What was the first adventure game?
Open world
There is no consensus on what the earliest open world game is, due to differing definitions of how large or open a world needs to be. Ars Technica traces the concept back to the free-roaming exploration of 1976 text adventure game "Colossal Cave Adventure", which inspired the free-roaming exploration of "Adventure" (1980), but notes that it wasn't until 1984 that what "we now know as open-world gaming" took on a "definite shape" with 1984 space simulator "Elite", considered a pioneer of the open world; Gamasutra argues that its open-ended sandbox style is rooted in flight simulators, such as SubLOGIC's "Flight Simulator" (1979/1980), noting most flight sims "offer a 'free flight' mode that allows players to simply pilot the aircraft and explore the virtual world". Others trace the concept back to 1981 CRPG "", which had a free-roaming overworld map inspired by tabletop RPG "Dungeons & Dragons". The overworld maps of the first five "Ultima" games, released up to 1988, lacked a single, unified scale, with towns and other places represented as icons; this style was adopted by the first three "Dragon Quest" games, released from 1986 to 1988 in Japan.
Bonk's Adventure
Bonk's Adventure is a 2D platform video game developed by Red Company and Atlus as the first game in the Bonk series that was released in 1989 in Japan and 1990 in North America for the TurboGrafx-16. In Japan it was released as in 1989, a play on the Japanese name for the system, 'PC Engine'. The game was re-released for the TurboGrafx-16 in the U.S. in 1992 on the "Gate of Thunder" 4-in-1 game CD-ROM. The game was later ported to the NES, Amiga and arcade systems under different titles (FC Genjin and BC Genjin). A completely different game with the same name appeared on the Game Boy (under the title GB Genjin in Japan). It is also available through Nintendo's Virtual Console service, on the PlayStation Store and there is a version for mobile phones in Japan.
Adventure (Atari 2600)
"Adventure" received mostly positive reviews at the time of its release and has continued to be viewed positively in the decades since, often named as one of the industry's most influential titles. It is considered the first action-adventure and console fantasy game, and inspired other titles in the genres. More than one million cartridges of "Adventure" were sold, and the game has been included in numerous Atari 2600 game collections for modern computer hardware. The game's prototype code was used as the basis for the 1979 "Superman" game, and a planned sequel eventually formed the basis for the "Swordquest" games. The Easter egg concept pioneered by the game has transcended video games and entered popular culture.
Himalaya Studios
The studio's first adventure game, "Al Emmo and the Lost Dutchman's Mine", was released on September 6, 2006.
Christian video game
Starting in the late 1980s the unlicensed game developer Color Dreams using the name of Wisdom Tree, developed the first Christian video game for the Nintendo Entertainment System, called "Bible Adventures". It featured Bible accounts such as Noah's Ark, Baby Moses, and David and Goliath. It was released in 1991 to Christian bookstores.
Adventure game
Graphical adventure games would continue to improve with advances in graphic systems for home computers, providing more detailed and colorful scenes and characters. With the adoption of CD-ROM in the early 1990s, it became possible to include higher quality graphics, video, and audio in adventure games.
"Myst", released in 1993 by Cyan Worlds, is considered one of the genre's more influential titles. "Myst" included pre-rendered 3D graphics, video, and audio. "Myst" was an atypical game for the time, with no clear goals, little personal or object interaction, and a greater emphasis on exploration, and on scientific and mechanical puzzles. Part of the game's success was because it did not appear to be aimed at an adolescent male audience, but instead a mainstream adult audience. "Myst" held the record for computer game sales for seven years—it sold over nine million copies on all platforms, a feat not surpassed until the release of "The Sims" in 2000. In addition, "Myst" is considered to be the "killer app" that drove mainstream adoption of CD-ROM drives, as the game was one of the first to be distributed solely on CD-ROM, forgoing the option of floppy disks. "Myst"s successful use of mixed-media would lead to its own sequels, and other puzzle-based adventure games using mixed-media such as "The 7th Guest". With many companies attempting to capitalize on the success of "Myst", a glut of similar games followed its release, which contributed towards the start of the decline of the adventure game market in 2000.
Alpine Ironman
The Alpine Ironman is considered by some to have been the first adventure race.
Adventure game
The most famous early Japanese computer adventure game was the murder mystery game "Portopia Serial Murder Case", developed by Yūji Horii (of "Dragon Quest" fame) and published by Enix. Its development began in 1981, and was released in 1983. The game was viewed in a first-person perspective, followed a first-person narrative, and featured color graphics. Originally released for the PC-6001, the player interacts with the game using a verb-noun parser which requires typing precise commands with the keyboard; finding the exact words to type is considered part of the riddles that must be solved. The game was non-linear, which includes exploring an open world, a branching dialogue conversation system where the story develops through entering commands and receiving responses from other characters, and making choices that determine the dialogues and order of events as well as alternative endings. It also features a phone that could be used to dial any number to contact several non-player characters. The game was well received in Japan for its well-told storyline and surprising twist ending, and for allowing multiple ways to achieve objectives. Hideo Kojima praised the game for its mystery, drama, humor, 3D dungeons, for providing a proper background and explanation behind the murderer's motives, and expanding the potential of video games. The game has also been compared to the later-released "Shadowgate" where the player must examine and collect objects, and find their true purpose later on. According to Square Enix, "Portopia" was "the first real detective adventure" game.
Platform game
The first attempts to bring platform games into 3D used 2D graphics and an isometric perspective. These games are nearly as old as the genre itself, one of the earliest examples being Sega's "Congo Bongo" in 1983. The first platformers to simulate a 3D perspective and moving camera emerged in the early-mid-1980s. An early example of this was Konami's platform game "Antarctic Adventure", where the player controls a penguin in a forward-scrolling third-person perspective while having to jump over pits and obstacles. Originally released in 1983 for the MSX computer, it was subsequently ported to various platforms the following year, including an arcade version, NES, and ColecoVision.
Gamebook
"The Adventures of You" series, authored by Edward Packard and R.A. Montgomery and initially published by Vermont Crossroads Press, laid much of the groundwork for the later surge in popularity of the gamebook format. The series was born with "Sugarcane Island" by Edward Packard, which was written in 1969 but did not see publication until 1976. The series later included "Journey Under the Sea" by R. A. Montgomery (1977). After the series' end, two standalone gamebooks authored by Packard would follow, both published by Lippincott: "Deadwood City" (1978) and "The Third Planet from Altair" (1979). While these early efforts apparently achieved some popularity with readers, they (and the gamebook format in general) still did not have a publisher with the marketing strength required to make them available to mass audiences.
Packard and Montgomery took the idea of publishing interactive books to Bantam, and thus the Choose Your Own Adventure (CYOA) series was born in 1979, beginning with "The Cave of Time". The series became immensely popular worldwide and several titles were translated into more than 25 languages. The series reached the peak of its popularity with children in the eighties. It was during this period that Bantam released several other interactive series to capitalize on the popularity of the medium (a few examples are: Choose your Own Adventure for Younger Readers, Time Machine and Be An Interplanetary Spy). Many other American publishers released their own series to compete with CYOA. One of the most popular competitors seems to have been TSR, who released several branching-path novels based on their own role-playing games. The most famous TSR series was Endless Quest. Another strong competitor was Ballantine with their Find Your Fate series, which featured adventures in the Indiana Jones, James Bond and Doctor Who universes. Famous author R. L. Stine wrote several books for this line, including "The Badlands of Hark", as well as for other series such as Wizards, Warriors and You. Several Choose your Own Adventure spin-offs and many competing series were translated into other languages.
Adventureland (video game)
Adventureland is the first text adventure game for microcomputers, released by Scott Adams in 1978. It was very successful and led Adams to form Adventure International, which went on to publish thirteen similar games in the "Adventure" series, each in different settings.
Video game culture
The first interactive movie game was "Dragon's Lair", originally released in the arcades in 1983, making it the first game to use a laserdisc and animation by Don Bluth, a man who worked for Disney on features like "Robin Hood", "The Rescuers", and "Pete's Dragon", but later worked for other film companies like United Artists ("All Dogs Go to Heaven") and Universal Studios ("The Land Before Time"). In "Dragon's Lair", you control the actions of a daring knight named Dirk, to save a princess from an evil dragon, hence the name of the game. Since the dawn of this exact game, more and more companies were influenced by the technology used, and decided to make their own interactive movie games for arcades and consoles.
Mystery House
"Computer Gaming World" in 1996 ranked it fourth on the magazine's list of the most innovative computer games. "GamePro" named "Mystery House" the 51st most important game of all time in 2007, for introducing a visual component to adventure games and for featuring graphics at a time when most computer games did not. Though the game is often considered the first adventure game to use graphics, dungeon crawl role-playing video games had already been using graphics prior to its release. Applying graphics to an adventure game, however, was unprecedented as previous story-based adventure games were entirely text-based.
