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Why Are We Still Talking About LucasArts' Old Adventure Games?
jones_supa writes "The gutting of LucasArts was a tragic loss for the video game industry, but for many of us, it was more than that. By most accounts the last truly great LucasArts game was released almost 15 years ago, and yet, many in the industry still hold these titles as the benchmark. But why is that? Why is it that we still consider these games among our pinnacle achievements as an industry? Why do developers still namedrop Monkey Island in pitch meetings when discussing their proposed game's story? Why do we all continue to mentally associate the word "LucasArts" as the splash screen we see before a graphical adventure game, even though the company hadn't released one in over a decade? Gamasutra has collected a good majority of the answers. Following these responses, as a special treat, Lucasfilm Games veteran David Fox attempts to answer that question with his own insider perspective."
Its Monday morning, stop asking so many damn questions until I've had my coffee.
That wall of text has approximately 0 readability and far less value.
Those games are gone. Those game companies are gone.
And the current games will most likely not produce anything like them again.
Heck todays games won't even run when they shut the activation server off in 2 years.
Excessive greed... Kills all the good stuff.
The pain.. Oh the pain of trying to install their games on my kids' computers. The incompatibilities with the video and soundblaster cards. The endless trips to buy upgraded hardware, even though you had the hardware already per the side of the box.
My kids loved their stuff, but they haven't been a player in this space, unless it was supporting the venerable Star Wars brand and IMO, that's played out. Once it went to Disney, as foretold in "South Park", expect Mickey to put the merchandising and game tie ins on overdrive.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
Jedi Outcast would like to have a few words with this Author, who confuses objective fact and subjective opinion quite hard. Yes the Money Island series was great, but that is NOT why people are upset over lucasarts demise. 1313 looked really promising, no possibility of a SW:Battlefront 3, no Jedi Knight 4, no hope for a new TIE Fighter or X-Wing vs TIE fighter game, etc.
The reason the games from 15 years ago were so great was that there was no attempt to shoe-horn prequel material into the story.
Thinking and puzzle solving (to a greater extent it's why people still mention Myst, although that was problem solving and really neat scenery). They were fun, with memorable characters and funny catch phrases ("I'm Guybrush Threepwood, Mighty Pirateâ). They weren't twitchy, blow-things-up-to-solve-problems games.In some, the characters had continuity between games and in others they were tied to movies of which we had fond memories (Indiana Jones and Star Wars).
Bark less. Wag more.
For the same reason scummvm has been ported to damn near every platform and why I still play these games on brand new smartphones. Reminds me, I need to find my Full Throttle game files.
Its a shame that George forced his entire empire to eat, breath and shit out Star Wars franchise IP which is why the empire collapsed and got absorbed by an even bigger evil empire. But the few original IP created by Lucasarts were actually quite good and original.
I'm not saying we need to revisit them or have remakes of any of them, but it shows there were actually some creative and inventive original thinkers in the Lucasarts company and hopefully now they are free of the oppression of only doing Star Wars IP, we might see some new and novel games come from them again.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
At this point is all going to be a PR stunt to make everyone somehow go "Yeay they saved Lucasarts." and then they hope that we will all run out and buy their next SW game: Darth Vader and the lost princess.
Personally I really loved Tie Fighter. And the mindset - no shields, no armor, everybody wants to murder you - was a great prep for driving.
Full Throttle had the greatest opening to a Videogame I have ever seen. I would point to the screen even years later to show people, "There! This is how you do it!" *Movies* didn't get me that juiced.
And while the gameplay itself was reminscent of "Sam and Max hit the Road" (since I believe it used the same SCUMM engine); it was still mighty entertaining. Considering that most CD-ROM based games at that time were terrible "click and wiggle" titles; the stuff that came out of LucasArts during that period was well thought out, richly designed, spectacularly written, and incredibly above-average. It was an exciting time.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
I, for one, am happy adventure games have died.
C'mon, you know you liked going pixel-by-pixel across an entire screen full of static forest background until your cursor changed to let you know that you'd found the one "stick" in the entire place that you can add to your inventory!
It's not because those games were just particularly amazing, well-written, and well-constructed. It's because those were the games that we grew up with. Those of us in their 30s and early 40s are the ones currently dominating the industry, and we grew up playing King's Quest IV and Monkey Island and Loom and X-Wing etc. We have a fondness for those now because we were kids and those games were the world to us.
Same reason most of us love Voltron and hate Power Rangers, even though they're damn near the same thing.
