IGN attempting to outdo Infinitron's AdventureDex interview: http://www.ign.com/articles/2015/03/02/the-past-present-and-future-of-adventure-games
THE PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE OF ADVENTURE GAMES
A massive roundtable discussion with the developers that helped shaped a genre…
In Arthurian legend it’s written that King Arthur created a giant round table so that his knights could come around to the castle and chill out, drink mead, and shoot the breeze. Being round in shape meant that there was no official head; everyone who chose to sit down had an equal voice. And without having to worry about order or stature or hierarchy, he would famously say, “Dudes, it’s just Arthur here. Or Art. Even Arty will do. Actually, no. Don’t call me Arty.”
Anyone who was anyone in Camelot would come and enjoy the freewheeling conversations that took place at the Round Table – as it was cleverly known, and it was here that everything from sedimentary sword extraction to how to properly groom a horse were discussed openly. Except for Merlin, who by this point had heard the Sword in the Stone story a few too many times and took to protest by staying in his tower working on new potions.
In computer gaming legend the adventure genre is one that began when computers were first made available for recreational use. Starting with simple pieces of text on a screen and a flashing prompt waiting for input, over the years and decades this would evolve, incorporating graphics, animation, sound, music, and live action video. And throughout it all, a focus on narrative would be central.
This may be the reason the adventure genre is such a malleable one, and that even though it’s been around for decades – and has seen a huge amount of change – still has seemingly limitless potential.
After spending more than 12 months rediscovering classic adventure games of yesteryear, I wanted to hear more from the people who helped shape this most noble of genres, and what better way than with our very own virtual Round Table - a roundtable, if you will, one where various adventure gamedevelopers knights could come and talk about their adventure gaming memories and the genre’s past, present, and future.
The Knights of the IGN Adventure Game Roundtable
(In alphabetical order)
Larry Ahern – Joining LucasArts at the peak of its classic adventure game output, Larry Ahern is an artist that contributed to a number of the studio’s classics including Monkey Island 2, Day of the Tentacle, and Sam & Max Hit the Road. With a keen eye for quality animation Larry would join Tim Schafer’s Full Throttle as lead animator and then later become the co-designer on the third Monkey Island game, The Curse of Monkey Island (1997).
Charles Cecil – A veteran UK developer who played a role in the region’s gaming boom in the early ‘80s with a string of text adventures for the ZX Spectrum. As the founder of Revolution Software Charles Cecil was also instrumental in the cinematic development of the genre in the ‘90s with titles like Beneath a Steel Sky (1994) and Broken Sword: The Shadow of the Templars (1996). Founded in 1990, Revolution Software has survived and thrived throughout the many changes within the industry and recently released the latest entry in the Broken Sword series, The Serpent’s Curse.
Noah Falstein – A veteran designer who worked on a number of titles at Lucasfilm Games, including the adventure classic Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989) alongside David Fox and Ron Gilbert. At LucasArts Noah Falstein got to work on another property envisioned by Steven Spielberg, as he led development on the first version of what would ultimately become The Dig (1995). Currently Noah is the Chief Game Designer at a little known internet company called Google.
David Fox – Creator of Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders (1988), David Fox joined Lucasfilm Games as the studio’s third employee in 1982. David was also the project leader on the very first LucasArts adventure game, Labyrinth: The Computer Game (1986). Based on the David Bowie-starring Jim Henson fantasy film, much like other adventure titles from the studio it would shy away from utilising a text-parser. As the company grew David also served as the Director of Operations at LucasArts, overseeing all development.
Dave Gilbert – A designer and one of the pioneers of the independent adventure game resurgence, Dave Gilbert began his career making freeware titles using the Adventure Game Studio software package. In 2006 he founded Wadjet Eye Games, and released two critically acclaimed adventure games The Shivah and Blackwell Legacy. The latter would become the first title in the Blackwell series with the most recent game, Blackwell Epiphany, released in 2014.
Ron Gilbert – Co-creator of the adventure classicManiac Mansion (1987), Ron Gilbert is also known for helping create the term point-and-click with the creation of SCUMM (or the Scripting Utility for Maniac Mansion). As the engine that drove all LucasArts adventures for a number of years, Ron Gilbert’s legacy was all but assured. But it would beThe Secret of Monkey Island (1990), created and designed by Ron, that would remain his most well-known and beloved game. After leaving LucasArts he co-founded Humongous Entertainment where he worked on a number of successful adventure games aimed at a younger audience.
Dave Grossman – After joining LucasArts it wasn’t long before Dave Grossman was put to work as a writer and programmer on The Secret of Monkey Island (1990). Working alongside Tim Schafer and designer Ron Gilbert this would start a long career of collaboration and adventure gaming, with titles like Day of the Tentacle at LucasArts and Sam & Max: Season One at Telltale Games. In November 2014 Dave Grossman joined Reactive Studios as their Chief Creative Officer overseeing the development of voice-controlled interactive experiences.
Jane Jensen – Creator of the Gabriel Knight series, Jane Jensen joined Sierra in the early ‘90s as a writer where she got to cut her teeth writing dialogue and story for titles like Police Quest III and EcoQuest. Her first efforts as a designer would come alongside Roberta Williams with the critically acclaimed King’s Quest VI: Heir Today, Gone Tomorrow (1992). Since departing Sierra Jane has continued to create story-driven adventure games, as seen with Gray Matter (2010) and more recently, Moebius: Empire Rising(2014).
Chris Jones – A game designer who has also earned the titles of actor and filmmaker. Chris Jones is not only the co-creator and designer of the Tex Murphy series of adventure games, but he is Tex Murphy. Under a Killing Moon (1994) not only served as one of the finer attempts at creating an interactive movie, but it helped push the genre into new and exciting areas. As the down on his luck 21st century gumshoe, Chris Jones recently donned the iconic fedora one more time for Tesla Effect: A Tex Murphy Adventure(2014).
Al Lowe – A former high school music teacher turned computing enthusiast, Al Lowe joined Sierra in the early ‘80s as a programmer where he worked on everything from King’s Quest to a line of educational titles starring popular Disney characters. But it would be Leisure Suit Larry in The Land of the Lounge Lizards (1987), Sierra’s adults-only sex-themed comedy adventure series that saw six titles released over the course of a decade that would define his career. Retiring after the fall of Sierra in the late ‘90s, Al Lowe recently contributed to the remake of the first Larry game, Leisure Suit Larry: Reloaded (2014). I had a lengthy chat with him about the series quite recently.
