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Adventure games are a type of computer entertainment programs and Video Game , characterized by investigation, which may include exploration, Puzzle -solving, interaction with game characters, and have a focus on Narrative rather than reflex-based challenges. It is important to note that this term is unrelated to adventure films, and adventure novels, and is not indicative of theme or subject matter. The vast majority of adventure games are Computer Games , though Console -based adventure games are not unheard of. Unlike many other game genres, the adventure genre's focus on story allows it to draw heavily from other narrative-based media, such as Literature and Film . Adventure games encompass a wide variety of literary genres, including Fantasy , Science Fiction , Mystery , Horror , and Comedy . Notable adventure games include '' Zork '', '' King's Quest '', '' The Longest Journey '', '' The Secret Of Monkey Island '', '' Indiana Jones And The Fate Of Atlantis '', '' Gabriel Knight '', '' Myst '' and '' The Last Express ''. Nearly all adventure games are designed for a single player, since the heavy emphasis on story and character makes multi-player design difficult. The adventure genre was quite popular during the late 1980s and early 1990s, and many considered it to be among the most technically advanced genres. While few developers continue to produce adventure games, some are still being released, and the adventure game genre has had some elements carry over into other genres. Games that fuse adventure elements with action gameplay elements are sometimes referred to as adventure games (a popular example is Nintendo's ''Legend Of Zelda'' series). Adventure game purists regard this as incorrect and call such hybrids Action-adventures . In Europe, games which fuse action and adventure elements are called "arcade adventure" games. The term "adventure game" is used with the same meaning in North America, Europe, and Japan, and is regarded as pure genre in all regions. HISTORY Colossal Cave Adventure In the early 1970s, programmer, caver, and role-player William Crowther developed a program called '' Colossal Cave Adventure ''. An employee at Bolt, Beranek And Newman (BB&N), a Boston company involved with ARPANET Router s, Crowther used BBN's PDP-10 to create the game. The game used a text interface to create an interactive adventure through a spectacular underground cave system. Crowther's work was later modified and expanded by programmer Don Woods , and Colossal Cave Adventure became wildly popular among early computer enthusiasts, spreading across the nascent ARPANET throughout the 1970s. The unique combination of Crowther's realistic cave descriptions and Woods' addition of fantastical elements proved immensely appealing, and defined the adventure game genre for decades to come. Swords, magic words, puzzles involving objects, and vast underground realms would all become staples of the Text Adventure genre. The "Armchair adventure" soon spread beyond college campuses as the Microcomputing movement gained steam. Numerous home-brew knockoffs and variations on Colossal Cave Adventure (which eventually came to be known as simply ''Adventure'') appeared throughout the late 1970s and early 1980s. Scott Adams One of the many fans of the Colossal Cave was programmer Scott Adams . Upon his first introduction to Adventure, Adams spent almost ten days traversing the game before he achieved Grand Master status. Once he had completed the game, Adams began to wonder how a game like Colossal Cave Adventure could be developed on a home computer like his TRS-80 . The main obstacle was that home computers such as the TRS-80 did not actually have sufficient memory to run a large game like Adventure. However, Adams hit on the idea that an adventure game executable could be divided into code written in a High-level Language and an Interpreter , much like the way BASIC is often implemented. Furthermore, once an interpreter was developed, Adams realized that it could be reused to develop other adventure games. (For more information: Details of Adams's early work .) In 1978, Adams founded Adventure International and produced twelve adventure games before the company went bankrupt in 1985. His first games were text-based and written in BASIC, but during his third game (''Mission Impossible''), Adams began programming in Assembly Language to improve the speed of his software. Graphical progress The great advance which immediately followed was the introduction of images. With the use of Machine Language allowing shorter programs, and computer memory increasing, it became possible to use the graphical potential of a computer like the Apple II and some companies soon switched from producing pure text-based adventure games. Soon the clumsy basic Vector Graphics gave way to more aesthetic imagery drawn by professional artists. Examples include:
The introduction of such high-quality Bitmap Graphics required more substantial storage capacity with many adventure games requiring several Diskette s for installation, which would be the case until the CD-ROM made its appearance. Infocom In 1977, two friends Dave Lebling and Marc Blank , who were students at the Massachusetts Institute Of Technology 's Laboratory for Computer Science, discovered Crowther and Woods's game ''Colossal Cave Adventure''. After completing the adventure game, they were joined by Tim Anderson and Bruce Daniels and began to develop a similar game. Their first production, '' Zork '', also started on a PDP-10 minicomputer and spread quickly across the ARPANET. Its success was immediate, and the game, which would reach the size of a Megabyte , enormous for the time, wouldn't be updated until 1981. On graduation, the students decided to stay together and to form a company. Tim Anderson, Joel Berez, Marc Blank, Mike Broos, Scott Cutler, Stu