Nostalgia.
Everyone doing that right now is getting old. Kids today will be doing the same thing about Gears of War, Borderlands and Splosion Man.
And some of us, who are older, are still doing it about Joust, Donkey Kong and Super Mario Brothers.
Welcome to the pool of people not at the top of the generation queue.
Equal parts rose-tinted nostalgia and the fact that no-one's moved the genre forward in a major sense since. Telltale have done a good job with their games and have managed to get rid of a lot of the annoyances from the Monkey Island era but it's all been small-steps rather anything major, and I think they've not managed to achieve quite the same level of humour as the old games yet but that could just be me getting old.
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I know everyone wants to complain about adventure games being dead, but recently I have been enjoying The Book of Unwritten Tales, an amusing point-and-click adventure in the traditional style. Incidentally, it had a Linux port before Valve ported Steam.
Cheers,
-l
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... and the majority of people couldn't access a BBS. Walkthroughs? Tutorials? If you were lucky, an actual real-life friend might have told you how to win the spitting competition in Monkey Island 2. Or you persevered, having a much greater attention span twenty years ago - uninterrupted by a billion browser tabs, FB notifications, phones ringing, etc. It was just the game and you.
The same reason we talk about Goldeneye as the best multiplayer shooter, good nostalgic moments.
To be fair, the LucasArts adventure games have aged much, much better than most games from the 32 bit / 64 bit era.
Sierra is spash screen that come to mind way before LucasArt... LucasArt is burn in my memory because it was the first game (X-Wing) that I saw on a 2X CD-Rom computer in a store... But Sierra is the compagny that made most of the adventure game I played.
The LucasArts point and click games were generally funny. I can't think of any other games being funny. Maybe it's because so many games are made in Japan, and Eastern humor is different than Western humor, but I can't think of a any game having even generated a chuckle out of me since playing the LucasArts games. Even the Monkey Island Tales, while somewhat entertaining, wouldn't be described as funny.
Simple..because LucasArts just got canned for exactly what is mentioned...they haven't produced much that's appealing in a decade. Sure, those games were fun and mind-blowingly fun when they came out but I assure you, nobody I know "still talks about them" except in a moment of nostalgia and that's no different than any other game from the first time we played Pong right up to recent years.
When I was 8-12, I thought adventure games were pretty awesome. I rarely beat them, and figured it was just a lack of creativity/ingenuity on my part. Even though I failed and failed and failed some more, I love solving puzzles/problems (I'm a technician by trade and math student by hobby currently) and spent hours going over the same few screens, scouring for clues that I missed, inventory combinations I hadn't tried (and in the days of the infamous parser, word combinations I hadn't tried). I'd spend hours doing this.
Then I got a little older, installed a few of the old games out of nostalgia's sake (even still have a few of the more memorable ones installed) and given that I don't have hours to spend staring at the same screen, decided to give up, look up some FAQs and at least push my way through the story (some of those games had some really well written ones). At this point I discovered that my failures were not entirely due to a lack of problem solving ability on my part, as I found that the majority of puzzles I had always gotten stuck on lacked any sort of logic at all (I believe there is an excellent write up on Gabriel Knight 3's issues somewhere on the net). They required the kind of creativity and problem solving ability you get at 4am from numerous bongs, a few beers and the inability to click where you want to click.
And before anyone "wooshes" me, I totally got the sarcasm in the parent and just felt this was the perfect spot for a mini-rant =)
In the 30+ years I've been gaming, Grim Fandango was the best game I ever played. Such an absolute joy, and an ending that was worth the journey.
If I had to choose between Grim Fandango 2 and Half-Life 3, GF2 it would be.
..."Samzenpus, float over here so I can punch you."
Because you were younger
They haven't released much that's at all memorable in ten to fifteen years, yet they're only now being handed pink slips? Way to screw the pooch! I'm impressed! How do we find sinecures like that, or do they only exist in corporate boards of directors these days? Fifteen years of no, "What have you done for us lately?", and they got away with it (no lawsuits & etc)? That's pretty amazing.
"Tongue tied and twisted, just an Earth bound misfit
First, because they were good. Second, because "we" - as in someone, somewhere - are always talking about everyone's old games. Thirdly, because they've just been closed down so they're topical (sorry, "trending"). Oh yeah, and fourthly, because Slashdot are click whores.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Seriously, I guess I must have missed something because I was too busy playing advanced (for the time) FPS games such as Wolfenstein, DOOM, Quake, Unreal, Diablo, Baldur's Gate, Fallout, and various AD&D style RPGs. Prior to this I had played the various Sierra games as well as the Tex Murphy series (now that was a funny game).
