Adventure game

For the UK children's television series see The Adventure Game.

The adventure game is a subcategory of the computer game. It is broad in scope, and encompasses many genres and styles. An adventure game is typically driven primarily by a narrative which the player moves through as the game progresses. The fundamental elements of the adventure game model include a main character, a game environment, non-player characters, and objects; the player controls the main character, and can interact with the other elements. Adventure games are also often based around puzzles, which are solved through these interactions. More generally, adventure games heavily emphasise thought and problem-solving abilities over the fast reflexes of more action styled games.

Though the above description might equally apply to computer role-playing games, the two are differentiated by the adventure game's replacement of combat and point-based advancement with interaction-based puzzles. It should be noted, however, that this distinction is an extremely loose one, and many games blur the line between the two categories. In particular, the status of what are sometimes called action-adventure games as members of the category is largely in doubt.

Few recent commercial adventure games have been hits. One explanation is that massively multiplayer online role-playing games, which offer a persistent, multiplayer world, and first-person shooter have at least partially supplanted the former genre.

Interactive fiction

See main article: Interactive fiction

The first adventure games to appear were text adventures (later called interactive fiction), which typically use a verb-noun parser to interact with the user. These evolved from early mainframe titles like Hunt the Wumpus (Gregory Yob) and Adventure (Crowther and Woods) into commercial games which were playable on personal computers, such as Infocom's widely popular Zork series. In recent years, a vibrant and creative community of interactive fiction authors has thrived on the Internet.

Some companies that were important in bringing out text adventures were Adventure International, Infocom, Level 9, and Melbourne House.

Graphical adventure games

Graphical adventure games were introduced by a new company called On-Line Systems, which later changed its name to Sierra On-Line. After the rudimentary Mystery House (1980) they established themselves with the full adventure King's Quest (1984), appearing on various systems, and went on to further success with a variety of strong titles. In 1987 a second major developer entered the field, LucasArts, with the release of Maniac Mansion, a game that replaced the text-based parser with a point-and-click interface. Most LucasArts adventures also have no points system. The classic example of LucasArts work is the Monkey Island series.

Notable text adventures

• Zork series (1979-)
• The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1984)
• Valhalla (1984)

Notable graphic adventures

Sierra adventures

• King's Quest series (1984-1998)
• Space Quest series (1986-1995)
• Quest for Glory series (1993-1998)
• Police Quest series (1987-)
• Leisure Suit Larry series (1987-)
• Gabriel Knight series (1993-1999)
• Freddy Pharkas: Frontier Pharmacist (1993)

LucasArts adventures

See LucasArts Adventure Games, SCUMM and GrimE.

Other notable graphic adventures

• Below the Root
• Cruise for a Corpse (1991)
• Tex Murphy series (1991-1998)
• Rex Nebular and the Cosmic Gender Bender (1992)
• Call of Cthulhu series (1993-1995)
• Myst (1993)
• Simon the Sorcerer series (1993-2002)
• Beneath a Steel Sky (1994)
• Little Big Adventure series (1995-1997)
• Discworld series (1995-1999)
• Broken Sword series (1996-)
• Blade Runner (1997)
• The Last Express (1997)
• The Longest Journey (1999)

See also

• Computer game
• MUD
• Video game