Microsoft Adventure
"Microsoft Adventure" is an implementation for personal computers of the PDP-10 mainframe game "Colossal Cave Adventure". Microsoft originally released "Microsoft Adventure" in 1979 for the TRS-80 and the Apple II under its new division, Microsoft Consumer Products. It was written for the company by Gordon Letwin of Softwin Associates, and was available for the list price of US$30. IBM later included "Microsoft Adventure" as the only game in the initial software release for its IBM Personal Computer. It was released in 1981 for the initial version of IBM PC DOS (1.0) as a launch title, making it the first commercial game available for the new computer. It was released on a single-sided 5 inch disk, required 32K RAM, and booted directly from the disk; it could not be opened from DOS. Microsoft's "Adventure" contained 130 rooms, 15 treasures, 40 useful objects and 12 problems to be solved. The progress of two games could be saved on a diskette.
Gamebook
Solitaire adventures were a parallel development. This type of book is intended to allow a single person to use the rules of a role-playing game to experience an adventure without need of a referee. The first role-playing game solitaire adventures to be published were those using the "Tunnels and Trolls" system, beginning with the book "Buffalo Castle" in 1976, making "Tunnels and Trolls" the first role-playing game to support solitaire play. Flying Buffalo released 24 solo adventure books (plus several pocket size adventures) in the period 1976–1993. A number of the adventures are still in print today. They were very successful among players of role-playing games and inspired many imitators.
Castlevania: The Adventure
Castlevania: The Adventure is a platform game released for the Game Boy in . It is the first "Castlevania" title for the system. "Castlevania: The Adventure" was re-released in color as part of the "Konami GB Collection" compilations in Japan and Europe. A remake titled "" was released as a WiiWare game for the Wii.
Dragon Quest
The original "Dragon Quest" game is often cited as the first console RPG. GameSpot called the original "Dragon Quest" one of the fifteen most influential games of all time and the "most influential role-playing games of all time", stating that nearly all Japanese RPGs since then have drawn from its gameplay "in some shape or form." "Next Generation" said it was "probably the first ever 'Japanese style' RPG", and listed the series collectively as number 56 on their "Top 100 Games of All Time". They commented, "While never as ambitious as Square's "Final Fantasy" series, later installments of "Dragon Warrior" can't be beaten for sheer size (if you only had enough cash to buy you one game that had to last you a month, you bought a "Dragon Warrior" title)." In response to a survey, Gamasutra cites Quinton Klabon of Dartmouth College as stating "Dragon Warrior" translated the "D&D" experience to video games and set the genre standards. Games such as "Mother", "Breath of Fire" and "Lufia & the Fortress of Doom" were inspired by various "Dragon Quest" titles. "Dragon Quest III"s class-changing system would shape other RPGs, especially the "Final Fantasy" series. "Dragon Quest IV"s "Tactics" system, where the player can set the AI routines for NPCs, is seen as a precursor to "Final Fantasy XII"'s "Gambits" system. "Dragon Quest V" is cited as having monster recruiting and training mechanics that inspired monster-collecting RPGs such as "Pokémon", "Digimon", and "Dokapon". "Dragon Quest V" also introduced the concept of a playable pregnancy. The real world and dream world setting of "Dragon Quest VI" is considered an influence on the later Square RPGs "Chrono Cross" and "Final Fantasy X". The "Dragon Quest" series was recognized by Guinness World Records, with six world records in the Guinness World Records Gamer's Edition. These records include "Best Selling Role Playing Game on the Super Famicom", "Fastest Selling Game in Japan", and "First Video Game Series to Inspire a Ballet".
Colossal Cave Adventure
One of the first efforts to port the code was by Jim Gillogly of the RAND Corporation in 1977. Gillogly, with agreement from Crowther and Woods, spent several weeks porting the code to C to run on the more generic Unix architecture. It can be found as part of the BSD Operating Systems distributions, or as part of the "bsdgames" package under most Linux distributions, under the command name "adventure". The game was also ported to Prime Computer's super-mini running PRIMOS in the late 1970s, utilising FORTRAN IV, and to IBM mainframes running VM/CMS in late 1978, utilizing PL/I. In the late 1970s a freeware Commodore PET version was produced by Jim Butterfield; some years later this version was ported to the Commodore 64. Microsoft also released versions of "Adventure" in 1979 for the Apple II Plus and TRS-80 computers.
Tomato Adventure
After AlphaDream developed and released their first video game title, "", Nintendo wanted AlphaDream's permission to develop an entirely new role-playing video game with them, titled . They got the name from an idea of a game structure that utilizes gimmicky, toy-like controls that make it an RPG with action elements. It was finished and almost ready to be released for the Game Boy Color in Japan, until Nintendo released the Game Boy Advance to make the Game Boy Color obsolete. After noticing that, Nintendo requested AlphaDream to redevelop and rename Gimmick Land as "Tomato Adventure" for the Game Boy Advance. Nintendo also requested AlphaDream to add some easily recognizable characters in which reflects the new title, so that the game would have a more marketable image. Those were Nintendo's largest requests. Other changes are the quality of the graphics and audio being enhanced. Only two screenshots of Gimmick Land were released to the public by the developers. On the release date of "Tomato Adventure", Nintendo and AlphaDream announced a contest where twenty winners won themselves 1 kg of sweet tomatoes from the Kochi Virtue Valley area. The contest ended on February 28, 2002. The reason "Tomato Adventure" hasn't been released in the west is because the targeted age group was considered too low. Problems with the battle system and the game not being received well at the time of release were other factors as well.
Emdrup
In 1943, the first Adventure Playground in the world, opened in Emdrup, inspired by the Danish landscape architect Carl Theodor Sørensen and in cooperation with the Copenhagen schoolteacher Hans Dragehjelm. The playground inspired child-care workers all over the world and is still in operation.
Frank Mentzer
The company's first product was the science fiction-themed "Cyborg Commando", designed primarily by Mentzer based on notes from Gygax, which was published in 1987. New Infinites began working on a third line of products, which began with an adventure written by Mentzer called "The Convert" (1987); Mentzer wrote the adventure as an RPGA tournament for "D&D", but TSR was not interested in publishing it. Mentzer got verbal permission to publish it with New Infinities, but since the permission was not in writing TSR filed an injunction to prevent the adventure's sale, although the injunction was later lifted. The next project was a new fantasy role-playing game spanning multiple genres called "Dangerous Journeys". It was originally to have been called "Dangerous Dimensions", but the name was changed in response to the threat of a lawsuit from TSR, Inc. who claimed that the "DD" abbreviation would be too similar to "D&D." When the product was released by Game Designers' Workshop, TSR immediately sued for copyright infringement. The suit was eventually settled out of court, with TSR buying the complete rights to the "Dangerous Journeys" system from New Infinities and then permanently shelving the entire project. This led to the demise of NIPI, and Mentzer decided to leave the game industry.
Easter egg (media)
In addition to Robinett's name appearing in "Adventure" (1979), there are many other instances where the Easter egg idea has been implemented. The first text adventure game, "Colossal Cave Adventure" (1976), from which "Adventure" was fashioned, included several secret words. One of these was "xyzzy", a command which enabled the player to move between two points in the game world. In 2004, an Easter egg displaying programmer Bradley Reid-Selth's surname was found in "Video Whizball" (1978), a game for the Fairchild Channel F system. According to research by Ed Fries, the first known Easter egg in an arcade game was in "Starship 1" (1977), programmed by Ron Milner. By triggering the cabinet's controls in the right order, the player could get the message "Hi Ron!" to appear on the screen. Fries described it as "the earliest arcade game yet known that clearly meets the definition of an Easter egg". The existence of this Easter egg wasn't published until 2017, leading Fries to suggest that, as more than one hundred arcade games predate "Starship 1", earlier Easter eggs may still be undiscovered. Fries noted that some Atari arcade cabinets were resold under the Kee Games label and included changes to the hardware that would make the game appear different from the Atari version. "Anti-Aircraft II" (1975) included a means to modify the circuit board to make the airplanes in the game appear as alien UFOs. Fries surmised that this feature may have been intended for a Kee Games release. For this reason, and because it required a hardware modification, Fries questioned whether it met the definition of an Easter egg.
Wizard and the Princess
"Wizard and the Princess" is a prelude to the "King's Quest" series in both story and concept (though chronologically set several years before "King's Quest V"). It was also the first adventure game released with full color graphics.
