Indie Games Studio
Game Developing, Programming, Computers, and other Technologies

If this brings back fuzzy memories there’s a good chance you were born before 1980

For those of you that were fortunate enough to be around when this genre was invented in 1980 and enjoyed playing these magnificent story-based games, you’re probably as excited as I was when I heard that Kickstarter has helped resurrected this once popular style of gaming.  Although adventure games might not have disappeared forever, thanks to loyal fans in the indie game scene, the genre was considered dead commercially around the late 90’s/early 00’s. 

It’s been a while since I wrote a “Soapbox” post but I thought it was time to do a little resurrecting myself for my own genre (or at least for one post :)

A little backstory…

Since the Kickstarter revival of Leisure Suit Larry, a number of Sierra veterans have been returning to the game scene to create classic adventure games.  For me as a game developer and a fan one of the most interesting parts of this revival are the interviews with the developers.  Sierra games typically had one or two authors that design the game; their face(s) and bio were printed on the back of the box along with a short description of the game (similarly to a book).  Using Twitch.tv, a live video streaming service with an emphasis on gaming, these authors are not only interviewed on how it was like to work at Sierra but also commenting as their games are being played.  For me, this DVD-commentary-style approach is interesting, entertaining, and educational.  Interviews can be found at the App Store or Twitch.tv.

Ken Williams wrote an article about the legacy of Sierra; a very interesting read and I highly recommend checking it out.  Now that Ken is retired, he’s currently boating around the world with his wife Roberta, also co-founder of sierra and arguably one of the most influential game designers of all time.

Of course Sierra wasn’t the only game company making graphic adventure games, studios such as LucasFilm Games (now LucasArts), Access Software (Tex Murphy), Westwood Studios (Legend of Kyrandia), and others.  However the stories, interviews, and behind the scenes info are more readily available for Sierra thus this article focusing on them.

Ok so why the Soapbox?

Searching the internet resulted in many theories of why this genre died.  The most popular reason was because of another genre that started to bloom called First Person Shooters.  Games like Doom, Quake, Unreal, etc were all very fast paced and started to push the boundaries of multiplayer gaming.  Although I think this was a factor in the death of adventure gaming, it was the main one.  I recently stumbled across an article by Old Man Murray.  He uses Jane Jensen’s game, Gabriel Knight 3 as the example:

• Gabriel Knight must disguise himself as a man called Mosley in order to fool a French moped rental clerk into renting him the shop’s only motorcycle.

• In order to construct the costume, Gabriel Knight must manufacture a fake moustache.  Utilizing the style of logic adventure game creators share with morons, Knight must do this even though Moseley does not have a moustache.

• So in order to even begin formulating your strategy, you have to follow daredevil of logic Jane Jensen as she pilots Gabriel Knight 3 right over common sense, like Evel Knievel jumping Snake River Canyon.  Maybe Jane Jensen was too busy reading difficult books by Pär Lagerkvist to catch what stupid Quake players learned from watching the A-Team:  The first step in making a costume to fool people into thinking you’re a man without a moustache, is not to construct a fake moustache.

• Still, you might think that you could yank some hair from one of the many places it grows out of your own body and attach it to your lip with the masking tape in your inventory.  But obviously, Ms. Jensen felt that an insane puzzle deserved a genuinely deranged solution.  In order to manufacture the moustache, you must attach the masking tape to a hole at the base of a toolshed then chase a cat through the hole.   In the real world, such as the one that stupid people like me and Adrian Carmack use to store our televisions, this would result in a piece of masking tape with a few cat hairs stuck to it, or a cat running around with tape on its back.  Apparently, in Jane Jensen’s exciting, imaginative world of books, masking tape is some kind of powerful neodymium supermagnet for cat hair.

• Remember how shocked you were at the end of the Sixth Sense when it turned out Bruce Willis was a robot?  Well, check this out:  At the end of this puzzle, you have to affix the improbable cat hair moustache to your lip with maple syrup!  Someone ought to give Jane Jensen a motion picture deal and also someone should CAT scan her brain.

Old Man Murray then closes with, “Who killed Adventure Games?  I think it should be pretty clear at this point that Adventure Games committed suicide.”  This guy totally nailed it!  Most of the adventure games back then had these ridiculous puzzles.  These overly obfuscated puzzles caused players to get stuck more often than they should have, resulting in frustration; even more so after finding out the solution was something stupid like the example above.  This frustration caused people to hunt through hint books one too many times and finally quitting.  

One of my biggest concerns with this revival is that these veterans will use the same techniques without realizing Game Design has made huge advancements since 1990’s.  This can cause the genre to fail again before it has a chance to grow.