Josh Mandel – Beginning his career as a stand-up comedian, Josh Mandel would join Sierra with the goal to create comedies. Over the years he would get the chance to work alongside Sierra veterans and design some classic comedies, including Freddy Pharkas: Frontier Pharmacist (1993) with Al Lowe, and Space Quest 6: Roger Wilco in The Spinal Frontier (1995) with Scott Murphy. Josh would also lend his voice to the King’s Quest series as it moved into the realm of multimedia, playing the role of King Graham in both King’s Quest V and King’s Quest VI.
Dan Marshall – Independent developer behind Ben There, Dan That (2008) and Time, Gentlemen Please! (2009), Dan Marshall’s first forays into the genre earned him critical acclaim. As both titles blended comedy, story, and puzzles in a fashion that had been all but forgotten about, they served as great modern renditions of a seemingly bygone style. Dan currently heads up the studio he founded in 2008, Size Five Games, where he’s hard at work developing what’s most likely to be the world’s first steampunk cybercrime caper, The Swindle.
Rand Miller – Alongside his brother Robyn, Rand Miller is the co-creator of the computer game sensation Myst. Through its fantasy setting, first-person viewpoint, and cutting edge graphics, Mystquickly became a major component of the multimedia and home computing boom following its release in 1993. As co-founder and CEO of Cyan Worlds, Rand has overseen development on a number of Myst sequels over the years and has most recently been working on Obduction, a spiritual successor due for release in the second half of 2015. Check out our Google Hangout with Rand from mid last year.
Benoit Sokal – Belgian comic artist Benoit Sokal was best known for creating the smoking anthropomorphic duck detective Inspector Carnado in the late ‘70s before joining developer Microids to work on adventure games. As a veteran comic artist and storyteller, Benoit designed the critically acclaimed Syberia (2002) and its sequel. Although delayed due to a lack of funding, the third game in the Syberia series, overseen by Benoit, is due for release in 2015.
Gary Winnick – Gary joined LucasArts (then known as the Lucasfilm Games Division) in 1984 as its first artist and animator. Working alongside Ron Gilbert he would co-create Maniac Mansion and help kick start the company’s focus on rich story-driven adventure games. As a veteran artist he would oversee the art department at LucasArts for a number of years as the studio released a string of classic adventures. Gary also designed Defenders of Dynatron City at LucasArts which was adapted into a TV special and comic book series. Currently, Gary is working alongside Ron Gilbert on Thimbleweed Park.
THE ROUNDTABLE
IGN: What was the first experience you had playing an adventure game? What were some of your thoughts on how it stood out from other games at the time?
Rand Miller: It was either Colossal Cave Adventure or Zork. My memory blurs between the two, but the feeling they provided was my first sense of actually exploring a virtual space on a computer, as opposed to simply moving through nondescript grids. I remember thinking that it was interesting to have an experience with a computer that would become the basis of a rather bizarre story that I would relate to co-workers the next day. “Last night? Well, I stumbled on a small cabin in the woods, and found a secret trapdoor underneath a rug that lead down to an underground kingdom.”
Let's set the scene.
Al Lowe: The first adventure game I played was on my Apple II computer which I bought “on line.” And by that I mean that it was from an ad in a magazine and I placed a mail-order over a phone line. Before I received it I thought that I should get a couple of games to play, so my son and I had something to do together. So I got an arcade game and I also got Cranston Manor, an adventure game. That was a Sierra game and it was one of their classic games set in a building with a lot of hallways and a lot of rooms. We got hooked, my son was around five years old at the time and it was a game that he and I could play together. I would sit there doing a lot of the typing and he would do a lot of the thinking. And his ideas were just as valid as mine. It was a way for us to experience a game together, and we played adventure games from then on.
Jane Jensen: The first adventure game that I ever played right through was King’s Quest IV in 1988. I had played text adventures before on mainframes, but I’d never seen a graphic adventure game before. I was immediately drawn into the story and into the idea of visually exploring the world. I loved it, so I went out and bought everything else in Sierra’s catalogue.
Get the t-shirt!
Dave Grossman: My first adventure game was Crowther and Woods's Colossal Cave Adventure, also known as just plain Adventure. It's the text adventure the genre is named after. I was in my early teens. I played it at home using a dial-up terminal that was like a fifty-pound typewriter with suction cups on the back that you stuck your phone into. It didn't have a screen, it printed everything out on rolls of expensive thermal paper. I was totally hooked on the game, and my friends and I used up a lot of that paper.
Noah Falstein: That would be the original Adventure in the Colossal Caves. I played it on a terminal in college, probably sometime around 1979. I wasn't very impressed though, the approach was interesting but I found it boring. A year or two later I was working at Milton Bradley and we had a VAX computer that had Zork on it. Now that was fun, the world was interesting and I loved the storytelling in what became the Infocom games. In particular I remember Starcross and Planetfall as grabbing my attention and keeping me engaged. I never really did like parser-based games though, it was mostly the depth of story that made me try a bunch of text adventures.
This guy... is no hero.
Larry Ahern: The first time I ever played an adventure game was the week after I started at LucasArts. They demoed The Secret of Monkey Islandduring my interview, and I was eager to try it out. I had no idea anyone made funny story games like that! I’d played a lot of arcade games, but never transitioned to the PC. I’d played an RPG in college that had me battling a “dragon” (which was technically an ampersand) but that failed to convince me of the platform’s entertainment potential. But there I was, a few years later, looking at fully animated characters, in colour, with story, dialog, and a rubber chicken with a pulley in the middle! Instantly I realised, “This is the kind of work I should be doing!” Of course that statement probably also applied to flipping burgers, given the state of my bank account. Thankfully I got the chance to work on games instead of asking, “Do you want fries with that?”
Dan Marshall: Oh man, I’m not sure. I remember playing Monkey Island on a - get this - black and white laptop. Not sure I got very far, it was pretty difficult to make out what the shapes were, and the display was so crappy. The first point and click I remember playing though, and being utterly in love with, was Sam and Max Hit the Road. It was amazing.
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Myst... was an amazing experience that made me want to create my own game. The sense of discovery, the atmosphere, the sights and sounds, they all captivated me...
Benoit Sokal: It wasn’t my first encounter with an adventure game, but the one that definitely stood out to me was Myst. It was an amazing experience that made me want to create my own game. The sense of discovery, the atmosphere, the sights and sounds, they all captivated me and pushed me forward to experience the entire story. Its mechanics, which were based on things like observation, deduction, and reflection, showed me that the adventure game opened up the very idea of gaming to a different audience, one eager for story rather than obtaining high scores. It was also perfectly in tune with what I loved, bringing in comics, incorporating simple and accessible interactivity.
Chris Jones: I consider Dungeons & Dragons on Intellivision as the first adventure game I played. It was different than an arcade game because it set up a world for you, and it was incredibly atmospheric. As simple as it was, it built atmosphere and tension.