Adventure (Atari 2600)
"Adventure" was conceived as a graphical version of the 1977 text adventure "Colossal Cave Adventure". It took developer Warren Robinett approximately one year to design and code the game, during which time he had to overcome a variety of technical limitations in the Atari 2600 console hardware, as well as difficulties with management within Atari. In this game, he introduced the first widely known video game Easter egg, a secret room containing text crediting himself for the game's creation. Robinett's Easter egg became a tradition for future Atari 2600 titles.
Tabletop role-playing game
Another early game was "Traveller", designed by Marc Miller and first published in 1977 by Game Designer's Workshop. This was originally intended to be a system for playing generic space-opera-themed science-fiction adventures (in the same sense that "Dungeons & Dragons" was a system for generic fantasy adventures), but an optional setting called "the Third Imperium" that was detailed in subsequent supplements became strongly identified with the game. The changes in this setting over time, especially those involving "the Fifth Frontier War" as depicted in the "Journal of the Travellers Aid Society", arguably constitute the first use of metaplot in a role-playing game. 
Meanwhile, "Call of Cthulhu" and "Paranoia" offered different role-playing experiences, in which the story arc of a group's investigation would lead to death and/or madness, or where comical infighting within a group would be expected and reinforced within the genre conventions of "a darkly humorous future". At the same time, games using the fictional worlds of "Star Trek", DC Heroes, the Marvel Universe or "The Lord of the Rings" expanded the range of possibilities for Table-top gaming. Games such as "GURPS" and "Champions" introduced game balance between player characters; later, "" and similar games emphasized storytelling, plot and character development over rules and combat. More recently, rules innovations have combined with literary techniques to develop games such as "Dogs in the Vineyard" and "Polaris" that rely on the contributions of players to enhance moral agency in a process of emergent storytelling.
Sierra Entertainment
In 1980, On-Line Systems released their first game in the "Hi-Res Adventure" series, "Mystery House." Roberta wrote the script for the adventure game in three weeks, then presented it to Ken. At this point, Roberta convinced Ken to help her develop the game in the evenings after work. She worked on the text and the graphics, and told Ken how to put it all together to make it the game she wanted. They worked on it for about three months and, on May 5, 1980, "Mystery House" was ready for shipment. "Mystery House" was an instant hit. It was the first computer adventure game to have graphics, although they were crude, monochrome, static line drawings. It sold about 15,000 copies and earned $167,000.
Dungeons &amp; Dragons
The role-playing movement initiated by "D&D" would lead to release of the science fiction game "Traveller" (1977), the fantasy game "RuneQuest" (1978), and subsequent game systems such as Chaosium's "Call of Cthulhu" (1981), "Champions" (1982), "GURPS" (1986), and "" (1991). "Dungeons & Dragons" and the games it influenced fed back into the genre's origin – miniatures wargames – with combat strategy games like "Warhammer Fantasy Battles". "D&D" also had a large impact on modern video games.
Adventure game
The first known graphical adventure game was "Mystery House" (1980), by Sierra On-Line, then at the time known as On-Line Systems. The game featured static vector graphics atop a simple command line interface, building on the text adventure model. Sierra would continue to produce similar games under the title "Hi-Res Adventure". Vector graphics would give way to bitmap graphics which also enabled for simple animations to show the player-character moving in response to typed commands. Here, Sierra's "King's Quest" (1984), though not the first game of its type, is recognized as a commercially successful graphical adventure game, enabling Sierra to expand on more titles. Other examples of early games include Koei's "Night Life" and "Danchi Tsuma no Yuwaku" (1982), "Sherwood Forest" (1982), Yuji Horii's "Portopia Serial Murder Case" (1983), "The Return of Heracles" (which faithfully portrayed Greek mythology) by Stuart Smith (1983), Dale Johnson's "Masquerade" (1983), Antonio Antiochia's "Transylvania" (1982, re-released in 1984), and "Adventure Construction Set" (1985), one of the early hits of Electronic Arts.
Gamebook
Another early role-playing game with solitaire modules made for it was "The Fantasy Trip". The first such module was Death Test, published in 1978. Eight adventures were released in total. One thing that set them apart was the need for miniatures and a hexmap, in order to take advantage of the combat and movement systems. These adventures were also very popular and influential.
Wander (1974 video game)
Wander is an adventure game by Peter Langston. It is one of the earliest text adventure video games in existence, predating Colossal Cave Adventure. The game was coded in BASIC. For a long time, the original files had been kept in an archived email by one of Langston's friends. The files new exist on Github. The game used a Mainframe computer with multiple databases to create the worlds that formed the game. The game was distributed in Langston's PSL Games collection for Unix.
The Oregon Trail (series)
The Oregon Trail is a series of educational computer games. The first game was originally developed by Don Rawitsch, Bill Heinemann, and Paul Dillenberger in 1971 and produced by the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium (MECC) in 1974. The original game was designed to teach school children about the realities of 19th-century pioneer life on the Oregon Trail. The player assumes the role of a wagon leader guiding a party of settlers from Independence, Missouri, to Oregon's Willamette Valley via a covered wagon in 1848.
Midwest Military Simulation Association
Dave Arneson joined when he was in high school. He produced a newsletter describing the group's Napoleonic and American Civil War games, as well as its play-by-mail Diplomacy games. In 1986, under the direction of Hal Thinglum, "The Midwest Wargamers' Association Newsletter" won the Charles S. Roberts Award as the best Best Amateur Wargaming Magazine. The younger members of the group began to meet at Arneson's house. More interested in wargaming than collecting or historical reenactment, these members played a critical role in the development of RPGs. Dave Wesely conducted what is considered to be the first role-playing game, set in Napoleonic Germany, in 1967. Arneson later developed a fantasy role-playing milieu called Blackmoor, and co-created Dungeons & Dragons with Gary Gygax in 1973. Dave Megarry conceived the idea of a dungeon crawl, and designed a board game around this idea called Dungeon!, published by TSR, Inc. in 1975. That same year TSR also published Star Probe by John Snider.
Adventure game
A notable adventure game released in 1983 was "Planet Mephius", authored by Eiji Yokoyama and published by T&E Soft for the FM-7 in July 1983. In addition to being one of the earliest titles to use a command menu system, its key innovation was the introduction of a point-and-click interface to the genre, utilizing a cursor to interact with objects displayed on the screen. A similar point-and-click cursor interface was later used in the adventure game "Wingman", released for the PC-8801 in 1984.
Expedition to the Barrier Peaks
"Expedition to the Barrier Peaks" was first played at the Origins II convention in 1976, where it was used to introduce "Dungeons & Dragons" players to the science fiction game "Metamorphosis Alpha". In 1980, TSR published the adventure, updated for first edition "Advanced Dungeons & Dragons" rules. The adventure was not updated for later rules systems, but a Wizards.com article did provide a conversion to "Future Tech". It included a separate booklet of illustrations, in both color and black and white. The adventure is an old-time favorite of many "Dungeons & Dragons" fans, including Stephen Colbert. It was ranked the fifth-best "Dungeons & Dragons" adventure of all time by "Dungeon" magazine in 2004, and received positive reviews from "White Dwarf" and "The Space Gamer" magazines. The other adventures in the "S" series include S1 "Tomb of Horrors", S2 "White Plume Mountain", and S4 "The Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth".
Labyrinth: The Computer Game
"Labyrinth" was the first adventure game produced by Lucasfilm, which became a critically acclaimed and commercially successful developer in the genre. The game's technology and mechanics influenced the company's subsequent title "Maniac Mansion", whose "SCUMM" engine was reused in many Lucasfilm adventure games. The word wheels were a predecessor to that game's point-and-click interface. Gary Winnick, an artist for "Labyrinth", went on to lead the production of "Maniac Mansion" with Ron Gilbert. Fox contributed to "Maniac Mansion" as well, and he later directed Lucasfilm's "Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders". Retrospectively, writers for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation regarded "Labyrinth" as a solid first attempt, but as inferior to "the real classics" made afterward by Lucasfilm.
Marco Polo (game)
According to one whimsical explanation, "legend has it that the famed explorer didn't really have a clue as to where he was going, much like [the "It" person]". WiseGeek says, "No one seems to know what the origins of the name are, although there are a number of apocryphal stories," adding "There does not appear to be any real link between the game of Marco Polo and the explorer of the same name, despite the creative efforts by some people, and it is hard to determine when the first game of Marco Polo was played."
Adventure game
Due to a lack of content restrictions, some of Japan's earliest adventure games were also bishoujo games with "eroge" content. In 1982, Koei released "Night Life", the first commercial erotic computer game. It was a graphic adventure, with sexually explicit images. That same year, they released another "eroge" title, "Danchi Tsuma no Yuwaku" ("Seduction of the Condominium Wife"), which was an early adventure game with color graphics, owing to the eight-color palette of the NEC PC-8001 computer, and role-playing video game elements. It became a hit, helping Koei become a major software company. Other now-famous companies such as Enix, Square and Nihon Falcom also produced similar "eroge" in the early 1980s before they became famous for their mainstream role-playing games. In some of their early "eroge", the adult content is meaningfully integrated into a thoughtful and mature storyline, though others often used it as a flimsy excuse for pornography.