I chalk this up to nostalgia, rather than the games being better than any other games from the same era.
The first two games I ever played from LucasArts (Lucasfilm Games at the time) were Rescue on Fractalus and Koronis Rift. They were two amazingly well done pieces of work considering the hardware that it had to run on (Atari 800XL). I always had high expectations from LucasArts after playing the crap out of these two games for years.
-USR1
Many games are too boring to play to the end even once. They lack story, or the challenges are repetitive in nature (Shoot that alien! Now shoot that alien! And that must be an entirely different alien, even though it looks exactly like those I shot before it, but it's still moving!...)
It is an interesting challenge to see whether you still remember the solutions to all the puzzles in the LucasArts games. If you do, playing these games is like participating in an interactive movie, but often with way more alternatives. I still like exploring large and complex environments when I find the time. Leave linear first person shooters to the masses and give me a new Fallout, Wasteland, or Elder Scrolls. Zak Mc Kracken 3D?
The LucasArts games were made with love and programmed thoroughly. I mean, while many games in that era were difficult to set up, the LucasArts games usually scaled better with faster hardware and enjoyed patches for years, long after other manufacturers would have dropped similar games. Also, the philosophy of death-free play that encouraged explorative playing style without a gazillion load-attempt-reload. The LucasArts games still serve as an ideal that is difficult to reach for many productions even despite much larger costs.
At this point I discovered that my failures were not entirely due to a lack of problem solving ability on my part, as I found that the majority of puzzles I had always gotten stuck on lacked any sort of logic at all (I believe there is an excellent write up on Gabriel Knight 3's issues somewhere on the net). They required the kind of creativity and problem solving ability you get at 4am from numerous bongs, a few beers and the inability to click where you want to click.
I remember getting stuck in some king's quest game because I never thought to stick a hole that was in my inventory onto a wall on the right screen. This also reminds me of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy that was impossible to get through if you hadn't read the book. (Like who is going to just put a fish in their ear?)
Downmod because it's true. You can't just state that a studio like LucasArts has been putting out crap for 15 years without sounding like a complete moron, and anyone who does should be called on it. Only haters and shills would seek to hide that truth.
Let me join your rant.
GK3 was the worst offender. Not only did you have to be at the right time at the right spot with little indication given. It also had the worst puzzles(and also some great puzzles). Having to molest a cat to get a fake mustache for your Mosley costume must be the worst thing ever done in an adventure game.
The only adventure that ever did the real time thing right was The Last Express which sadly has to be the best game nobody ever played. But even that had its fair share of problems. Putting an action sequence into an adventure game is propably lost on your audience. Fighting on the roof of a train may be fun in a fighting on the roof of a train game but not in an adventure game. Some did it right(you could skip the jump&run sequence in Rise of the Dragon) and some did it wrong(the kneel down sequence in Indiana Jones 3 springs to mind).
But the worst puzzles were those that referenced popular culture. In Day of the Tentacle you had to scare off a couple of morons. What you had was white paint and a black cat sitting on a fence. A friend of mine is from Romania and it took a couple of highly educational Pepe le Pew cartoons to explain to him why painting a white stripe on the back of a black cat was the obvious choice to do things.
It's the cultural equivalent of why none of us old farts will ever get why painting some obnoxious kid's hair orange and gel it into a spiky mess will scare off bullies. Kamekamehaha...whut?
I very rapidly understood why adventure games are best played with a walkthrough. And it is best to consult it only when needed. Being stuck was the worst thing that could happen to you. Being stuck because youd didn't pick up something at a place you can't get to anymore was even worse. And that is what never happened to you in Lucasfilm Games adventures and that was also something that made them awesome. That and you very rarely got stuck. And they were great fun. And they sometimes even made you think. They had great atmosphere. And diversity. They sent you on tropical islands, the afterlife, who knows where(Loom was odd), the future, the past, on a bike, on a zeppelin and even Atlantis(which would have been the better choice then looking for alien glass skulls)
Sadly they fell victim to the Doom clone craze and continued to produce rehash upon rehash of the least cerebral game concept since shooting gallery shareware was invented. Only with light sabres! And Jedi! Yay!
http://www.dosgamesarchive.com/download/shooting-gallery/
20 minutes into the future
Let's think about this...