Colossal Cave in action.
Josh Mandel: My first adventure game was Will Crowther’s Colossal Cave. Up until that point, the only computer games I’d ever played were Eliza (which was more of a toy, not a game) and the BASIC game that became known as ‘Star Trek’ and then, later, Star Fleet. To me, the adventure game was the one that immediately made me think of all the different possibilities, all the genres of fiction that could be turned into interactive adventures. And although I found it incredibly frustrating, I couldn’t wait to play it again and have an opportunity to map it all out and solve the puzzles. Unfortunately, it was well over a decade before I had the opportunity to do that.
Gary Winnick: I remember playing King’s Quest and Space Quest, mainly because Ron showed them to me when we were first developing Maniac Mansion. I was very intrigued by the presentation because at that time it felt a bit like I was playing an interactive cartoon. I could definitely see the possibilities, particularly when Ron outlined the concept of ‘point and click.’
Ron Gilbert: I played Adventure on the college mainframe computer when I was in junior high school. It was my introduction to adventure games. I remember me and three other classmates huddled around the screen trying to solve puzzles and drawing large maps. It was the first time I’d played a game like that and it was mesmerizing.
Dave Gilbert: My mother made the mistake of buying me a copy of Wishbringer when I was in the fifth grade or so. It's very easy to romanticize the past, but I remember being incredibly drawn in. It was wonderfully written, and I loved exploring the little island that it took place on. I would dream about the puzzles in that game. Quite literally. I dreamed up the solution to one of the puzzles in that game and I couldn't believe it when it worked. Also, around the same time I borrowed a friend's copy of King’s Quest. Like Wishbringer, I enjoyed walking around the world, but what stuck out the most was when I arbitrarily typed in “jump”, Graham actually jumped! That blew my little mind!
Unicorn dog can happen!
David Fox: My first experience was playing the original text adventure game Colossal Cave on a printer terminal in 1976, sitting on my bed at home. I loved how immersive it felt, even though the descriptions were short, and the only pictures were in my head. I loved it! Soon after, when my wife, Annie, and I opened our public access microcomputer centre, we had the complete series of adventure games from Scott Adams’ Adventure International, and I ended up converting them from TRS-80 to Apple II and CPM systems for him.
Charles Cecil: The first adventure game that I ever played was a Scott Adams text adventure on the TRS80 in about 1980. The TRS80 had a whopping 4K of memory, compared to the ZX80 and then ZX81 with just 1K, so it was able to display much more impressive graphics than its British counterpart. As this was at the birth of the computer games era, we were hugely excited to see what others were doing, things were developing so fast.
IGN: As you began a career in game development what drew you to the adventure genre, and were there any specific goals you had when you began work on your first game (where you had some form of creative control)?
David Fox: I love the sense of exploration and problem solving (rather than shooting or fighting) in an adventure game. They also let me play in a complete world, apart from our own, and try things I could or would never try in real life. The first adventure game I designed (with the help of some amazing people, including Douglas Adams), was Labyrinth. But the scope and story were somewhat restricted by the film it was based on. I did have a lot of creative control in choosing what to use, but it still had to be based on Labyrinth. Next, I came on as the SCUMM scripter for Ron Gilbert and Gary Winnick’s Maniac Mansion. This was even more fun since I had more control over what happened in the game via SCUMM. But it was Ron and Gary’s story, so there were some limitations. But I was still able to come up with ideas, the hamster in microwave being one.
Look away, animal lovers.
Noah Falstein: It wasn't until I was at Lucasfilm Games that I began to pay attention, Ron Gilbert and David Fox were the first two project leaders to delve into it (although we were all interested in games as storytelling experiences) and we all worked together to one extent or another on Labyrinth, Maniac Mansion, and Zak McCracken, before finally co-leading and co-designing Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade together. That was the first game where I was a major contributor as it was my project alone before David and Ron came on board so we could finish it in time for the theatrical release of the film. I very much wanted to capture the feeling of the movie but offer an experience that wasn't just an action game playing out scenes from the movie. We worked together to figure out how to fit the gameplay "between" the scenes of the movie so it would feel as if you were playing the role of Indiana Jones and getting to see what was left out. We had the original script and many of the game scenes that were not in the movie were from that. It was fun being a semi-insider, although we didn't really get to work much with the filmmakers.
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade still looks great.
Rand Miller: Our first game (The Manhole) was started as more of an interactive book. But I think that my brother Robyn and I were both so intrigued by the idea of exploring virtual places that it just evolved naturally into a first person visual adventure. That first game had little in the way of story or goals, but it set the stage for us to move to more sophisticated games and, ultimately, to Myst and Riven. Our goals remained the same for all of our projects. That is, to build immersive worlds to be explored.
“
The main thing that led me to being creative in general has always been the desire to tell great stories. And whatever form the setting or story may take, what matters to me most is the emotion at its core.
Benoit Sokal: The main thing that led me to being creative in general has always been the desire to tell great stories. And whatever form the setting or story may take, what matters to me most is the emotion at its core. If we can create and convey that level of emotion with a medium like videogames, then we’re already halfway there. The rest feels secondary, even if things like gameplay, controls, and graphics, are important and can make the difference between a merely functional game and an exceptional one. With my own games I envision transporting players and giving them a sort of virtual trip. I draw inspiration from real places and facts, but always try to give them a sort of fantastical twist. This reinvention of the world is one I prefer to deal with, and the best way for me to tackle various social topics.
Charles Cecil: I was invited to write an adventure game for a fledgling computer games company, Artic Computing (one of the very first European games publishers). The concept of writing a story that could be played interactively was extraordinary. Dungeons & Dragons had come to the UK a few years earlier, but I never had the opportunity to play. My first game, Adventure B (it was the second adventure game to be published by Artic) was very much inspired by the Indiana Jones film Raiders of the Lost Ark, which I still consider to be the best ever adventure movie. During that early period, we really were making up all the rules as we went along.
Josh Mandel: I used to play every genre of computer game. I’d take a real-time trip with a Flight Simulator every Sunday morning, for instance, but adventure games were the only ones that made me want to work on games for a living. My goals were very specific. I had been playing the original Leisure Suit Larry, and some of the Infocom comedies, and I thought, “There are so few good comedies out there, and I bet I can write an adventure at least as funny as these.” I had been a comic for a decade leading up to my first job in game development, so I was thinking in terms of how I would manipulate the displaying of text in order to simulate the way a comedian uses timing, and how we could do a better job of setting up the jokes so that they had more impact, and how to build good running gags, and so on.
