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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.
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...
Also Day of the Tentacle only gets a passing mention. However, as stated, this article is more about the key developments of the genre rather than necessarily it's greatest games.
Old Man Murray made a compelling argument explaining the decline of adventure games:
http://www.oldmanmurray.com/features/77.html
Maybe the problem is that you're not a girl.
The main consumers of graphic adventure games (Myst, Monkey Island, King's Quest, etc) were girls. The boys got violent, blood-soaked action games (DOOM was released the same year as Myst), and the girls got nice little story-based games, where you uncover a wacky adventure. That's not to say there weren't also violent graphical adventure games (Police Quest) or lewd ones (Leisure Suit Larry), but it was basically dominated by female-demographic titles.
Eventually, the genre died, as puzzle games took over the female demographic.
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..
Just because the adventure games being currently produced are not the focus of the AAA developers does not mean a decline. My partner and her friends sit and play a seemingly endless stream of very creative looking new adventure games produced by indie developers and sold on steam. I'd recommend anyone to check them out and they are usually very cheap to buy.
Also worth noting about the article is that on each of the 6 pages there are up to 4 separate web tracking networks sending my blocking software haywire.
Citation needed. Adventure games were my favourite genre 20 years ago. I didn't know a single girl who could bear them.
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.
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.
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
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.
That game is awesome but that's the wrong type of adventure the article is talking more about the point and click variety