They haven't made a game in 10 years and they're a game studio. That's probably why they're being gutted.
Also how does TFA not mention Star Wars.... LucasArt's most lucrative license and some of the best SW games ever made. X-wing? KOTOR?
Nostalgia: It's not as good as it used to be.
while (true != false) process_more_stupid_code();
Even though a comment of mine further down the list wishes for a parser to be in a game, the parser could sometimes kill a puzzle. That was horrid. You had the right idea the entire time, but whomever programmed that one puzzle into the game was looking for a very specific word choice otherwise it was no go. If I remember correctly, King's Quest 3 had an instance of this when attempting to turn the wizard into a cat. I gave up on the game at this point. Went back to it about 5 years ago, decided to finish the game, downloaded the walkthrough,etc etc. Got back to that point, found out that my original idea was correct, I just hadn't been typing the command in the way the game wanted me to. Some people if given a time machine would go back in time and give themselves the winning lotto numbers, sports picks, whatever. I'd go back in time and tell myself what I needed to type to turn that damn wizard into a cat.
The games of old, we look back on when we were in our pre-teen to early adult years have a special place in our heart. These adventure games are the first few games that you have won and it was a hard win to have won. My nostalgia was more towards Sierra Online Adventures, but the premise is the same. You spend hours as there wasn't easy access to the internet to give you a hint. The excitement every time you were able to get to a new screen, as you are about to face a new challenge. Then you get older, you have real challenges in your life, and the new games just don't spark that kind wonderment. It isn't that the new games are any better or worse, but when you were a kid, things are new.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Anyone who wants the classic lucasarts games back should be emailing GOG.com and emailing Disney. I mean sure there is a slim to nill chance of it happening but hell, its guaranteed to not happen if we don't do anything. Since Disney axed lucasarts now is our best chance and it benefits Disney. They don't have to do squat but will make a lot of money and satisfy a lot of fans.
GOG contact page
http://www.gog.com/support/contact
Disney email address
support@disneyonline.com
So please email GOG and show them support, email Disney saying you would buy the classic games on GOG, and post their contact information somewhere else on another forum or whatnot to spread the message.
Tell me about Loom
You mean the latest masterpiece of fantasy storytelling from LucasArts' Brian Moriarty? Why it's an extraordinary adventure with an interface of magic. Stunning, high resolution, 3D landscapes and sophisticated score and musical effects. Not to mention the detailed animation and special effects, elegant point 'n' click control of characters, objects and magic spells. Beat the rush! Go out and buy Loom today!
Nouvelles de jeux et technologies en français. TC
Not the (much later) Heroes of M&M3, but the early '90s Might and Magic III. It had an animated skull speaking at you and I remember when I first saw it: I was walking into Softwarehouse in Santa Clara, CA and Sheltem's animated skull was playing on the screen "you have entered my realm..." and life for me was forever changed. The game was so radically different from the arcade style "fastest reflexes win" type games I had played before that I fell into gaming addiction mode.
The follow-up game of Might and Magic 4+5 (which could be combined into one world) was truly amazing too. The icing on the cake was upon completion of that game (world of Xeen) you could send your final score to to New World computing and they sent back a "letter from the Dragon Emperor" on (I think purple) paper with his seal pressed into (a nice touch!)
you could skip the jump&run sequence in Rise of the Dragon
How dare you bring that game up? How DARE YOU?!
Geez, I had to watch Hunter's girlfriend get zapped to death so many times... Never did figure out how to get the collar off her.
Trigger warnings next time, man.
*goes off to cry in a corner*
Getting someone else's puzzle is HARD. For instance, in Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Father, one puzzle is to translate a piece of German text. I happen to be fluent enough in German to never think of looking for a dictionary in the game to find the answer to progress to the next bit.
It is the same reason stereo-types are so common in media, when you got a X amount of time to make something clear, you can't afford to leave any room for mis-interpretation. Mine was to forget Gabriel Knight is an American and as such mono-lingual.
The Secret World is a MMO by the maker of The Longest Journey and it has some puzzles in it... and boy was it "fun" to see anyone from PhD's to xbox owners tackle them. One tricky puzzle asked you to find a password with no more a clue then "Night Helen and I meter, under the fireworks set to my favorite composer." and "Music of the Seasons" that one right next to the computer you are trying to unlock. You would be surprised how many didn't get it.