A classic Larry gag preempting what players might do.
Al Lowe: I learned to program by creating a set of 20 interrelated programs to manage a school music festival, which at the time seemed to me like a real money maker. So that’s one of the reasons we bought a computer but as we were playing adventure games and my son was learning to read, my wife and I (both working in education) thought that we should do a game that was educational. So we created adventure games that looked a lot like Sierra games because that’s what we played. But we simplified them, we only used the spacebar to change between choices and the enter key to choose. So they were more like multiple choice adventure games, where you could move from room to room, talk to people and do simple things. They were simple kids’ games, but they were effective.
“
My goal initially just was to work for Sierra in some capacity. But by the time I was able to propose my own adventure game at Sierra, my goal was to write a game that was more mature, dark, and a bit scary – something with a more serious story.
Jane Jensen: My goal initially just was to work for Sierra in some capacity. But by the time I was able to propose my own adventure game at Sierra, my goal was to write a game that was more mature, dark, and a bit scary – something with a more serious story.
Ron Gilbert: I love the storytelling of adventure games. I love weaving the story in with all the puzzles until they are inseparable. I don’t know that I had a specific goal when Gary and I startedManiac Mansion. To be honest, it didn’t even start out as an adventure game. We didn’t know what it was at first. It was just a collection of characters and odd idea, then I saw King’s Quest for the first time, and everything fell into place.
Gary Winnick: I find the nature of adventure games presenting a character driven story very compelling, I come from a graphic novel and animated film background and the look and feel of adventure gaming, for me, is a close cousin. As far as a goal, I really wanted to be able to tell a story that was both immersive and fun.
Chris Jones: It was always my goal to incorporate cinema style storytelling, character development, and plot development into games. I was a huge fan of movies and made lots of films in high school and college, so to be able to find a way to merge games and movies was really fun. I wanted the chance to create games where the player felt like a character from a movie.
Under a Killing Moon introduced players to future gumshoe Tex Murphy.
Dave Grossman: I liked adventure games because they were stories more than other games were stories, and having a job where I spent that much time crafting scenes in a digital puppet theatre and writing interactive dialog was just really fun. But it wasn't a choice I got to make for myself, the opportunity in front of me was one where I'd be making adventure games, and I took it. The only conscious choice for me was to stick with it as time went by. And by, and by, and...
Larry Ahern: Honestly, the adventure genre was pretty much all that LucasArts was doing at the time, so I really didn’t have a choice in the matter. But even if that wasn’t the case, I would have been drawn to the style because of the blending of story, puzzles, and animation. I was never a big gamer, never played D&D or war games or anything like that. But I was always big into comics, cartoons, and animation. The thought of taking those forms of media and letting audiences interact with the characters and stories was very appealing.
The first game I really had creative input on was Day of the Tentacle. I remember working as an animator on The Secret of Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge and being frustrated at the inconsistent character designs and lack of a defined style for the animation. I really wanted to create characters that felt like they were all of one world, and then push the boundaries of the animation there. Monkey 2 was a comedy, but it was more subdued, and I wanted to go extreme. I’d never seen a game that tried that. Plus we had a pixel height limit on the characters, and I figured out that by making them cartoony, with larger heads, it meant I got much more expressive faces while still adhering to those restrictions.
Day of the Tentacle's art direction is superb and bursting with personality.
Dave Gilbert: As the saying goes, you write what you know. And I both knew and loved adventure games. I discovered the Adventure Game Studio engine at the exact time in my life when I had the time and desire to create something. People seemed to like what I made, so I kept making more! Could I have written novels or films or plays? Sure, but I was drawn to the adventure genre and I seemed to be reasonably good at it. As for specific goals, my desire at the beginning was to see if I could somehow earn my living from it! I had no goal beyond "I want to make this work." Somehow, I managed to do that. And I am grateful for that every day.
Ben There, Dan That.
Dan Marshall: Well, Ben There Dan That was sort of made as a silly joke, a slap-dash little adventure made following the long, harrowing development of my first game. I set it loose and it really clicked with a lot of people, so I wound up writing a sequel. I don’t think it was so much a massive, burning desire to create a point and click as it was the availability and ease of using Adventure Game Studio after finishing up development on something that didn’t really use any third-party tools.
IGN: In the early days the adventure game genre was the go-to place for players looking for rich characterisation and story in their games. Do you think this has successfully been carried across to other genres, or are there still things that you can only do, narratively speaking, with an adventure game?
Charles Cecil: Pretty much all genres have adapted to incorporate stories, particularly RPGs. Indeed, this is one of the reasons for the decline of the adventure from the mid ‘90s, it no longer had a monopoly on storytelling. Action games make a big song and dance about their intricate stories, but generally these are just linear stories broken up to create the motivation for, and then reward gameplay. Adventures do tell an interactive story in a unique way, although the definition of ‘adventure’ is now so wide (from The Wolf Among us through point-and-click to Heavy Rain) that it isn’t really possible to generalise.
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It's more difficult in most other genres for the gameplay to contribute to the story in a really meaningful way...
Dave Grossman: Certainly other types of games can and have had some success with story. But adventure games have an advantage, in that the gameplay is all about interacting with characters and driving the story forward, instead of, say, interacting with bullets or platforms, or driving a motorcycle forward. It's more difficult in most other genres for the gameplay to contribute to the story in a really meaningful way, and since gameplay is what you spend almost all of your time doing in a game, the story often starves as a result.
Rand Miller: It’s interesting to me how rich story and characterization is showing up everywhere these days, sometimes to a fault. I still think that there is a certain calming purity to the idea of exploring for exploring sake which is, I suppose, what the adventure genre is all about. But even as other gaming genres intersperse some adventuring, once the needle tilts to a more aggressive gaming achievement experience the player’s motivational psychology switches away from the subtle connections of story and environment. The focus becomes almost exclusively to efficiently learn the skill to achieve the goal, at the expense of the wonder at the world around them. This isn’t bad, it’s just different.
David Fox: I think you could bring rich characterization to any story-based game. But the adventure game is a much easier environment for this, partially because of its pacing, and the player’s need to dig into the characters to find out what they want, and what they will and won’t do under your command.
Such a memorable character.
Noah Falstein: Oh, I think that modern games like the BioShock, Mass Effect, Assassin's Creed, and Portal series (all of which started at almost the same time!) certainly tell interesting, involved stories that are the match of most adventure games. Not to mention RPGs with many thousands of lines of dialog. The pacing of adventure games is perhaps still friendlier to those who want to savour the story and think about things without being pushed along by action scenes.