Adventure game
Following the NES version of "Portopia" in 1985, and "Suishō no Dragon" in 1986, more adventure games followed on consoles from 1987.
Action-adventure game
According to "Wizardry" developer Roe R. Adams, early action-adventure games "were basically arcade games done in a fantasy setting," citing "Castlevania" (1986), "Trojan" (1986) and "Wizards & Warriors" (1987) as examples.
John Howard (adventure racer)
Very few individuals have dominated endurance sports in the way John dominated adventure racing. Since winning the first ever major adventure race held in the world, the Raid Gauloises in 1989, he went on to win every significant race in the sport, including Eco-Challenge (three times), the Raid Gauloises (three times), the Elf Authentique, the ESPN X-Games (twice) and the Southern Traverse. In addition, he has served as a course designer or advisor to numerous high-profile outdoor adventure events, including the Mild Seven Outdoor Quest, Action Asia and New Zealand's (which he won in 1984).
The Adventure Game
The Adventure Game was a game show that was originally broadcast on UK television channels BBC1 and BBC2 between 24 May 1980 and 18 February 1986. The story in each show was that the two celebrity contestants and a member of the public had travelled by space ship to the planet Arg. Their overall task varied with each series. For example, the team might be charged with finding a crystal needed to power their ship to return to Earth. The programme is often considered to have been a forerunner of "The Crystal Maze".
Roberta Williams
In the 1980s and 1990s, Roberta and her husband, Ken Williams, were leading figures in the development of graphical adventure games. In 1980, they founded the company On-Line Systems, which later became Sierra On-Line. The first Williams' title was "Mystery House" (1980), the first graphical adventure game. The second title, "Wizard and the Princess" (1980), added color graphics. But the first serious success was the "King's Quest" series, which featured a large expansive world that could be explored by players. "King's Quest I" (1984) was the first adventure game to have animation, and "King's Quest V" (1990) was the first to use an icon-based interface. Roberta Williams also designed such titles as "Mixed-Up Mother Goose" (1987), "The Colonel's Bequest" (1989), and "Phantasmagoria" (1995), which was the first in her career to be developed in the full-motion video technology. "Phantasmagoria" featured extreme violence and rape scenes. The game has received mixed reviews. Though Sierra was sold in 1996, Williams' production credits date to 1999, when she retired from Sierra On-Line. Roberta posed for the cover of the game "Softporn Adventure" by Chuck Benton, published by On-line Systems. She also posed much later with her children as Mother Goose for the cover photograph of "Mixed-Up Mother Goose". The end sequence of "Leisure Suit Larry 3" features her as an in-game character. She was also a source of inspiration for Cameron's character in the AMC television drama "Halt and Catch Fire".
Adventureland (video game)
"Adventureland", Adams' first program, is a slightly scaled-down, machine-language game similar to the "original" "Adventure" program.
The source code for "Adventureland" was published in "SoftSide" magazine in 1980 and the database format was subsequently used in other interpreters such as Brian Howarth's "Mysterious Adventures" series.
Adventures of Mana
Adventures of Mana is an action role-playing video game developed and published by Square Enix. It is a 3D remake of the 1991 Game Boy game "Final Fantasy Adventure", the first game in the "Mana" series. It was released worldwide for Android and iOS on February 4, 2016; a PlayStation Vita version was also released on the same date in Japan, and in June 2016 in North America, South America and Europe. In addition to these releases, Square Enix has said that they are considering developing versions for PlayStation 4 and personal computers.
Dog Star Adventure
Dog Star Adventure is a text adventure game written by Lance Micklus in TRS-80 BASIC and published as the cover article in the May 1979 issue of "SoftSide" magazine. It is historically notable as the first example of the source code to a text adventure being published, and as a result, many later text adventures are based on its concepts.
Odyssey: The Compleat Apventure
Although primitive by today's standards, "Odyssey" was considered cutting-edge for its time, making use of the Apple II's two graphics modes (high-resolution and low-resolution), and text. The game was written in Integer BASIC and was one of the first microcomputer games to be created using multiple programs, requiring floppy disc activation and access mid-game. (This feature, however, led to a way in which the player could cheat: by removing the disk when the computer required access, a cursor flashes on screen; typing "goto 770" would fool the computer into thinking that the player had just opened up a treasure box. This is one of the earliest known examples of a cheat code.) Prior to this, most games were self-contained, single programs; Odyssey was split into several different programs and took up an entire disk. The game also made use of rudimentary sound effects.
Interactive fiction
Around 1975, Will Crowther, a programmer and an amateur caver, wrote the first text adventure game, "Adventure" (originally called "ADVENT" because a filename could only be six characters long in the operating system he was using, and later named "Colossal Cave Adventure"). Having just gone through a divorce, he was looking for a way to connect with his two young children. Over the course of a few weekends, he wrote a text based cave exploration game that featured a sort of guide/narrator who talked in full sentences and who understood simple two word commands that came close to natural English. Adventure was programmed in Fortran for the PDP-10. Crowther's original version was an accurate simulation of part of the real Colossal Cave, but also included fantasy elements (such as axe-wielding dwarves and a magic bridge).
Electronic literature
In 1975–76, Will Crowther programmed a text game named "Colossal Cave Adventure" (also known as "Adventure"). Considered one of the earlier computer adventure games, it possessed a story that had the reader make choices on which way to go. These choices could lead the reader to the end, or to his or her untimely death. This non-linear format was later mimicked by the text adventure game, "Zork", created by a group of MIT students in 1977–79. These two games are considered to be the first examples of interactive fiction as well as some of the earliest video games.
The earliest pieces of electronic literature as presently defined were created using Storyspace, software developed by Jay David Bolter and Michael Joyce in the 1980s. They sold the software in 1990 to Eastgate Systems, a small software company that has maintained and updated the code in Storyspace up to the present. Storyspace and other similar programs use hypertext to create links within text. Literature using hypertext is frequently referred to as hypertext fiction. Originally, these stories were often disseminated on discs and later on CD. Hypertext fiction is still being created today using not only Storyspace, but other programs such as Twine.
Rogue (video game)
Toy subsequently enrolled in computer science at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC) in the late 1970s. Working first on UCSC's PDP-11 and then its VAX-11, Toy began exploring what games were available over ARPANET, the predecessor of the current Internet. One game that intrigued him was "Colossal Cave Adventure" (also known as "Adventure") (1976) by William Crowther and Don Woods. "Adventure", considered the first text-based adventure game, challenged the player to explore a cave system through descriptions given by the computer and commands issued by the player. Toy was impressed by the game and started writing his own.
Artic Computing
Adventures A through D were written for the ZX81 but were quickly ported to the ZX Spectrum platform on its release (as well as other systems). By comparison with later Spectrum adventure games such as "The Hobbit", they are basic and short. However they are considered by many to be the start of the adventure game genre on the Spectrum in particular and thus were an important step in the growth of adventure games.The parser in their adventures is of a basic 2-word design, such as "Use Axe". Other developers later produced multiple word parsers, as featured in games by Infocom and Magnetic Scrolls. However the programs from adventures A-F were built using a custom built design. Adventure G (Ground Zero) and later were built using The Quill, an Adventure Game Creator produced by Gilsoft.
Adventure game
As computers gained the ability to use pointing devices and point-and-click interfaces, graphical adventure games moved away from including the text interface and simply provided appropriate commands the player could interact with on-screen. The first known game with such an interface was "Enchanted Scepters" (1984) from Silicon Beach Software, which used drop-down menus for the player to select actions from while using a text window to describe results of those actions. In 1985, ICOM Simulations released "Déjà Vu", the first of its MacVenture series, utilized a more complete point-and-click interface, including the ability to drag objects around on the current scene, and was a commercial success. LucasArts' "Maniac Mansion", released in 1987, used a novel "verb-object" interface, showing all possible commands the player could use to interact with the game along with the player's inventory, which became a staple of LucasArts' own adventure games and in the genre overall. The point-and-click system also worked well for game consoles, with games like Chunsoft's "Portopia Serial Murder Case" (1985) and Square's "Suishō no Dragon" (1986), both on the Nintendo Entertainment System using the controller input instead of text-based actions.
Adventure game
The term "Adventure game" originated from the 1970s text computer game "Colossal Cave Adventure", often referred to simply as "Adventure", which pioneered a style of gameplay that was widely imitated and became a genre in its own right. The video game genre is therefore defined by its gameplay, unlike the literary genre, which is defined by the subject it addresses, the activity of adventure.
