tarket Europe first and then the US because most of the dev studios are european and the market is bigger there.
Also there is the success story of Telltale Games which have found a nieche of their own.
So it is a natural development, as soon as the dinosaurs are extinct or have left, the small animals are taking over again
and everything is thriving again.
You want to save graphic adventures? Simple, have whoever owns the Leisure Suit Larry trademark hire Al Lowe and have him get cracking on a new, *GOOD* Larry, that actually stars Larry and not his nephew or whatever shit was in the past few games.
Monstar L
Its getting harder and harder for me (and not just me apparently, youngsters too are complaining) to find really genuinely fun games.
Last stuff I was looking into was Deus Ex 3 (not an adventure game tho) and they seemed to have turned the whole thing into yet another Prince of Persia meets Mass Effect sort of thing, it looks like its going pure action and "wow" effect. This is in itself getting old, and even people from a younger generation can see it is
going to be a bad game and would rather play Deus Ex 1 even if it doesnt have new fangled graphics.
Last night I was discussing Under a Killing Moon with my girlfriend and we agreed that definetely fun games, and adventure games doubly so, are a rarety now.
She thinks, and I agree, that game developers nowadays take themselves way too seriously and forget to have some humour.
I can't wait for Episode 2 of Back To The Future adventure games, I bought the whole lot of them after playing Episode 1. I genuinely had fun on this one; and I can't wait for the rest of the episodes. (yes I actually paid for video games, I usually pirate the hell out of everything because I know I'll play it for no more than an hour before I get bored and no I dont have ADHD/ADD, I just like my games to be really fun; but I do not mind paying for good games like that)
Adventure games were *the* genre in a time when the non-console gamer market was composed from people who bothered to do stuff and spend some time to solve a problem. Back in the day, software wasn't as friendly, hardware wasn't as friendly, and in general you needed to think about stuff. And internet wasn't as prevalent as it is. Adventure games needed that seclusion and focus, and without internet and the gazillion other distraction factors that we have today, it was possible.
Now we have 2011. Adventure games market is a niche of PC market which is a niche of the video gaming market which is dominated by "casual" and "social" games. It's niche^2, and as niche is less than 1, that doesn't look good for companies. Also the seclusion, focus, and unavailability of solutions within 10 seconds is really difficult nowadays. So yes, in their standard format, adventure games are as good as dead. Innovation for the genre won't easily come, as companies with budget wouldn't take the risk. It might come as a byproduct of an innovative game from another genre, who knows..
I would suspect that one factor in the death of adventure games as a genre(or at least their relegation to "smells funny" status) is that bad adventure games are absolutely fucking awful; but comparatively easy to make, while things like shooters, RPGs, and RTSes, tend to have a vast stretch of mediocrity to fall into.
Without tough-to-quantify-or-demonstrate-in-a-ten-minute-tech-demo-to-the-suits stuff like wit, good puzzle logic, and a dash of elegance, it is all to easy for an "adventure" title to fall into the morass of being a mixture of grindingly dull and unrealistic pixel hunts(You need a stick for reasons that make no sense. Go to the 'forest' area and move your cursor from right to left, line by line, until it changes to the 'action cursor' icon when you have found the one stick in the forest that is actually an inventory item, rather than painted background.) and dialog trees that read like the bastard spawn of a choose-your-own-adventure book and the worst tech support call ever endured by man. Extra credit for puzzles that make up for their childish simplicity by tacking on utterly arbitrary requirements that can only be fulfilled with fanatical inventory management and the prescience of the Kwisatz Haderach. The technical requirements of making such a game are minimal, so the barrier to entry is low; but the result is utterly unplayable dreck.
By contrast, with the exception of the "baby's first 3d engine" horrors that no sane human pulls out of the bargain bin(Extreme Paintbrawl anyone?), the world is full of utterly generic; but playable enough, Doom Clone N+1s, illegitimate children of either C&C or Warcraft, and Diablo clones of assorted stripes. Most are not good; but the more action-oriented genres seem to have a much wider band of playable adequacy. This both makes them lower risk to produce, and makes the average endurability of those genres higher. Ergo, more are churned out.