Jane Jensen: I don’t think there are things you can only do with adventure games. It’s more a matter of ‘what else’ is in the game (besides the story) and whether or not that’s appealing. Personally, I don’t enjoy playing action sequences so I prefer a game that has puzzle, exploration, and story over games that may have those but also include heavy action sequences. To me that’s the difference between an adventure game and not-an-adventure-game.
Al Lowe: I don’t think there are things that you can only do with an adventure game, but I do think there are things that haven’t been done well yet. It’s not easy to create a story that has characters with depth and personality, and often that’s the last thing to get tacked onto a game. People are usually more interested in the game mechanic and in the quality of graphics and animation, than the story. So story was often and probably still is, kind of tacked on at the end. And that wasn’t the way we did our games at Sierra, which were much more about placing the lead character in situations and seeing how the player reacted to those things. And through that building up the characterisation. I think a telling point is that for years, the central character in all the source code we had was always named ‘ego’. And that was a glimpse into how we thought the games were perceived.
Dan Marshall: I think where adventures excel is in the idea of the auteur. As a player, you’re getting into the mindset of the designer and working out how they’re trying to trick you. It’s all very meta, but I think with the true greats of the genre you’re sort of circumnavigating the ghost of the designer. Playing Day Of The Tentacle, you can see all these little hurdles laid out in front of you and it’s not that you’re looking for a logical solution, you’re looking for “Okay, what does Schafer want me to do?” And I think sadly that’s something that’s dying out.
What are you trying to say, Tim?
Gary Winnick: I think it’s all relative to execution, if well executed any genre can be used to tell a story, I think it can be a bit easier in an adventure game based upon both the players pre-existing expectation when it comes to the genre as well as presentation.
Chris Jones: I still think the best bet for the narrative to be told in an interactive way is an adventure game. It gives you a chance to develop characters in deeper ways with multiple endings, multiple character interactions, and the chance to develop natural relationships with characters. You could meet a character and depending on the interaction, it can evolve in many different ways.
Dave Gilbert: I've always felt that the idea of "rich narrative only being possible in adventure games" is kind of elitist. Narrative has always been possible in all genres, it's just that some genres are more conductive to certain kinds of stories. What adventure games can do, and quite effectively, is put you [in] another person's shoes, immersed in another time or place. It's tricky to pull off, but when done well there is no experience like it.
Benoit Sokal: Today the majority of the games, the biggest and most spectacular looking titles, provide things like context, character, and events. Nevertheless, they still often serve as a pretext for action. So even though adventure game mechanics can be found across many other genres, the adventure game still continues to feel like its own thing. Because it allows the player to take their time to explore the world around them.
Valve and storytelling, eh?
Larry Ahern: I’m probably not the best judge of something like that, since my job and family demands have made it harder for me to find time to play games. But I guess I’ll try to make up some kind of answer. The first nail I saw in the adventure game coffin was when Half Life came out. They took an FPS and actually added some logical story and puzzle elements on top of the mechanics in a way that made it feel a lot more immersive than the usual action game of the period. And a lot of games seem to have followed that model with great success.
On the other hand, there’s often a bit of conflict (ludonarrative dissonance, I think, is what the kids are calling it these days) between the stories developers want to tell and the mechanics they’re using in their games. But because the adventure genre puts the story first, then builds the mechanics around that, I think there’s always going to be a certain tone that you can only find in that genre. And I don’t think adventure games have to be restricted to inventory puzzle mechanics or that kind of thing either. They just need to be structured around story. Heck, they don’t even need to be “adventures.” Where’d we even get that term anyway? Actually, I know the answer, but since I already used ludonarrative dissonance in a sentence, I don’t want to come across as too smart or anything.
Josh Mandel: I see that there’s been tremendous progress in the storytelling aspect of many other genres, particularly RPGs and first-person shooters. They seem to have learned some of the best lessons of adventure games. But from the standpoint of turning a specific narrative into an interactive experience, adventure games are still the best compromise. They’re not as open-ended as RPGs and thus better able to sustain dramatic tension, and they’re also not as constrained by the need to stay focused on action as with first-person shooters.
Ron Gilbert: Humans love storytelling. We used to sit around camp fires and tell stories. It’s how we learned, passed on history and entertained ourselves. It’s just natural for storytelling to become a part of gaming, no matter the genre. I don’t know if there is anything specific to adventure games that make them good at storytelling, but it’s what interests me about making them.
IGN: What’s one of your favourite moments or memories from a title that you worked on?
Via Cool-Hand-Mike on Deviant Art.
Dave Grossman: It's odd, the things that stick with me are not moments that are the most fun or the most humorous. It's the things I screwed up that taught me something in the aftermath. For example, that whole monkey-wrench puzzle from Monkey Island taught me that not only should you never base a puzzle on a play on words if you plan to translate the game into other languages, you should also check to see if the reference applies culturally. Even in places where they do speak the same language as you. Because although that object you use to open a big valve is often called a "monkey wrench" in the country you live, there are lots of places in the English-speaking world where it's called something else and that term has no meaning whatsoever. And if you don't have that specific phrase in your head you can't really figure out how to solve that puzzle, and the game is broken. Whoops!
Dan Marshall: There’s a puzzle in Time Gentlemen, Please! I’m very proud of. You find yourself on an Alien Planet with a non-responsive character, and it turns out you’re inside this little text adventure that was introduced at the start of the game. One that the player has had ample opportunity to mess around with. So you have to keep running back and forth, typing away at the text parser to get things to change on the alien planet so you can progress. It’s this really tight little puzzle, and it’s a lovely homage to the progress of adventure games to boot. I’m really quite proud of all that, it works well.
David Fox: It’s definitely the collaboration we had on these games. Very much like a dance where the partners take turns leading. Ideas come in from all places, including other designers, play testers, etc., and it’s fun choosing the best ones to incorporate in the game, and then see how that ripples through the rest of the design.
Gary Winnick: I just think the entire process of creating Maniac Mansion and then discovering we’d actually reached an audience. Remember in those days there was no internet, we just sent a product out into the market and it actually took months to see a review printed in a magazine.
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I love meeting fans of the Broken Sword series whose lives were affected by playing one of my games...
Charles Cecil: I love meeting fans of the Broken Sword series whose lives were affected by playing one of my games, whether through a relationship shared with someone with whom they played, a love of art that they then pursued, someone who decided to write their own adventures, or the desire to travel to places featured in the games. I am very proud of our medium, and am surprised that the press and so many people are still so negative towards the industry.
Ron Gilbert: Despite Maniac Mansion and Monkey Island being such touchstone games, I think the most rewarding part of my career was making adventure games for kids at Humongous Entertainment. Kids are such a pure audience. It means a lot to me when people come up and say they play adventure games today because they grew-up playing Putt-Putt or Pajama Sam.