Action-adventure game
Although noting some similarity to "Adventure", IGN UK argues that "The Legend of Zelda" (1986) "helped to establish a new subgenre of action-adventure", becoming a success due to how it combined elements from different genres to create a compelling hybrid, including exploration, adventure-style inventory puzzles, an action component, a monetary system, and simplified RPG-style level building without the experience points. "The Legend of Zelda" was the most prolific action-adventure game series through to the 2000s.
Hentai
Due to the vague definitions of any erotic game, depending on its classification, citing the first erotic game is a subjective one. If the definition applies to adult themes, the first game was "Softporn Adventure". Released in America in 1981 for the Apple II, this was a text-based comedic game from On-Line Systems. If eroge is defined as the first graphical depictions and/or Japanese adult themes, it would be Koei's 1982 release of "Night Life". Sexual intercourse is depicted through simple graphic outlines. Notably, "Night Life" was not intended to be erotic so much as an instructional guide "to support married life". A series of "undressing" games appeared as early as 1983, such as "Strip Mahjong". The first anime-styled erotic game was Tenshitachi no Gogo, released in 1985 by JAST. In 1988, ASCII released the first erotic role-playing game, "Chaos Angel". In 1989, AliceSoft released the turn-based RPG "Rance" and ELF released "Dragon Knight".
Roguelike
The creation of roguelike games came from hobbyist programmers and computer hackers, attempting to create games for the nascent computer field in the early 1980s, particularly influenced by the 1975 text adventure game "Colossal Cave Adventure" (often simply titled "Adventure"), and from the high fantasy setting of the tabletop game "Dungeons & Dragons". Some elements of the roguelike genre were present in dungeon crawlers written for the PLATO system. This includes "pedit5" (1975) believed to be the first dungeon crawl game, and featured random monster encounters, though only used a single fixed dungeon level. "pedit5" inspired similar PLATO-based dungeon crawlers "dnd" (1975), "orthanc" (1978), "Moria" (1978), and "avatar" (1979). It is unclear if these PLATO games inspired the roguelike genre as there is no evidence that the early roguelike creators had access to these games. The core roguelike games were developed independently of each other, many of the developers not learning about their respective projects until several years after the genre took off.
LucasArts adventure games
LucasArts' first adventure game was the 1986 title "". The game's development was led by David Fox, with contributions from Douglas Adams, Christopher Cerf, Noah Falstein and Brenda Laurel. Based on the film of the same name, it is LucasArts' first video game adaptation of a film. It is the only adventure game not published by LucasArts, as "Labyrinth" was published and distributed by Activision. "Labyrinth" differs significantly from later LucasArts adventure games as it uses text parser gameplay as the main means of play.
"Labyrinth" was followed in 1987 by "Maniac Mansion". "Maniac Mansion" was the creation of Ron Gilbert and Gary Winnick, and marked the debut of SCUMM, the game engine that powered all but two of LucasArts later adventure games. The game was also the first LucasArts adventure game to be released for DOS. "Maniac Mansion" was LucasArts' first full graphic adventure game, using a point-and-click interface rather than the text-based gameplay seen in "Labyrinth". A menu of verbs allows the player to choose how to interact with the game's environment. "Maniac Mansion" aims to parody the horror genre. The game was subject to several enhancements and re-releases, and was included as a game within a game in its sequel, "Day of the Tentacle".
Everyone's A Wally
"Everyone's a Wally" was the first arcade adventure game to feature multiple playable characters - a revolutionary feature at the time. Players began in control of Wally (a builder and handyman), but could switch to Wilma (his wife), and their friends Tom (a punk plumber), Dick (a dodgy bricklayer) and Harry (a hippie electrician) - these last three names drawn from the placeholder phrase Tom, Dick and Harry. Herbert (their baby son) also appeared in the game as a mobile hazard NPC. The player cannot freely change character; the player begins in control of Wally and in order to switch must be on the same screen as the desired character. Those not being controlled by the player wander randomly around the map controlled by extremely simple AI - another feature that at the time had never been seen before. Lives and health (called "endurance") were tracked independently for each character, but the game ended if any character died.
Colossal Cave Adventure
"Adventure" also inspired the development of online multiplayer games like MUDs, the precursors of the modern-day MMORPG. The Atari 2600 video game "Adventure" was an attempt to create a graphical version of "Adventure", and itself became the first known example of an action-adventure game, and introduced the fantasy genre to video game consoles. The "Carmen Sandiego" series, one of the first educational games, was inspired by transforming the caverns of "Colossal Cave Adventure" into a globe-spanning clue-and-treasure hunt.
Interactive fiction
Adventure International was founded by Scott Adams (not to be confused with the creator of Dilbert). In 1978, Adams wrote "Adventureland", which was loosely patterned after (the original) "Colossal Cave Adventure". He took out a small ad in a computer magazine in order to promote and sell "Adventureland", thus creating the first commercial adventure game. In 1979 he founded Adventure International, the first commercial publisher of interactive fiction. That same year, "Dog Star Adventure" was published in source code form in "SoftSide", spawning legions of similar games in BASIC.
PDP-10
Will Crowther created "Adventure", the prototypical computer adventure game, for a PDP-10. Don Daglow created the first computer baseball game (1971) and "Dungeon" (1975), the first role-playing video game on a PDP-10. Walter Bright originally created "Empire" for the PDP-10. Roy Trubshaw and Richard Bartle created the first MUD on a PDP-10. "Zork" was written on the PDP-10. Infocom used PDP-10s for game development and testing.
Dave Arneson
Arneson wrote up the Blackmoor setting for Judges Guild in "The First Fantasy Campaign" (1977). In 1979 Arneson and Richard L. Snider, an original "Blackmoor" player, co-authored "Adventures in Fantasy", a role-playing game that attempted to recapture the "original spirit of the Role Playing Fantasy Game" that Arneson had envisioned in the early 1970s, instead of what "D&D" had become. In the early 1980s he established his own game company, Adventure Games – staffed largely by Arneson's friends, most of whom were also members of a Civil War reenactment group – that produced the miniatures games "Harpoon" (1981) and "Johnny Reb" (1983), as well as a new edition of his own "Adventures in Fantasy" role-playing game (1981). The company also put out about a half-dozen Tékumel related books, due to Arneson's friendship with M. A. R. Barker. Adventure Games was profitable, but Arneson found the workload to be excessive and finally sold the company to Flying Buffalo. Flying Buffalo picked up the rights to Adventure Games in 1985; because Arneson owned a portion of Flying Buffalo, he let them take care of the rest of the company's stock and IP when he shut the company down.
Adventure game
For markets in the Western hemisphere, the genre's popularity peaked during the late 1980s to mid-1990s when many considered it to be among the most technically advanced genres, but had become a niche genre in the early 2000s due to the popularity of first-person shooters and became difficult to find publishers to support such ventures. Since then, a resurgence in the genre has occurred spurred on by success of independent video game development, particularly from crowdfunding efforts, the wide availability of digital distribution enabling episodic approaches, and the proliferation of new gaming platforms including portable consoles and mobile devices; "The Walking Dead" is considered to be a key title that rejuvenated the genre.
Xyzzy (computing)
Modern usage is primarily from one of the earliest computer games, "Colossal Cave Adventure", in which the idea is to explore a cave with many rooms, collecting the treasures found there. By typing "xyzzy" at the appropriate time, the player could move instantly between two otherwise distant points. As "Colossal Cave Adventure" was both one of the first adventure games and one of the first interactive fiction pieces, hundreds of later interactive fiction games included responses to the command "xyzzy" in tribute.
Get Lamp
The name "Get Lamp" comes from the first inventory pickup in arguably the first-ever adventure game, Will Crowther's "Colossal Cave Adventure" (1975), more commonly known as simply "Adventure". The lamp appears as a kind of Easter Egg in every interview. The film starts off with a tour of part of the real-life Mammoth Cave system in Kentucky that "Adventure" was based on. The soundtrack includes Creative Commons-licensed work from Zoë Blade (who started out writing Amiga .MOD files) and Tony Longworth.
Adventure game
Japan's first domestic computer adventure games to be released were ASCII's "" (表参道アドベンチャー) and "Minami Aoyama Adventure" (南青山アドベンチャー), released for the PC-9801 in 1982. Another early Japanese adventure that same year was MicroCabin's "Mystery House", which was unrelated to (but inspired by) the On-Line Systems game of the same name. MicroCabin released a sequel, "Mystery House II", for the MSX that same year. The following year, the Japanese company Starcraft released an enhanced remake of On-Line Systems' "Mystery House" with more realistic art work and depiction of blood.
