Adventure Games through the Ages

[pauraque_bk]

Here is a thing about me: I love adventure games. I love adventure games like Debbie loves cats. Recently I got lost in a Wikipedia hole, as you do, and realized how many adventure games there are that I have never played, some because they came out before I was old enough to play them, others because there was a period of time in the 90s when a LOT of adventure games came out, and I was like 10 years old and had no money. There are also a lot that I played and forgot about.

So I'm going to play through some of these and post my take on them. For extra fun, let's do them in chronological order and see how the genre developed over time. I have a very long list of games I'd like to play/blab about, but it's going to depend on the availability of the games, and my attention span.



Title: Mystery House (aka High-Res Adventure #1)
Year: 1980
Developer: On-Line Systems (precursor to Sierra On-Line)
Current availability: Freeware since 1987. Free download with emulators, iPad/iPod/iPhone port ($5.99).

Developed by Ken & Roberta Williams of King's Quest fame, this is the first game that can be somewhat generously called a graphical adventure. Really it's the first text adventure with pictures. The images look like they were drawn with a mouse by someone who kind of sucked at drawing to start with, which makes for a funny juxtaposition with the grim murder-mystery plot of the game. You discover dead bodies, and they are stick figures with big goose-egg bumps on their heads. It is unintentionally hilarious.



The game is very short and much easier than I was anticipating, based on painful memories of King's Quest. There are several ways to lose the game. You can get lost in a forest, lost in the dark, locked in a basement, stuck without the item you need, or killed by the murderer if you happen to typo the command when you try to shoot first. (Serial killers hate typos.) You can also shoot an innocent person for no reason, but you can't beat the game if you wasted your one bullet on him, so I guess the joke's on you! Ha ha. If this game were released today, it would probably merit a Congressional hearing.

Restarting several times after succumbing to these various pitfalls, I solved the game in an hour or so, which made it feel like a proof-of-concept for the genre. Unfortunately, the implementation of the graphics is so clumsy that it actually makes the game harder. Sometimes the graphics don't match what the text says, so that it's hard to figure out which way you're going. The instructions understatedly explain: "Because of the difficulty of drawing doorways to the south or the bottom of the screen, there are one or two rooms where the doorways do not match up to the normal directions." No kidding.

On the flip side, the graphics give away a few puzzles, because any object that is movable is also transparent. Check out how the bottom of the wall is visible through the cabinet below. Gee, do you think you're going to need to MOVE CABINET later on?



I give these guys props for an innovative idea, but man. If I had playtested this game in 1980 I would've told them to stick to text. What do I know, though? The game was a big hit when it was released.

Comments

[muridae-x.livejournal.com]

*blink blink blink*

Sheesh, you'd think that vanishing points would be easy on a computer. There's just no excuse for the wince inducing perspective in those.

My favourite text-with-graphics adventure from the early days is still The Hobbit, but there were a ton of written-by-one-teenager-in-bedroom ones that I played that were also ridiculous fun.

[pauraque]

Oh, good call. I didn't have The Hobbit on my list and I haven't played it. *adds*

As I'm reading about games I played back in the day, I'm astonished at how many of them were made by one person. It was my dad getting them for me off BBSes and such, so I didn't always know the story behind them.