S&M: An incredibly well animated game.
Larry Ahern: I remember working on a few animations for Sam & Max Hit the Road between bigger projects and just wanted to do something that made Steve Purcell laugh. I was a big fan of his work, but since I wasn’t involved in writing or designing anything for the game, I wanted to find some way to leave my mark. Steve gave me the Cone of Tragedy scene to animate and said “just come up with something.” The Cone was a horrible carnival ride that was only defined by its name (and your imagination), so I thought long and hard about it and finally decided that the ride would spin, then a bunch of Swiss Army Knife blades would pop out and move back and forth like one of those big knives in the window of a knife shop. That, combined with Max giving Sam CPR afterwards, did the trick and had Steve chuckling. Also, he mentioned the scene once in an interview, so I feel obligated to validate that, while simultaneously indirectly heaping more praise on the steaming pile of hyperbole that is key to the Cone’s legend.
Noah Falstein: I was the first project leader on The Dig, and as such, was the only one to run multiple brainstorming meetings with George Lucas and Steven Spielberg as participants. That was a high point in my career, particularly when the two of them would get into banter about each other’s ideas. We also had some separate meetings with Steven, who was and still is a huge game enthusiast. His son Max, who I met on the phone while Steven played Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and called us up for hints with Max watching him play, is now a game developer. I was also working on our Their Finest Hour: The Battle of Britain game at the time, and I enjoyed watching Steven play an early build of that while ILM guys had to wait until he was done to talk to him about some early Jurassic Park dinosaur test clips.
Jane Jensen: I’ve always loved watching the voice actors work in the studio. And I will always remember the day we went into the warehouse at Sierra in Oakhurst and watched the first triangular boxes of Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers go through the assembly line. That was a great day.
Gabriel Knight: mature, realistically depicted and thoroughly researched.
Josh Mandel: It would be impossible to beat the experience of working with the Freddy Pharkas programmers: Steve Conrad, Bill Shockley, and Cindy Brown. I mean, the whole team was fantastic, and working so closely with Al Lowe was something I’d never imagined. But Steve, Bill, Cindy, and I shared an office and we pretty much ate, slept, and breathed Freddy for months, day and night, solving issues and adding features and just being astoundingly driven and productive and cooperative.
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[Working on Freddy Pharkas] gave me an uplifting sense of camaraderie like I’ve never experienced before or since.
When everybody has a creative stake in the outcome, even the arguments are valuable. It gave me an uplifting sense of camaraderie like I’ve never experienced before or since.
Al Lowe: I don’t know if this is a good story but one day we were working on King’s Quest IV and we had a crazy deadline, like one month to code this game. That was because the two guys that were hired to code it waited until the last minute to tell everybody that they didn’t know what they were doing. So Sierra basically shut down all other projects for about a month, and all the programmers went to work on this one game. And everybody did a couple of scenes but we worked around the clock, literally until we fell asleep in our chairs. And then we’d go to a nearby motel where we had a rotating system where you’d sleep, wake up, and then someone else would go into the room. It was crazy. I remember one programmer coming to me and giving me his timesheet and he had 120 hours of work in a week on it. That may not sound like a fun story but earlier that week I had teased him a few times about going home early, so that was pretty funny!
A better memory though would be the thrill that came from directing the voice overs for the Larry games. I really got a kick out of going to Hollywood and hiring actors that spent their time doing various animated films, cartoons, commercials, and working with them in a creative environment. We would do a lot of improvisation in the studio too, and if they came up with an idea I could just as easily change the game. So it was very fun and loose coming up with the different voices, accents, and personalities through that whole process.
Rand Miller: I think the experience of first interviewing people who playedMyst is fairly high on the list. They were given the game for a week, and then we covertly watched as they were interviewed. Their comments and excitement were powerful medicine at a time when we had precariously created an experience with only “us" in mind, not really knowing if anyone beyond “us” would like it.
Myst was a cultural phenomenon.
Benoit Sokal: I tend to think that the best memories are yet to come, and still expect a lot of great times making the next Syberia. But I will always remember, with great emotion, the release and the fantastic reception we got with the first game. I’m amazed, that even after a decade, people are still showing their support and love.
Dave Gilbert: Working with the voice actors. Game development is a very solitary thing, and I always look forward to calling up the actors and start working with them. They bring such a life and vivaciousness to a project that is so inspiring. Working with Abe Goldfarb and Rebecca Whittaker on Blackwell was especially fun. My biggest regret about finishing the series is that I won't be working with them as much anymore.
Chris Jones: My favourite moments were watching other actors work. For example, Michael York had such a powerful presence. We basically gave him a book of dialogue to memorize in a very short amount of time, and he arrives on set and delivers an engaging performance. I’m a novice, so my goal was to minimize my lines because I didn’t want to look bad! I’ve been very impressed by the professionalism and the talent of many of the actors in the Tex Murphy series. We only had Steve Valentine in for a day, but he was very warm and engaging with everyone on set. While we were setting up the next shot, Steve would be in the stairwell, studying the next scene intensely. June Lockhart was very excited for her role and (spoiler alert!) death scene. Kevin Murphy was a total pro and such a pleasure to work with too. I’ve just loved having the chance to work with people I’ve admired.
IGN: The adventure genre up to a point was always something that kept up with technology, from text parsers and icons systems to voice acting and even video. Where would you like to see the genre going with today’s technology?
Not pictured: dithering.
Al Lowe: You didn’t go back far enough! The first game sold that even had graphics was Mystery House, which was an adventure game. And sure it had these horrible stick figures that Roberta Williams drew in black and white on a screen, but it was graphics. And then when Roberta wanted to do another game, she complained to Ken because the Apple could only do four colours, plus black and white. And so Ken invented dithering, which was used in Wizard and the Princess. And that’s the process of mixing a pixel of this colour and a pixel of that colour so that when blended together your eye would see a different colour.
As for your question! I’ve thought for over thirty years that at some point games would become like motion pictures or films. Or that what people really wanted was to star in their own movies, and go so far as to scan their face and entire body and then place them in the game and become the star. I first envisioned that idea in 1981 because it seemed to me like that was where the future was going. You can see intimations of that in things like facial recognition, motion capture, and so forth, so it won’t be long before someone produces a game that lets you become a hero.
Gary Winnick: The term Interactive Movie has always been a buzzword for us, particularly coming from a company with the history of LucasArts. That being said I think one of the definitive links between here and there would obviously be adventure gaming.
Rand Miller: I don’t think our goals at Cyan have changed much from those early days. We want to use the latest technology to the best of our abilities to build immersive worlds to be explored. Better technology just provides a more convincing portal to those worlds.