Another hinted to look at the psalms for a keycode near a church. Is it THAT obscure that churches display psalms going to be sung at the next service somewhere? I am not even a Christian and I know that. Many many don't.
Adventures games are games from a time when you had to read books to learn things in an age when everything is a Google away. People have gotten lazy. I have gotten lazy. Throw six switches when I can throw 1? Throw 1 when I can throw 0?
Look at the latest Tomb Raider, pretty enough but the "hidden" dungeons couldn't be easier to find if they had flares next to them (instead of giant white graffiti) and consists of exactly ONE short puzzles doable in a few minutes. Compared to slowly making your way all around a gigantic underground pyramid, it just don't compare.
TSW was considered by many to be to hard... as an old fart, I can't be anything but be amazed by how mindless such people must be. But the simple fact is that the old Lucasarts and Sierra adventures were THEMSELVES, dumb downs of the text adventures.
I enjoyed the new Tomb Raider, I just wish it required me to actually think for a second at time instead of being a rather tiring roller coaster all the time. I wish TSW had more puzzles but spend more time playing Guild Wars 2 which is so fucking easy you have to do something else at the same time to avoid slipping into a coma.
Because while these new shallow games are much simpler, they are also far far smoother. No endless quest bugs in GW2, or none you mind anyway. The new Tomb Raider had me dropping to my death only a handfull of times and rarely required me retrying a jump several times to get it pixel perfect.
Old quality games required quality players and quality time and that is hard combo to get when you get old or have an xbox.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Some say I'm pointless,
yet many are obsessed by me.
I have caused heroic gambles
and sown endless frustration.
Uncounted deaths have I caused.
What am I?"
Like who is going to just put a fish in their ear?
Anyone who read the books? On the other hand, getting the fish required first of all that you remember to pick up the junkmail at the very start of the game (and don't forget to feed the dog soon after, or it will eat your space fleet two hours further into the game) and then arrange it in a complex way to make the vending machine work without the robot catching the fish. The hint book entry for this was two pages long.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Actually, the best game they made (for my taste) was more like 8 years ago. Gladius (for Xbox/PS2) was an awesome game, one of my favorite games in any platform, consistently voted into all the "best games you probably haven't played" lists. Unfortunately it didn't sell well, so the planned sequel was scratched. Hopefully some company can buy the rights for very cheap and make a sequel.
They did not, they are stronger than ever
When talking about video games, most people just keep remembering "back in the days" when they were playing. STOP IT. Games nowadays are better than ever, especially the point and click adventure genre. I hate it how they all go unnoticed and only a small subset of people try them.
I feel your pain on weirdly difficult puzzles. When I discovered that an adventure game called Under a Steel Sky was available to install for Debian, I tried playing it. At one point I got very stuck... I just couldn't find a way in to some compartment. Finally I decided to Google the answer. There was a loose floor board in one of the rooms, and if you opened it you would find a lump of some putty. There was a broken light bulb by the compartment. You needed to put the putty in the light bulb and then flip the switch, because the putty was actually plastic explosive that would explode if you put mains power through it. So of course this procedure would blow a hole in the wall you could use as a door. WTF! I was so angry I stopped playing and never went back. IMHO this puzzle was not reasonable... putty found under a loose floor board was plastic explosive? Stuffing it into a broken light bulb will work to detonate it? If you are going to put such a crazy thing into a game there needs to be a clue, like a book on a shelf called "how to make home-made plastic explosives" that if you read it says "you don't need blasting caps, just mains power will detonate it".
Some say I'm pointless, yet many are obsessed by me. I have caused heroic gambles and sown endless frustration. Uncounted deaths have I caused. What am I?"
A Woman?
It is getting dark, you are likely to get eaten by grue . . .
Speaking of hint books, I wonder if some of the puzzles were purposely difficult just to force purchase of hint books to solve the game. Maybe DLC isn't such a new concept after all.
I thought this was one of the greatest things about the Lucas Arts adventure games -- it was (nearly) impossible to die. The game was about solving puzzles, and going on an adventure.
I remember finding a spot in Monkey Island 2 where it was possible to die... ... that is, until the scene fades back to the game's framing, of Guybrush telling the story to Elaine, who points out that if he did fall into a pit of acid like he said, he probably wouldn't be alive, telling her the story.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XozZDD5M4os
...they relied on story, clever dialog and had *heart* - so, the same reason everything of quality (books, music, movies) is appreciated decades or centuries later.