It's like humor vs. generic summer splatterfests. Humor well done is excellent. Humor ill done isn't simply dull, it is downright painful(I find this odd; but it seems to be the case). Your basic run-and-gun action fest or hyped horror vehicle, on the other hand, has to work much harder to be downright painful, even if its odds of being excellent are basically nil. For whatever curious reason, there is just a broad band of "OK" in some genres; but much sharper division between "superb" and "painfully worthless" in others...
Last year, I got Beneath a Steel sky for my iPhone. It was the first graphic adventure I ever played to completion.
Without the aid of nostalgia, I can honestly say it's among the ten best games I've ever played. Anyone who loves a good story should take a look into adventure games. You can actually own it for free just by signing up at GOG Highly recommended for anyone wanting to give it a spin.
Full Throttle 2 and Warcraft Adventures: Lord of the Clans.... :(
A good article although I was a little disappointed to see that they didn't mention Magnetic Scrolls who developed several adventure games in mid 1980s and early 1990s.
The amazing thing about them (at the time) was the language parser. Previous adventures games could only handle verb-noun commands (eg. "hit box") but it could cope with more complex things such as "go right, open the door and look out of the window".
My personal favourite game was Corruption which I first saw on an Amstrad PCW although it was available for a lot more platforms. Although I never played them, The Guild Of Thieves, Pawn and Jinxter were considered some of their finer efforts.
You can get a Magnetic Scroll emulator for a wide variety of platforms to run many of their games.
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
Depending on your definition, the "adventure genre" is more alive than ever. There are 23 Nancy Drew games for the PC. BigFish games has almost or as many. Go look at the PC selection at target, about a quarter of it is Nancy Drew/BigFish/other adventure games. These might not be as polished as Myst or King's Quest but there certainly is a lot of them.
Yet another story about how adventure games are 'dead,' in a time when more adventure games are coming out each year than in the ten years or so after Sierra and Lucasarts stopped making them. Small, dedicated companies are doing a great job of keeping the genre alive, and there is so much on the market now that it's impossible to play all the games that appear.
-- Cheers!
You know, I'd have thought that graphical adventure games would've found a new lease of life on touch-screen mobile phones.
The interface is ideal, almost on-par with a mouse: tap to click... er... and that's about it (no right click, though).
Games like Monkey Island, Beneath a Steel Sky, etc., would be very easy to play on them, far easier than most arcade-style games. The ability to save at virtually any time would also make them perfect for the nature of the phones. How many people do you see tinkering with them on their daily commute? Play for 20 or 30 minutes. Save, continue tomorrow or after work.
I know that ScummVM is available for Android, but it's rather strange that there aren't more commercial point-and-click adventure games available.
(note: I neither own an iPhone or an Android phone)
THE HONOUR OF THE KNIGHTS - CC Licensed Sci-Fi Novel
Magicka is a new adventure game that is quite original. If you don't know what it is, check the video "WTF is Magicka?" by Totalbiscuit/Halibut(?) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g_XP9OBWGKo The only negative thing right now is that there are quite a few bugs in the game, but the devs are on it.
Perhaps the adventure games can arise again thanks to new devices and formats. I was pretty excited when I saw that a number of Sierra Online games were made available on the iPad. http://www.joystiq.com/2011/01/15/sierra-on-line-games-playable-on-ipad-via-web-app-for-now/
The most glaring omission I see are Atari, Commodore, and Amiga graphic adventures. The topic discusses Apples and IBMs, but nary a word about the other machines.
Some of the Best graphic adventures were on the Ataris/Commodores because they had 128 and 4000 colors respectively. If you wanted to play Activision's Mindshadow or the graphic-adventure Zork Zero, you didn't waste time with a black-and-white Mac or 4 color IBM. You played them on the Atari or Commodore or Amiga so you could get near-photo-realistic graphics.
Information wants to be expensive AND wants to be free. So you have Value vs. Cheap distribution fighting each other.