Galley, Dave Lebling, J. C. R. Licklider, Chris Reeve, and Albert Vezza created Infocom on 22 June 1979 . The idea of distributing Zork came to mind very soon, but the game was too big to port to the microcomputers of the time: the Apple II and the TRS-80, the potential targets, each had only 16 kb of RAM. They solved this problem by breaking up the game into three episodes. They wrote a special programming language called ZIL (''Zork Implementation Language''), which could function on any computer by using an emulator (the Z-machine ) as an intermediary. In November 1980 the new ''; One month later, it was released for the TRS-80 , with more than 1,500 copies sold between that date and September 1981. That same year, Bruce Daniels finalized the Apple II version and more than 6,000 additional copies were sold. ''Zork I'' would go on to sell over a million copies. Douglas Adams produced two games with Infocom, the first based on his popular Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy series and a lesser known venture game titled '' Bureaucracy '' after his attempt to go on a vacation. The company continued developing text adventure games even as it opened a department for the development of professional software, a department which would never be profitable. High-quality games, with massive, intelligent plots, unequaled syntax analyzers, and meticulous documentation as integral parts of the game, succeeded in all genres. However, with the power of microcomputers increasing and the demand for graphics (which it refused to include in its games), Infocom saw sales decline and in 1989, it had shrunk to a mere 10 employees, compared to 100 employees at its peak, and games developed after 1989 would have no link with the original team. Sierra '' for the Apple II was the first adventure game to use graphics in the early Home Computer era.]] At the end of the 1970s, Ken Williams sought to set up a company for enterprise software for the market-dominating Apple II computer. One day, he took a Teletype Terminal to his residence to work on the development of an accounting program. Rummaging through a catalogue, he found a program called ''Colossal Cave Adventure''. He and his wife Roberta both played it all the way through and their encounter with Crowther's game would have a strong influence on video-gaming history. Having finished ''Colossal Cave Adventure'', they began to search for something similar, but found the market underdeveloped. Roberta Williams liked the concept of a textual adventure very much, but she thought that the player would have a more satisfying experience with images and began to think of her own game. She thus conceived '' Mystery House '', the first graphical adventure game, a detective story inspired by Agatha Christie 's '' And Then There Were None ''. Ken spent a few nights developing the game on his Apple II, and in the end they made packets with ziploc bags containing the game's 5¼-inch disk and a photocopied paper describing the game. They sold it via a local software shop and to their great surprise, ''Mystery House'' was an enormous success. Though Ken believed that the gaming market would be less of a growth market than the professional software market, he persevered with games. Thus, in 1980, the Williamses founded ''On-Line Systems'' which would become '' Sierra On-Line '' in 1982. The company would be a major actor in the video-gaming of the 1980s. '' used colorful graphics which were much more Immersive than the line drawings of the earlier adventure games. Below the image the command prompt can be seen, waiting for a command by the player.]] Sierra soon took things further. Until this point adventure games were in the first person; images presented the décor as seen through the eyes of the player. Williams's company would introduce a new feature in the '''', a new standard was born, and nearly all the industry latched onto it. The commands were still entered on the keyboard and analyzed by a syntax interpreter, as with text adventure games. Soon after, Sierra had multiple successful series of adventure games running, including King's Quest , Police Quest , Space Quest , Leisure Suit Larry , and Hero's Quest ( Quest For Glory ), with each containing numerous games. A few years after these series had started, the classic graphics above the command cursor was fully replaced with "point and click" game-play and VGA graphics. Their last and most critically acclaimed series was the Gabriel Knight series, which began in 1993 and ended with Sierra's last adventure game in 1999. Sierra would develop new games and push the boundaries of adventure gaming until its purchase by Cendant in 1998. Then in 1998, Cendant sold off their entire interactive software branch for $1 billion to Havas Interactive , a subsidiary of Vivendi Universal . Sierra pursued technologies for their games (such as hand-drawn backgrounds, rotoscoped animation, and in-game video) that were more advanced than most other genres at the time. However, the release of the Sony PlayStation marked the end of the adventure game era; as 3D became the dominant graphics format, the mostly 2D adventure market began to shrink. LucasArts In 1987, when nobody seemed able to overcome Sierra's power, a programmer named Ron Gilbert working for the company Lucasfilm Games — which has since become LucasArts — created the script-writing system SCUMM which used a Point-and-click interface similar to ICOM Simulations' MacVenture games first introduced in 1985. Instead of having to type a command to the syntax analyzer, this system was controlled by means of text icons. To interact with his environment, the player clicked on an order, on an icon representing an object in her inventory, or on a part of the image. This approach was first used by LucasArts for the game '' Maniac Mansion '' to great effect. |
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