Obduction is Cyan's current project.
Benoit Sokal: What also led me to video games and especially adventure game creation, was my fascination with computer generated images (CGI). For me, CGI is one of the main advantages of working with computers to tell a story. I often spend a lot of time and energy refining lighting and colour details, and even though you can tell a story with just a few pixels or a simple drawing, I have to admit that it’s just a lot more pleasant to see detailed and pretty visuals. The technique is not the goal, but it helps to visualize the world or setting as the author imagined. I personally think that these beautiful images and art we see in games should be appreciated on nice, large screens too. Maybe one day we can walk directly into these worlds through technology.
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We’ll all sit around, plugged in and fed through tubes as we play adventure games for our entire lives.
Ron Gilbert: I don’t know what the next step is, but it will eventually become like the holodeck and then just injected right into our brains. We’ll all sit around, plugged in and fed through tubes as we play adventure games for our entire lives. Yeah, pretty sure that is what’s going to happen.
Charles Cecil: There are some interesting games that mix linear with emergent narrative, this is an area that I am particularly interested in. The key is to write a game that still appeals to a core adventure audience, while adding new elements that broaden that appeal.
Dave Grossman: Well, where I am now, at Reactive Studios, we're using increasingly effective voice recognition technology to let you control audio experiences by talking to them. I happen to think that's pretty cool.
David Fox: I’d love to see more immersive adventures. Either in a virtual reality (VR) space, or VR Movies, or overlaid on existing environments (like theme parks) with augmented reality (AR) support. If you haven’t read the Dream Park books, check them out.
Jane Jensen: I’d love to work with VR.
Chris Jones: For me, the adventure game’s real core has always revolved around the story. Technology is great, and I see how virtual reality can be a new way for a player to immerse themselves inside the game. However, the most important part is an engaging storyline. If the story doesn’t work, it doesn’t matter how you tell it.
Tex's most recent adventure was 2014's Tesla Effect.
Noah Falstein: I'm mostly interested in the storytelling aspects, particularly in ways to do dialog with procedural components. I think we're decades from computer being able to write good dialog on the fly, but I do think that there are ways to make story-flow more procedural. Hal Barwood and I collaborated on an adventure game a few years ago called Mata Hari. There were problems out of our control that plagued the project but we started experimenting with dialog choices in the form of tokens you could collect, which we felt had great promise. The tokens resulted in different dialog depending on who you played them on and they represented information or concepts you'd heard. I'd like to go further with that someday.
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If the narrative and design are strong, you don’t need all the cutting edge bells, whistles, and scenic vistas of the Uncanny Valley.
Larry Ahern: I’m ready for some good augmented reality or virtual reality adventures. Recently, I’ve been interested in location-based gaming too, so I think there are some interesting things to be done in that space. As opposed to that small square of couch cushion space where so much of gaming typically lives. Also, you know, I’m getting older so I really need an excuse to get more exercise, and Dance Central doesn’t work for me. On the other hand, the great thing about the adventure genre is it works really well on decades old technology. If the narrative and design are strong, you don’t need all the cutting edge bells, whistles, and scenic vistas of the Uncanny Valley.
Dan Marshall: I’d love to see an adventure game that doesn’t necessarily rely on the “right key for the right door” approach to design. I remember getting frustrated at one of the old Broken Sword games because I needed to jam a door shut. I had the perfect inventory item for it, but it wasn’t the “right” solution, so the game wouldn’t let me do it. I’d love to see someone try an “anything goes” approach to puzzle design.
Dave Gilbert: Honestly, I am really content with the way things are. It's never been easier or more accessible to make a game and get it out there, and the thriving indie scene is proof of that. I don't think the genre needs to evolve or change so much as we need to keep telling better stories with the tools we currently have.
Blackwell Legacy - an acclaimed adventure from Dave Gilbert's Wadjet Eye Games.
Josh Mandel: On a much less ambitious scale, I think now’s as good a time as any to bring back the parser. Our current obsession with point-and-click grew out of our infatuation with GUIs (graphical user interfaces), and for a long time, it was actually out of fashion to type at all if you didn’t have to. But with the advent of Twitter and texting, everyone’s back to typing, and, in fact, have miraculously become comfortable doing it on handheld devices like smartphones and tablets. The whole “hunt the verb” issue is really easily remedied with proper design and QA, and the parsers we could develop today would be far more sophisticated than the ones from twenty years ago.
IGN: Finally, people want to know. What (or who) killed the genre in the late ‘90s, are they still on the loose, and have the police found the culprit?
Noah Falstein: That's too obvious. It was done in by a shooter. In first person.
Ron Gilbert: DOOM killed the adventure game. I don’t mean that as a dig at DOOM, it was a great game, but it introduced a whole new audience to gaming. Also, it’s not really that adventure games died, they kept selling as well as they always did, it’s just that the rest of the market grew and grew a lot. Adventure games didn’t keep up. But we’ll get our revenge and are to some degree. Due to a larger and more mass audience, we’re seeing adventure and story based games doing very well.
Hey! What did the adventure genre ever do to you?
David Fox: I think the culprit might be technology. As adventure game designers began trying to make each game more impressive than the last, the number of people on the team had to grow exponentially, as did costs, budgets, and schedules. Cut-scenes changed from moving a puppet-character back and forth on a screen, to full-screen, fully animated productions. One way to deal with that was to make the games shorter. Another, was to just not do them! I heard that several adventure games were killed at LucasArts because while the games got more expensive, the audience didn’t grow enough to justify the expense.
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I don’t think the genre actually died in the 90s, it just went into hibernation. Or maybe it was a coma. Either way, that sleeping bear, or partially vegetative and severely muscle-atrophied amnesiac, is now awakened. So beware!
Larry Ahern: I don’t think the genre actually died in the 90s, it just went into hibernation. Or maybe it was a coma. Either way, that sleeping bear, or partially vegetative and severely muscle-atrophied amnesiac, is now awakened. So beware!
Dave Grossman: I spent a fair amount of time in the '90s and '00s telling people that adventure games weren't dead, only sleeping. And there does seem to be a resurgence going on right now. But something certainly did happen to them, and I think at least some of it comes down to a lot of poorly thought-out games having been published, and these became the face of the genre. Adventure games got a reputation for being pointless exercises in "guess what random thing the designer wants you to do next" because many of them were made without much understanding of craft or empathy for the audience. And my fear is that the current up swell will fall victim to this as well. It's a common misconception that adventure games are easy to design, in fact, they are pretty tricky to get right. Not that I'm opinionated or anything.