I remember when I was playing Monkey Island 2 in hard mode, all my high school class was playing the same and it took a LONG time to solve in a group effort. Today people are lazy and want instant satisfaction, they go to the internet and download the solution right away and the game is spoiled.
Even I would think that maybe this could happen to me, some of this games where damn hard, but what a great satisfaction when you solved it on your own.
Someone needs to tell the guys that wrote Dragon Age.
In fact, Gamespy's "Top 25 games of the 2000s" ...and later columns will most certainly include the Mass Effect games and Dragon Age as AAA titles, but most certainly will miss a whole host of excellent indie titles like Machinarium.
http://pc.gamespy.com/articles/114/1145626p1.html
(they only have #25-#11 so far)
includes the following games that I would consider graphic adventure games:
23. Thief II: The Metal Age
16. Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic
14. The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind
So yes, perhaps the "click all over the still screen looking for the "thing" you can manipulate cryptically" style 'adventure/puzzle' game is gone, replaced by graphically gorgeous, artistic, complex, deep, and engaging interplayable stories.
I'm cool with that.
-Styopa
of my gaming childhood was playing some of the second-rate graphic adventure games that usually came in the giant 10-15-20 CD packs of software, or the CDs that were usually included with new PCs. You'd have your standard Grolier's Multimedia Encyclopedia, productivity software and whatnot. Then you'd have some FMV gems like MegaRace. However, the ones I really remember are the Tsunami graphic adventure games, notably Police Quest clone Blue Force.
I was very disappointed to see just a small name drop for Full Throttle (and then even only mentioning the cancelled sequel). I understand Tim Schafer is know for a more milestone game, but FT was definitey one of the best of that genre IMO. Seeing the screens from Deja Vu and Maniac Mansion made me smile as well. That Phantasmagoria was mentioned made me chuckle. One of my friends bought the game and had to give it up due to parental issues. I remember getting that massive 7-CD wallet that the game came with and slowly working my way through it.
Is it me or did the author of that blog, and most commentors so far here, miss the mark entirely? So, games like Grand Theft Auto, Uncharted, Infamous, etc., etc. don't count? Bunk! The graphic adventure game is quite alive and well, it has just evolved. I remember playing Myst and a bunch of others over the years and if the technology and expertise had been affordable/existed then, those games would have looked like GTA or Uncharted.
So Dragon Age, Fallout, and Mass Effect are complete failures and sold no copies?
Those two are "Graphic Adventure" in every sense of the word with added goodies like combat. It seems that the author refuses to look at what the graphic adventure has turned into.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
And yet more adventure games are coming out as in the Sierra heydey. The trick is that all those game studios are not multi mega corporations who would sniff at sales numbers below 3 mio but are small companies which make a living on selling 30.000 copies of a game maybe 60.000 worldwide.
And so far it seems to work for them. Sometimes it is a good thing if a genre is below the radar of EA, Activision and co.
They are the perfect genre for all those new iPads and other touchscreen tablets out there. Game companies are missing the chance!
Does the grind component of MMOs make them not adventure games? Hrm.
Let's examine the secondary revenue stream the came from publishing Strategy Guides as one of the causes of death.
Whether published in-house or by another company these guides cost around the same price as the game itself. At least one puzzle in a game was solved with such convoluted logic that completing the game required the purchase of the Strategy Guide or knowing someone who did.
I could be wrong, but I sure felt like it was part of a larger consipiracy to force me to shell out another wad of paper route money if I wanted to complete the game.
For every benefit you receive a tax is levied. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
The first game I ever played that was genuinely and intentionally laugh-out-loud funny.
Everyone who has a favorite adventure game is sure to point out that theirs isn't mentioned (for me, it was: Full Throttle (barely mentioned), Dreamfall, and more recently, Machinarium).
However, overall, this is simply a superb article. It touches on all the bases, is exceptionally well written, and really makes me yearn to play a new adventure game (come on Ragnar... you know you want to work on that sequel....)
I hope that anyone who has (or has ever had) even the most flighting interest in adventure games reads this article.
Carmen Sandiego!