MUD
"Colossal Cave Adventure", created in 1975 by Will Crowther on a DEC PDP-10 computer, was the first widely used adventure game. The game was significantly expanded in 1976 by Don Woods. Also called "Adventure", it contained many D&D features and references, including a computer controlled dungeon master.
List of video game genres
Because they put little pressure on the player in the form of action-based challenges or time constraints, adventure games have had the unique ability to appeal to people who do not normally play video games. The genre peaked in popularity with the 1993 release of "Myst", the best-selling PC game of all time up to that point. The simple point and click interface, detailed worlds and casual pace made it accessible, and its sense of artistic surrealism caused news outlets such as "Wired Magazine", "The New York Times" and the "San Francisco Chronicle" to declare that the gaming industry had matured. It had four proper sequels, but none managed to experience the same level of success. The success of "Myst" also inspired many others to create similar games with first person perspectives, surreal environments and minimal or no dialogue, but these neither recaptured the success of "Myst" nor of earlier personality-driven adventures.
Early history of video games
The history of video games spans a period of time between the invention of the first electronic games and today, covering a long period of invention and changes. Video gaming reached mainstream popularity in the 1970s and 1980s, when arcade video games, gaming consoles and home computer games were introduced to the general public. Since then, video gaming has become a popular form of entertainment and a part of modern culture in most parts of the world. The early history of video games, therefore, covers the period of time between the first interactive electronic game with an electronic display in 1947, the first true video games in the early 1950s, and the rise of early arcade video games in the 1970s ("Pong" and the beginning of the first generation of video game consoles with the Magnavox Odyssey, both in 1972). During this time there were a wide range of devices and inventions corresponding with large advances in computing technology, and the actual first video game is dependent on the definition of "video game" used.
Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge
In 1992 "Computer Gaming World" named it the year's best adventure game, praising its "challenging puzzles and wonderful sense of humor, along with a stunning visual presentation". In 1996 the magazine ranked it as the 74th best game of all time. In 1994, "PC Gamer UK" named "Monkey Island 2" the fourth best computer game of all time. The editors wrote, "Anyone who claims to have an interest in adventuring cannot afford to be without this." In 2011, Adventure Gamers named "Monkey Island 2" the eighth-best adventure game ever released.
Warren Robinett
His first effort at Atari was "Slot Racers" for the Atari 2600. While he was working on it, he had discovered and played Crowther and Woods' "Colossal Cave Adventure" at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and decided that a graphical video game version "would be really cool". However, with 128 bytes of RAM and 4096 bytes of ROM, Atari's "Adventure" was a much simpler program, and with only a joystick for input, the set of "commands" was necessarily brief. "Adventure" was a hit upon its 1979 release, and eventually sold a million copies.
Sonic Adventure
Prior to the release of "Sonic Adventure", most 3D platform games focused on exploration and collecting items; "Sonic Adventure" changed this with its linear gameplay. According to "GamesRadar", it was one of the first sixth-generation console games and changed the industry "forever", despite its glitches. "Joystiq" wrote that both "Adventure" and the original "Sonic the Hedgehog" had innovated through effective linear level design and by feeling "good to play". In 2009, "GamePro" listed "Sonic Adventure" as the seventh-best platform game of all time, saying it had not aged well in certain aspects but its core gameplay remained among the best of the "Sonic" series. Several journalists ranked the game among the series' best, but "Kotaku" argued the addition of voice acting and greater focus on plot changed Sonic into "a flat, lifeless husk of a character, who spits out slogans and generally has only one personality mode, the radical attitude dude, the sad recycled image of vague '90s cultural concept".
Adventure (Atari 2600)
As the first action-adventure video game and first console fantasy game, "Adventure" established its namesake genre on video game consoles. In addition to being the first graphical adventure game on the Atari 2600 console, it is the first video game to contain a widely known Easter egg, and the first to allow a player to use multiple, portable, on-screen items while exploring an open-ended environment, making it one of the first examples, even as small and primitive as it is, of an open world game. The game has been voted the best Atari 2600 game in numerous polls, and has been noted as a significant step in the advancement of home video games. "GamePro" ranked it as the 28th most important video game of all time in 2007. In 2010, "1UP.com" listed it as one of the most important games ever made in its "The Essential 50" feature. "Entertainment Weekly" named "Adventure" as one of the top 10 games for the Atari 2600.
Colossal Cave Adventure
As described by Matt Barton in "Dungeons and Desktops: The History of Computer Role-Playing Games", "Colossal Cave Adventure" demonstrated the "creation of a virtual world and the means to explore it", and the inclusion of monsters and simplified combat. For this, it is considered the precursor of computer role-playing games. Glenn Wichman and Michael Toy state "Adventure" as an influence for their game "Rogue" in 1980, which would go on to become the namesake of the roguelike genre.
Curse of Enchantia
"Curse of Enchantia" was Core Design's first attempt in the adventure genre as they set up to compete with LucasArts and Sierra On-Line. The game features several highly unconventional and controversial game mechanics and design choices for an adventure title from that era, including having many simple action game style sequences and being practically devoid of in-game text and conversations.
Adventure board game
Adventure board games often integrate various role-playing game mechanics, such as experience points and character creation into the board game format. The origins of these two types of game are related. In the early 1970s, Dave Arneson introduced his role-playing game, Blackmoor, to a group of players. One of those players, Gary Gygax, collaborated with Arneson to create "Dungeons & Dragons" (1974). Another member of that gaming group, Dave Meggary, translated the experience into the board game, "Dungeon!" (1975), the first adventure board game. In fact, the term "adventure gaming" in the 1970s referred to what later became known as tabletop role-playing games, and only later became associated with board games.
Adventure game
"Colossal Cave Adventure" set concepts and gameplay approaches that would become staples of text adventures and interactive fiction. Following its release on ARPANET, numerous variations of "Colossal Cave Adventure" appeared throughout the late 1970s and early 1980s, with some of these later versions being re-christened "Colossal Adventure" or "Colossal Caves". These variations were enabled by the increase in microcomputing that allowed programmers to work on home computers rather than mainframe systems. The genre gained commercial success with titles designed for home computers. Scott Adams launched Adventure International to publish text adventures including an adaptation of "Colossal Cave Adventure", while a number of MIT students formed Infocom to bring their game "Zork" from mainframe to home computers and was a commercial success.
History of alternate reality games
In 1996, Wizards of the Coast launched a proto-alternate reality game called "Webrunner: The Hidden Agenda" to promote their game "Netrunner". It cast players as hackers through seven puzzle-themed "gates" to get the secret data ("agenda"). The popular game was the first online game tied into a product release, making the front page of the New York Times technology section. A sequel, "Webrunner II: The Forbidden Code", followed on to promote the release of the "Proteus" expansion of the game.
Laura's Happy Adventures
Laura's Happy Adventures is an adventure game developed by Ubi Soft Montreal and published by Ubi Soft, and released as part of the Playmobil Interactive series of products. The game was originally released in 1998 becoming the first adventure video game to be produced primarily for young girls as a target audience. The setting was based on Playmobil's Victorian dollhouse line. The game's storyline revolved around a good-natured young girl named Laura as she solved the mystery of a magic diamond by helping the people around her, both within her family and the outside villagers, blending real-world everyday life with fantasy elements. A Game Boy Color-exclusive version, simply re-titled "Laura", was produced and released in 2000.
Dungeons &amp; Dragons (1974)
The original "Dungeons & Dragons" boxed set was the first role-playing game, a fantasy system with a medieval European flavor. This set introduced concepts which would become standard, including abilities (such as strength, intelligence, and dexterity); character classes (fighting-man, magic-user, cleric) and levels; races (human, dwarf, elf, halfling); armor class; monsters and treasure; subterranean dungeons of halls, rooms, and doors replete with tricks and traps; and magic items, such as intelligent swords. The set also includes rules for wilderness travel by land and sea, hiring specialists and men-at-arms, building fortifications and setting up baronies. Movement rates and areas are given in inches, like that of the miniatures rules from which the system descended.
Adventure game
There are a number of hybrid graphical adventure games, borrowing from two or more of the above classifications. For example, the "Ace Attorney" series of games, while presenting itself as a visual novel, includes elements of point-and-click adventure games. The "Zero Escape" series wraps several escape-the-room puzzles within the context of a visual novel. The "Adventures of Sherlock Holmes" series has the player use point-and-click type interfaces to locate clues, and minigame-type mechanics to manipulate those clues to find more relevant information.
While most adventure games typically do not include any time-based interactivity by the player, action-adventure games are a hybrid of action games with adventure games that often require to the player to react quickly to events as they occur on screen. The action-adventure genre is broad, spanning many different subgenres, but typically these games utilize strong storytelling and puzzle-solving mechanics of adventure games among the action-oriented gameplay concepts. The foremost title in this genre was "Adventure", a graphic home console game developed based on the text-based "Colossal Cave Adventure", while the first "The Legend of Zelda" brought the action-adventure concept to a broader audience.
