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 through which the player moves 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 exploration, 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 the first-person shooter genre, have at least partially supplanted the former genre.
Text based
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.
Action-adventure
The only remaining popular genre of adventure, action-adventure games typically emphasis combat as well as puzzle-solving and exploration. The most prominent example of action-adventure is the Legend of Zelda series. The popular Resident Evil series could also be considered action-adventure games, but with the focus on horror.
Today
For about a decade, adventure games were the most popular type of computer game. But from around 1995 their market share declined, because the managers of game development companies thought the idea of adventure games was outdated.
During the 1980s and early 1990s several games were usually published per year. The average in the 2000s is only about one game per year. Well-known names like Sierra and LucasArts have left the market of adventure games.
In reaction to this trend, many fans took on the challenge of developing their own adventure games, so called fan adventures. Such games are either programmed from scratch, or composed by using authoring tools. Examples for such graphical development environments for adventure games are AGS (Adventure Game Studio) [1] and Visionaire [1].
Modern computer games, in conjunction with Videogames, have evolved the genre of the Action-Adventure game. These are barely connected to "real" adventure games, but have a similar name. There are similarities to computer role-playing games, which have been published more frequently since the surprising success of Baldur's Gate in 1998.
Many famous adventure games cannot be run on modern computers. Early adventures were developed for the C64 or the Amiga, computers which are not in much use today. There are now emulators available for personal computers that allow these old games to be played.
One Open Source project called ScummVM [1] provides a free engine for the good old LucasArts adventure games.
Text adventure games have survived much better. There are only a small number of widespread standard formats, and nearly all the classics can be played on modern computers. Even some more modern text adventure games can be played on very old computer systems. Text adventures are also suitable for PDAss, because they have very small computer system requirements.
See also
Computer and video game genres
Adventure | Educational | Fighting | Fixed shooter | Platform | Puzzle | Racing | Role-playing | Rhythm | Simulation | Shooter | Sports | Strategy