I just finished playing Day of the Tentacle with my wife and two kids last night, and they all enjoyed it thoroughly.
sig fault
I think it was Al Lowe who stated that there is a lot of money in hint books...
DLC/DRM it's always been there, the form just keeps changing.... (I had a game in the late 80's where if you tried to circumvent the copy protection on the disks, it "nuked" the disks and rendered the game unplayable, as a child with divorced parents, carrying a box of disks between houses was a major pain the ass - note that this type of copy protection also prevented HDD installs).
Of course now as an adult I have a binder of console games I typically bring with me when I travel (though next trip will probably be laptop only).
By most accounts the last truly great LucasArts game was released almost 15 years ago, and yet, many in the industry still hold these titles as the benchmark.
:P
I'm sure that's true by "most accounts", but most accounts come from geezers (in my opinion). I'm a geezer. I never latched onto adventure games outside a little Leisure Suit Larry. But I and a whole bunch of folks find modern games much better. Older games never addicted me like some more recent games do (notable recent ones being Skyrim and Borderlands 2)). I guess what I'm trying to say is, I wouldn't base a post on such an arguable, subjective premise. The supremacy of old adventure games is not a given for many people. And I know this post was based on a subjective premise but I'm just sayin'.
That works!
It's from the Infocom game Leather Goddesses of Phobos.. That was as far as I got in the game because I couldn't figure it out. Pretty frustrating as I was a 15 year old male and giving the correct answer meant you got to bang the king's daughter or something. If you got it wrong, you died.
The solution was to type: say "riddle"
I may have had the right answer, but I wasn't typing "say" in front of it.
And they work all over the gaming industry. If I won a gold medal you think I'd be talking about my achievements as a benchmark?
Gaming is entertainment, and entertainment is all about self promotion. And former LucasArts folks work all over the gaming industry. Likely in senior staff positions too... I doubt you'll see a 22-25 yr old game designer talk about how great those games were.... unless they worked for Lucas.
Wow. That does seem impossible to guess. I've luckily forgotten how nearly every game was impossible without a cheat book in those days. Because I never had any money, and didn't want to win by cheating, they never got solved and I never did finish them.
I'm still mourning for RareWare. N64 on standby,
thanks man!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Go pixel-by-pixel? Damn you were lucky.
To get that one stick I'd have to type:
]Look
You see a pile of sticks
]Examine pile
You can't examine that you're not a doctor
]Look at pile
It's a pile of sticks
]Grab stick
There's dozens of them, which one do you want?
]Search Pile
You move the sticks around neatly spreading them out. One oddly shaped stick catches your eye
]Get oddly shaped stick
You tell the stick a joke, but it doesn't understand. Guess you just don't get each other
]Pick up stick
Now is not the time for games
]Pick up oddly shaped stick
You gather the oddly shaped stick and place it in your pocket. You get a sudden burst of intuition that it might be useful sometime in the future
D6 63 0D 70 89 81 BB 8E 7B 7C 5F 5D 54 EA AB 73
the parser could sometimes kill a puzzle.
Leisure Suit Larry 2 was also infamous for this - to complete the game you had to make a Molotov cocktail with a bottle and a bag. "PUT BAG IN BOTTLE" was not understood by the parser; "put THE bag in bottle" did work, but as you never had needed to type "THE" before, almost nobody found this. I only finished the game years later when I got a scanned hintbook from a friend.
Evidence of the flaws in adventure games are in the fact 'hint books' were rampant back then. I'm one of the biggest Sierra/Lucasarts/Westwood Studios fans out there (esp Quest for Glory, SQ, KQ) but they had serious issues with the design. Most of the old school adventure game designers admit this. The games I enjoyed the most were the least linear, namely QFG, where if you didn't know what to do next you could at least roam around and fight monsters to advance your stats. The fighting was fairly creative in some of the games and advanced for action on a PC. Though on the other hand, while I appreciate the enjoyable idle time sink, I also appreciated the general non-violence theme of many adventure series (notably KQ).
There's this idea that floats out there that adventure games were "intellectual".. I don't think any game is intellectual, maybe required patience and creativity at best.
Popularity of games like League of Legends (the worlds #1 game, and my go-to fix for the last few years) is because it's instantly gratifying (not mind numbing) and there is some thought involved with your champion selection and configuration. I'd say equally "intellectual".
tl;dr Adventure games were story telling, preceded by books, and were replaced by books.
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