Disney's Animated Storybook
The first full-length Disney animated film to be adapted into an adventure game was "The Black Cauldron"; it wasn't until Disney's Animated Storybook that Disney achieved a "stunning visual quality" that was comparable to the theatrical films, according to "Disney Stories: Getting to Digital". The Boston Herald thought the games were "beautifully produced", though did not consider them edutainment. "Daily News" felt the series offered "terrific" examples of the interactive storybook genre, which read as pages out of a printed children's book. Coming Soon Magazine felt the series "has many things to attract young children like animal characters and great artwork". Beth Kljajic from Adventure Learning Club said the games were "very poorly written". Entertainment Weekly said the series offered stripped-down bare-bones retellings. "The Mirror" called the series"delightful", "film-quality", and "colorful", while suggesting that young players would be "entranced" by the animated storybooks. "Knight Ridder Tribune" said the games' "lush animation" succeeded in "capturing the warm and fuzzy texture" of the source material. "The Columbian" writer Mike Langberg wrote that the games "faithfully reproduces the story, visual style, voices and music" of the original. A "Knight Ridder Tribune" article written by John J. Fried and William R. Macklin commented that while "Pocahontas" was "beautifully rendered", it was "poorer" than "Winnie the Pooh and the Honey Tree" due to not featuring any songs. 
"Entertainment Weekly" commented that "Disney's Animated Storybook" contained "all the familiar scenes" from the movies they were based on, albeit augmented by entertaining point-and-click activities. When comparing the "Hunchback" and "Dalmatians" Storybooks (which were released around the same time in 1997), a writer from the Sun-Sentinel said "the "Hunchback"'s tale is deeper, more lustrously animated and gives kids more to do than "Dalmatian"". Meanwhile, a reviewer from "Technology & Learning" described the two games as "appealing" and "beautifully rendered". "The Austin Chronicle" noted that the style elements of the originals are "vividly woven in". "The Washington Post" said the illustrations are "nothing short of excellent" "AllGame" reviewer Brad Cook commented that the games brought the films they were based on to life. Super PC noted that the game could only work properly with a 16-bit sound card, and with a graphics card that could handle the .AVI files; the newspaper felt it was unreasonable to require a high-end PC for a children's educational game, and noting the wasted space on the CD thought it would be better to have released a less-quality game that could work with normal configurations. Mark Manarick praised the games for the cartoon graphics, characters, and sound taken directly from their movies. Dayton Daily said the games has "terrific and friendly voice-over work. Working Mother felt games were "absolutely addictive" deeming the audiovisuals "fun" and "zany". "The Lion King animated storybook: A case study of aesthetic and economic power" felt the Lion King animated story book was inferior to other companies' animated story books in technical detail. The Chicago Tribune felt that the "Dalmatians" CD-ROM was very successful "in seamlessly guiding players into and out of each screen" due to their entrances and exits integrated into doorways. The paper felt that in "Tigger Too"'s case "the quality animation and sweetly familiar characters will give the program a lot more mileage among youthful Pooh fans than it otherwise deserves". Video Business favourably compared the series' animations positively to 1996's . Reviewing "Winnie the Pooh and Tigger Too" - the last game in the series - "The Washington Post" criticised its "charmless[ness]" and "leadenness", adding that its "jerky, disjointed narration are confusing to follow because characters move abruptly from scene to scene without much of a connecting theme". In 1997, The Times London deemed 101 Dalmatians as "Just about the best Disney Interactive title to date". Consumer Reports noted that the quality of the series fluctuates between games, praising 101 Dalmatian while finding fault with Hercules' writing and Toy Story's user friendliness. The Seattle Times suggested that "While the content of these products is fairly shallow, Disney sets high standards for the graphics and animation".
The Adventures of Captain Comic
The Adventures of Captain Comic is an action-adventure platform game initially released for MS-DOS in 1988 as shareware. Developed by Michael Denio, it is one of the first side-scrolling platform games for the IBM PC. Later a version for the Nintendo Entertainment System was published by Color Dreams as an unlicensed title.
Michael Denio wrote in the introduction to the game's manual:
Captain Comic is on a mission to the planet Tambi, where the quest begins. Comic must find three artifacts: the Mystical Gems of Lascorbanos, the Thousand Coins of Tenure, the Crown of the Ages. To find them, he must travel through many varied environments. The game ends when Comic is in possession of the three treasures.
LucasArts adventure games
In 1989, while designing the first Monkey Island game, Ron Gilbert wrote an article titled Why Adventure Games Suck outlining what he perceived to be design flaws in adventure games of the time.
Dragon Quest Monsters
"Dragon Warrior Monsters", the first game in the series, was released in 1998 in Japan and in North America and the PAL region the next year for the Game Boy Color. The Japanese version was called "Dragon Quest Monsters". It was released for the Game Boy Color before the console itself was released, however the cartridge was backward-compatible with the older Game Boy in black-and-white. Its sequel, "Dragon Warrior Monsters 2", also for the Game Boy Color, was released in 2001 in both Japan and North America. There are two versions of the game, similar to "Pokémon Gold" and "Silver", called "Cobi's Journey" ("Ruka's Journey" in Japan) and "Tara's Adventure" ("Iru's Adventure in Japan"), named after the main characters the player controls. Each version features slight differences, such as monster appearances. Both games were developed by TOSE and published by Enix. "Dragon Quest Monsters 1+2", a remake of these two games with updated graphics and an interface, was released in 2002 in Japan, for the PlayStation. The game is compatible with the i-Mode adapter for the PlayStation, allowing players to upload monsters to the i-Mode cellular phone version, "Dragon Quest Monsters i". The two games were remade on the Japanese Nintendo 3DS on 2012 and 2014, respectively.
Richard Adams (inventor)
Adams built an early 16 bit computer in his home which his brother, Scott Adams, used to program his first computer game (while attending Florida Institute of Technology in Melbourne Florida) before going on to found Adventure International, which became notable for its text adventure games (also known as Interactive Fiction).
LucasArts adventure games
In 1995, after a year-long hiatus from adventure games, LucasArts released "Full Throttle". "Full Throttle" was designed by Tim Schafer, and follows the story of Ben, a biker in a dystopian future who has been framed for murder. It was the first LucasArts adventure game to be released for Windows, although support for DOS was still retained. The game was the tenth to use the SCUMM engine, which had undergone further enhancements. The game kept a modified version of the streamlined interface used in "Sam & Max Hit the Road", but introduced a contextual pie menu that dictated how players interacted with the game. "Full Throttle" featured technology called INSANE (Interactive Streaming Animation Engine) to assist with cut scene animation and the game's action sequences. The game's musical score was produced by Peter McConnell, and incorporated a title theme by The Gone Jackals. "Full Throttle" was the first LucasArts adventure game to be distributed only on CD-ROM.
Later in 1995, "The Dig" was published. Production had started in 1989, however "The Dig" was plagued with development problems. The final version of the game was overseen by Sean Clark, although two previous versions had involved Noah Falstein, Brian Moriarty and Dave Grossman. The game's story itself was envisioned by Steven Spielberg, who had concluded that a film version would be prohibitively expensive. Spielberg's story focused on a group of astronauts becoming stranded on an alien world while on a mission to stop an asteroid hitting Earth. "The Dig" used the SCUMM engine and the INSANE technology. In addition, fellow Lucasfilm company Industrial Light & Magic was involved in the game's special effects. Michael Land composed the game's music, which included excerpts, many as short as one or two chords, from Richard Wagner's work.
Adventure game
Text adventures convey the game's story through passages of text, revealed to the player in response to typed instructions. Early text adventures, "Colossal Cave Adventure", "Hugo's House of Horrors" and Scott Adams' games, used a simple verb-noun parser to interpret these instructions, allowing the player to interact with objects at a basic level, for example by typing "get key". Later text adventures, and modern interactive fiction, use natural language processing to enable more complex player commands like "take the key from the desk". Notable examples of advanced text adventures include most games developed by Infocom, including "Zork" and "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy". With the onset of graphic adventures, the text adventure fell to the wayside, though the medium remains popular as a means of writing Interactive Fiction (IF), which tend to be focused more on the narrative through player exploration and discovery rather than puzzle solving. Interactive fiction may include puzzles, but these tend to be incorporated as part of the narrative in comparison to being specifically added as gameplay that must be solved to continue within adventure games.
