Learn About Adventure Games

What are Adventure Games?

Adventure Games (also known as Point and Click Adventure Games) put the player in the role of the protagonist or hero of an interactive story. The player has a lot more control of how they progress in the story and interacts with the game world in a different way than in most other games. The hero or heroine is often faced with a number of puzzles to solve or clues to find in order to progress through the story. There is typically a lot more to read in these games and the player often finds that they will use their minds far more than they will their reflexes or hand-eye coordination.

The History of Adventure Games

Adventure games themselves first began in the mid 1970s as little more than text-based interactive stories, but in the 1980s graphics began to be added to the games to give the player a better sense of what was happening. The popularity of these games was growing steadily and better and better games began to emerge on the market.

It was companies like Sierra that really pushed the progress of this gaming genre when they introduced games like King’s Quest, Police Quest, Space Quest, and Hero’s Quest. The introduction of these popular series’ really opened the genre in a new and exciting way and they can be considered the ones that helped Adventure Games become what they are today.

Sierra held the status of controlling the adventure game market from the early 1980s on until a programmer named Robert Gilbert came on the scene with a program called SCUMM. This program brought to life the point and click interface that Lucas Arts introduce in Maniac Mansion. No longer did the player have to type a command into the game to the protagonist. Instead, all the player had to do was point and click to command the protagonist and progress the story.

Adventure games in the 1980s were one of the most popular gaming genres on the market and much of that was thanks to companies like Lucas Arts and Sierra. The genre became very popular with the birth of CD-ROMS for computer and a game that made full use of this new storage medium - Myst.  Released in 1994, Myst presented an amazing interactive world the character had to explore and manipulate in order to proceed through different “ages” to solve the game.  Myst was so popular that is was the best selling PC game through the 1990s until it was finally passed by The Sims in 2002. 

In the mid 1990s, adventure games as a whole began to decline in the face of the rising popularity of more action oriented games. Companies like Sierra and Lucas Arts began to shift their focus to the more popular action and first-person shooter style games. Adventure gaming was on a steady decline until recently.  The popularity of casual games and their appeal to non-traditional gamers have given rise to a new style of simplified adventure games such as Dream Chronicles and Alabama Smith.  Traditional adventure games are also gaining traction with an update to the Sam and Max and Monkey Island Lucas Arts classic franchises.

Who Will Like These Games?

Typical adventure gamers are those that prefer to think their way through the game. They enjoy solving puzzles and figuring out clues to progress the game, and more often than not, violent confrontations or having to perform an endless series of coordination feats is not what they want in a game.

Adventure gamers just want to sit back and relax for a while as they enjoy a good story, one that they have to figure out along the way. They enjoy having to think, and problem solving is an important element to the game for these players. They want to explore new worlds, and they want to have a story that has an air of mystery to it. Most important is finding the reason behind the story.