Krista Bonello Rutter Giappone goes all nostalgic as she celebrates the rise and laments the fall of adventure gaming.
Most of today’s game developers belong to a generation that was raised on Ron Gilbert’s creations, experiencing – within the space of two decades – the early arc of development of a medium, and witnessing the rise and apparent fall of a genre.
The adventure game dominated the 1990s, and was certainly the genre that demanded my total engagement when I was growing up.
First, then, a little shameless indulgence in nostalgia. The electrifying thrill of the line ‘You are likely to be eaten by a grue’ was hardly diminished by the lack of graphics. The Infocom text-adventures, and all that took its cue from Zork, laid down the foundations of the adventure game – explore, interact, take anything that is not nailed to the floor.
This budding genre built up its own set of conventions, requiring gamers’ initiation into the practice of using a very limited set of recognised commands – possibly the most notorious source of frustration for adventure-gamers.
In spite of this, I cannot overstate the excitement involved – the intensive challenge, the animated discussions and exchange of hints with friends at a time when walkthroughs were not readily available, the descriptions that conjured up whole imaginary realms, and the seemingly-infinite potential for exploration.
Graphics were introduced in 1980 with Sierra’s Mystery House. Throughout the 1980s, they were interwoven with the text-format, interactive to varying degrees – Sierra’s King’s Quest permitted interaction with the visual environment, Déjà Vu used a multi-window interface, while The Pawn had static pictures for important locations.
With the increasing use of graphics, games changed accordingly. One effect was the limiting of multiple possibilities – no longer could you wander off into indefinite, quasi-unmappable, wilderness. Over the course of the mid-late 1980s, the point-and-click interface gradually replaced the text-based format.
Sierra, on the scene almost from the start, was followed by LucasArts, with Ron Gilbert’s Maniac Mansion – in hindsight, Maniac Mansion is more of a prototype for Gilbert’s later creations and the launch-pad for the SCUMM engine.
The adventure genre feels like a form in flux at this point, with an uneasy balance between limiting possibilities and keeping avenues open. With a heavy reliance on having the correct items in your possession, and sequences so often being irreversible, the player was forced to save the game at almost every turn.
This was offset by having several possible endings and the option of controlling different characters.
Before the graphic-adventure formula had properly cemented, there were some interesting gameplay experiments – Lucas Arts’ Loom, for example, uses spells activated by tunes rather than command-triggered actions.
Reviewers uniformly hailed Ron Gilbert’s The Secret of Monkey Island as ushering in a new era in adventuring. Constraints on outcome and sequentiality were constructively used to facilitate entry into the game world – the fact that you couldn’t veer too far off-course, die, or fatally compromise your chances in the game, encourages the player to explore everything.
This further established adventure games as an ideal medium for parody, comedy, meta-gaming – aspects that already had strong roots in the Zork-series. The near-impossibility of dying became a hallmark of many post-Monkey Island adventures, and – while not universally adopted in the 1990s – is one of the most enduring features of such games today.
There followed the 1990s’ high-soaring wave of undisputed classics. Lucas Arts secured its place at the top of the canon with Sam and Max Hit the Road, Monkey Island, Day of the Tentacle, Grim Fandango, Indiana Jones: The Fate of Atlantis and Full Throttle – the latter two incorporating combat as an optional mode or integral part of the gameplay.
Indeed, it is probably fair to say that right up until MI4: Escape from Monkey Island, every Lucas Arts adventure was an event. Sierra’s output was equally steady, with instalments of King’s Quest, Gabriel Knight, and Carry On-style Leisure Suit Larry released inthe 1990s.
For a while, it seemed that every featured ‘Game of the Month’ in computer magazines was an adventure game. Even those that were less than innovative had their charms – Simon the Sorcerer and Discworld games were entertaining, if minor, additions to the genre while Myst is interesting in its atypicality.
Genre-offshoots included puzzle adventures such as The 7th Guest, and survival horror – the original Alone in the Dark owed more to the adventure than the action genre. Elements of adventure dialogue and plot made inroads into other genres such as strategy, thus reinforcing the graphic adventure’s place as dominant genre.
Oft cited as emblematic of the genre’s fall is Gabriel Knight 3’s infamous moustache-puzzle – one allegedly impossible to fathom without a walkthrough. Coming in 1999, at the end of a decade, it provides a conveniently identifiable cut-off point.
However, solving adventure puzzles – even in the text-based years – often seemed to rely rather less on intuitive logic than on familiarity with gameplay conventions. The puzzles nonetheless do appear to have become more contrived, leading the player into more and more mysterious convolutions.
More significant perhaps is MI4. The game, released in 2000, is symptomatic and revelatory – it plays self-consciously upon Monkey Island’s status, downgrades insult-swordfighting to a series of inarticulate sounds, and spectacularly recognises its own implosion, becoming Lucas Arts’ unwelcome farewell to the genre and leaving a host of disillusioned fans in its wake.
But is the genre really dead? Adventure games continue to be made, and I still look forward to their release. However, nothing inspires loyalty like nostalgia.
The revivals there have been so far have been precisely that – retro-gaming, demonstrably targeting gamers who can remember the glory-days. Innovativeness and inventiveness seem in short supply, as today’s adventure games tread the old ground respectfully.
Jack Keane (2007) features a hero, bearing a passing resemblance to Zak McKracken, who passes through rooms that serve as a shrine to Monkey Island in-between solving puzzles. The game is enjoyable, but too often feels like a museum to a past phenomenon.
So encrusted in the ossified formula are many of today’s adventure games, that where puzzles become obscure, a seasoned adventurer can usually solve them by running through the possibilities – try combining inventory items, even unlikely ones, revisit locations after a turn in the plot, make sure you’ve explored every nook and cranny in a location.
Even Telltale’s games sometimes suffer from this symptom. Telltale is perhaps the most important adventure-game company around today, taking over some of Lucas Arts best-loved franchises (and Sierra’s too, with the prospect of a new King’s Quest). Telltale’s creations are beautifully-crafted, clever, funny, and mostly true to the spirit of the canon – after all, they are fans, aware that their primary targets are likewise fans of the originals.
This assumption lies so deep that Reality 2.0 (Sam & Max Season 1) features a meta-game framework, incorporating a text-adventure within the overarching game.
I was utterly delighted and it instantly became my favourite Telltale episode – however, it does limit the game’s accessibility and further locks the genre within its association with a certain generation.
Back to the Future is, of course, nostalgic to the core. Telltale does make some concessions to new players – sometimes by reducing the challenge; there are moments in some episodes where one is simply required to follow instructions, apparently as a medium to connect the extensive cut scenes.
Most new adventure games venerate at the altar of the canon, a reverence that acts only as testament to its demise. Yet, every nail hammered into its coffin simultaneously signals that there’s life in it yet.
I await every Telltale release with the same degree of anticipation I would have reserved for a Lucas Arts game in the 1990s – perhaps this is merely my feeble attempt to recapture the excitement.
Sometimes, however, I get more than simply partial satisfaction of my voracious nostalgia. Whenever the genre reveals its ability to surprise once more, I could walk around in a happy haze for days.
Those rare moments come courtesy of Telltale again. Season 3 of Sam & Max takes steps in genuinely new directions – it doesn’t always succeed, but where it does, it approaches brilliance.
Add to that incomparable voice-actors and Jared Emerson-Johnson’s outstanding musical compositions – indication, perhaps, that Telltale are capable of doing more than stoking the embers of a dying genre.
Ms Bonello Rutter Giappone is an assistant lecturer at the University of Kent. Her interests include stand-up comedy, theatre, horror, punk, and videogames.