Zork
The first adventure game, "Colossal Cave Adventure", was written by Will Crowther in FORTRAN on the DEC PDP-10 at BBN in 1975. "Colossal Cave" is a basic treasure hunt that takes place in an analog of Mammoth Cave. The game uses a simple two-word parser that later adventure games imitated. PDP users quickly spread "Colossal Cave" around their community, including a Stanford University computer used by Don Woods in 1976. Woods contacted Crowther and received his permission to make an improved version which also spread to many locations, including the PDP-10 systems at MIT.
Adventure game
Further, the improvements in digital distribution led to the concept of episodic adventure games, delivering between three and five "chapters" of a full game over a course of several months via online storefronts, Steam, Xbox Live Marketplace, PlayStation Store, and Nintendo eShop. Modeled off the idea of televisions episodes, episodic adventure games break the story into several parts, giving players a chance to digest and discuss the current story with others before the next episode is available, and further can enhance the narrative by creating cliffhangers or other dramatic elements to be resolved in later episodes. The first major successful episodic adventure games were those of Telltale Games, a developer founded by former LucasArts employees following the cancellation of "Sam & Max: Freelance Police". Telltale found critical success in "The Walking Dead" series released in 2012, which eschewed traditional adventure game elements and puzzles for a strong story and character-driven game, forcing the player to make on-the-spot decisions that would become determinants and affect not only elements in the current episode but future episodes and in sequels. The game also eschewed the typical dialog tree with a more natural language progression, which created a more believable experience. Its success was considered a revitalization of the genre, and would lead Telltale to produce more licensed games driven by story rather than puzzles.In the midst of releasing "", the company was forced to initiate a "majority studio closure" after their last investor had pulled out of funding. Telltale announced on September 21, 2018, that it had let go of all but 25 of its staff as part of this closure, with the remaining skeleton crew completing specific obligations, such as finishing the "Minecraft: Story Mode" project porting to Netflix. Telltale Games filed for bankruptcy in November 2018.
List of video game genres
One of the first action-adventure games was the Atari 2600 game "Adventure" (1980). It was directly inspired by the original text adventure, "Colossal Cave Adventure". In the process of adapting a text game to a console with only a joystick for control, designer Warren Robinett created an action-adventure game by incorporating action arcade game elements.
Visual novel
Some of Japan's earliest adventure games were erotic bishōjo games developed by Koei. In 1982, they released "Night Life", the first commercial erotic computer game. It was a graphic adventure, with sexually explicit images. That same year, they released another erotic title, "Danchi Tsuma no Yūwaku" ("Seduction of the Condominium Wife"), which was an early adventure game with colour graphics, owing to the eight-color palette of the NEC PC-8001 computer. It became a hit, helping Koei become a major software company. Other now-famous companies such as Enix, Square and Nihon Falcom also produced similar erotic games in the early 1980s before they became famous for their role-playing video games. While some early erotic games meaningfully integrate the erotic content into a thoughtful and mature storyline, others often used it as a flimsy excuse for pornography. The Japanese game Pai Touch! involves the protagonist gaining the ability to change the size of girls' breasts, and the adventures that ensue in trying to choose which girl to use the power on the most.
History of games
The earliest reference to a purely electronic game appears to be a United States patent registration in 1947 for what was described by its inventors as a "cathode ray tube amusement device". Through the 1950s and 1960s the majority of early computer games ran on university mainframe computers in the United States. Beginning in 1971, video arcade games began to be offered to the public for play. The first home video game console, the Magnavox Odyssey, was released in 1972.
Eamon (video game)
Brown encouraged players to modify and add to "Eamon", and published technical information on the game to assist them. "Eamon" is notable for being one of the first adventure games designed to be modular, with expansion packs written by users forming an integral part of the game experience. A master disk called the "Main Hall" is used to manage player characters and to facilitate their transfer between individual adventures. The character retains his or her attributes and statistics from adventure to adventure, as well as up to four weapons.
The game's interface is similar to that of most other text adventures — the game presents the player with descriptions of the character's surroundings, including events, artifacts, monsters and exits, then prompts the player to enter a command. These commands include such things as moving in certain directions (NORTH, EAST, UP, etc.), readying weapons, attacking, getting or dropping items, interacting with characters, casting magical spells or checking inventory.
Early history of video games
Following the 1947 invention of the cathode-ray tube amusement device, the earliest known interactive electronic game as well as the first to use an electronic display, the first true video games were created in the early 1950s. Initially created as technology demonstrations, such as the "Bertie the Brain" and Nimrod computers in 1950 and 1951, video games also became the purview of academic research. A series of games, generally simulating real-world board games, were created at various research institutions to explore programming, human–computer interaction, and computer algorithms. These include "OXO" and Christopher Strachey's draughts program in 1952, the first software-based games to incorporate a CRT display, and several chess and checkers programs. Possibly the first video game created simply for entertainment was 1958's "Tennis for Two", featuring moving graphics on an oscilloscope. As computing technology improved over time, computers became smaller and faster, and the ability to work on them was opened up to university employees and undergraduate students by the end of the 1950s. These new programmers began to create games for non-academic purposes, leading up to the 1962 release of "Spacewar!" as one of the earliest known digital computer games to be available outside a single research institute.
Castlevania
Many "Castlevania" titles have been released for markets in Japan, North America, Europe and Australia on various video game consoles, personal computers (PC) and mobile phones, with additional remakes and re-releases. The first console title, "Castlevania", was released on the Famicom Disk System in 1986 and then in North America in 1987 on the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES). A 2D sidescrolling action game where the player progresses through six stages, many principal features of the "Castlevania" series originated with it. It has since been ported to many platforms, such as the NES Classic Edition. Also released in 1986 was "Vampire Killer" for the MSX home computer, which played significantly different from the original "Castlevania", where players now had to search for the exit before they could proceed to the next stage. Following that year, in 1987, "" further departed from the standard platforming genre of the first "Castlevania" for a game more similar to the nonlinear gameplay of "Metroid", with several RPG elements such as a world map which the player is free to explore and revisit. "Castlevania"'s first arcade game, "Haunted Castle" (1988), returned to the linear platforming gameplay of the original. This continued with the first handheld Game Boy entry, "" and the NES sequel, "", both released in 1989. "Dracula's Curse" added new features to the original gameplay, including alternate stages and multiple playable characters. "The Adventure" later saw a GameBoy sequel, "", in 1992 and also a developed by M2 for the WiiWare service in 2009.
Slot Racers
Slot Racers is a video game cartridge for the Atari 2600. It was the first game developed by Warren Robinett, who went on to create one of Atari's most successful games for the 2600, "Adventure".
Adventure in Time
"Adventure in Time" was the first game released by Illinois software company Phoenix Software, after developer Ron Unrath contacted programmer Paul Berker about writing an adventure game for the Apple II in 1980.
Quest for Camelot
The first video game was titled "Quest for Camelot" and is an action-adventure video game developed and published by Titus Interactive with assistance from Nintendo for the Game Boy Color in 1998. A Nintendo 64 version of the game was planned but was scrapped due to the film's performance at the box office.
The second video game was titled "Quest for Camelot: Dragon Games" is a computer game developed by Knowledge Adventure, it gives the player the ability to explore Camelot after the events of the film. In addition to exploring the world, the player gets to raise a dragon egg and watch it grow.
Hideo Kojima
After initial failed attempts to break into the video game industry, Kojima joined video game publisher Konami's MSX home computer division in 1986 as a designer and planner. Initially, he was disappointed with his assignment, and desired to work on Nintendo Entertainment System and arcade games instead—Kojima felt the color palette of the system was too restrictive. Kojima's gameplay ideas were often overlooked initially, and due to his lack of familiarity with programming was repeatedly snubbed for his failures in his initial years at Konami. At one point Kojima considered leaving the company, but he hung on. The first game he worked on was "Penguin Adventure", the sequel to "Antarctic Adventure", as an assistant director. It significantly expanded upon the gameplay of "Antarctic Adventure", adding more action game elements, a greater variety of levels, role-playing elements such as upgrading equipment, and multiple endings. The first game he developed was "Lost Warld" [sic], an MSX platform game in . However, the game was ultimately rejected by Kojima's superiors at Konami.
Adventure (Atari 2600)
Adventure is a video game for the Atari 2600 video game console, released in late –. In the game, the player controls a square avatar whose quest is to explore an open-ended environment to find a magical chalice and return it to the golden castle. The game world is populated by roaming enemies: three dragons that can eat the avatar and a bat that randomly steals and hides items around the game world. "Adventure" introduced a number of innovative game elements to console games, including a playing area that spanned several different screens and enemies that continued to move even when not displayed on the screen.
List of Dungeons &amp; Dragons adventures
The adventures listed here are official Wizards of the Coast Dungeons & Dragons 3/3.5 adventures only. The first 3rd Edition adventure module published (not counting OGL/d20 STL modules) was "The Sunless Citadel", in 2000.