Benoit Sokal: I’m no games industry analyst, but we should always remember that for a long time the adventure game was one of the major genres. As other genres slowly took over and even incorporated adventure game mechanics, work on adventure games began to decrease. They generated less income than other games so that meant less money to make them. With crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter though, the appetite for traditional adventure games proved that people still wanted to play them, even if publishers believed the opposite. I think that the adventure game still has a lot of life left in it.
Rand Miller: Honestly I think that the complexity of designing and building these beasts killed the genre, or at least slow[ed] it down. It’s hard enough making games when you have the entire gameplay mechanics nailed down. Like for example in a FPS the mechanics are well known and defined from years of previous development. 1) Get a better weapon, 2) kill something with it so you can, 3) go to 1. Or a driving game. 1) Get a better car (or track), 2) drive faster so you can, 3) go to 1.
I’m not dissing those games at all. We all love those achievement oriented games, and we wait anxiously to see how the next big one will be skewed and skinned. But I think adventure games are different, the gameplay mechanics have to be designed and built from the ground up with each new title. If Riven had the same basic puzzles that Myst had, but we had just put a different skin (story and environment) on it, it would have been laughable. Riven had to have new story, environment, and friction. The puzzles had to be freshly and cleverly designed from scratch along with the rest of the elements. And all of those elements had to work together in an elegant and convincing way. Doing all of that from scratch for every adventure game is time consuming, expensive, and hard. Don’t get me wrong, I love doing it.
Classic bespoke Larry animation...
Al Lowe: It seemed obvious to me, in terms of Sierra at least, that it was killed by the accountants and the suits. Publishers started this horrible cycle of “prove to us that this game will sell before we give you the money to make it.” And I think that was the end of the genre because that didn’t really work for adventure games, particularly comedy ones. Comedy games are pretty unique in that they take a lot of specific animation and dialogue to pull off a joke or gag. In an action game you can create an explosion to blow something up and re-use it a hundred times over, and that’s much more cost effective.
Josh Mandel: I think the culprits were the publishers who looked at Myst’s sales numbers and decided that selling a few hundred thousand units was no longer a good enough return on investment. Every game, they proclaimed, had to be a Myst-killer. And by the time they found out what every designer could’ve told them, that you can’t lead through imitation, they soured on the whole genre. Fortunately, the fans have had the last laugh.
Gary Winnick: I think it was a combination of the market changing from more dedicated computer gaming to console platforms and the proliferation of much larger numbers for shooters and action games. As the audience and delivery platforms continue to evolve along with the addition of new funding models like Kickstarter, and associated indie development, there’s obviously a resurgence of adventure games happening.
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Schafer pretended to kill it but kept it in his basement so he could do a Kickstarter and “bring it back”. It’s all a big scam.
Dan Marshall: Schafer pretended to kill it but kept it in his basement so he could do a Kickstarter and “bring it back”. It’s all a big scam.
Dave Gilbert: This is all circumstantial, but I believe the genre faked its own death and is now living on an island in the South Pacific under an assumed name, drinking Mai Tais and playing volleyball with the girls from Dead or Alive.
Jane Jensen: Last I heard, the main suspect was a rabid dog that lived under a bridge near La Cienga and Vine. Don’t know if they’ve caught him yet.
A treacherous path...
Charles Cecil: It was PlayStation, albeit inadvertently. The phenomenal success of PlayStation in the late ‘90s led retailers to focus on mainly stocking PlayStation titles. Publishers decided that the PlayStation audience just wanted visceral 3D-based games, despite pretty clear proof that the audience was actually much more eclectic. The first Broken Sword, for example, was ported to the original PlayStation, sold 500,000 copies and was voted 5th best PlayStation game ever by readers of Official PlayStation Magazine. And yet, the publisher at the time still didn’t want to commission further adventure games for PlayStation. The ability to publish digitally has removed the chokepoint of retail, allowing indie games to thrive and even led to the resurgence of the adventure game. PlayStation has been at the heart of the video games industry for almost 20 years, and instrumental in making games appeal to a wider audience. So I would ask that they are forgiven for this particular crime.
Tex Murphy: Police have probably given up by now, but not me! I’m still after the culprits and I’ll track them down if it’s the last thing I do.
A big thanks to everyone who participated in this roundtable discussion for taking the time to share your thoughts and experiences, as well as for being all around polite, jovial, and super awesome people![/S]
A massive roundtable discussion with the developers that helped shaped a genre…
In Arthurian legend it’s written that King Arthur created a giant round table so that his knights could come around to the castle and chill out, drink mead, and shoot the breeze. Being round in shape meant that there was no official head; everyone who chose to sit down had an equal voice. And without having to worry about order or stature or hierarchy, he would famously say, “Dudes, it’s just Arthur here. Or Art. Even Arty will do. Actually, no. Don’t call me Arty.”
Anyone who was anyone in Camelot would come and enjoy the freewheeling conversations that took place at the Round Table – as it was cleverly known, and it was here that everything from sedimentary sword extraction to how to properly groom a horse were discussed openly. Except for Merlin, who by this point had heard the Sword in the Stone story a few too many times and took to protest by staying in his tower working on new potions.
In computer gaming legend the adventure genre is one that began when computers were first made available for recreational use. Starting with simple pieces of text on a screen and a flashing prompt waiting for input, over the years and decades this would evolve, incorporating graphics, animation, sound, music, and live action video. And throughout it all, a focus on narrative would be central.
This may be the reason the adventure genre is such a malleable one, and that even though it’s been around for decades – and has seen a huge amount of change – still has seemingly limitless potential.
After spending more than 12 months rediscovering classic adventure games of yesteryear, I wanted to hear more from the people who helped shape this most noble of genres, and what better way than with our very own virtual Round Table - a roundtable, if you will, one where various adventure gamedevelopers knights could come and talk about their adventure gaming memories and the genre’s past, present, and future.
The Knights of the IGN Adventure Game Roundtable
(In alphabetical order)
Larry Ahern – Joining LucasArts at the peak of its classic adventure game output, Larry Ahern is an artist that contributed to a number of the studio’s classics including Monkey Island 2, Day of the Tentacle, and Sam & Max Hit the Road. With a keen eye for quality animation Larry would join Tim Schafer’s Full Throttle as lead animator and then later become the co-designer on the third Monkey Island game, The Curse of Monkey Island (1997).
Charles Cecil – A veteran UK developer who played a role in the region’s gaming boom in the early ‘80s with a string of text adventures for the ZX Spectrum. As the founder of Revolution Software Charles Cecil was also instrumental in the cinematic development of the genre in the ‘90s with titles like Beneath a Steel Sky (1994) and Broken Sword: The Shadow of the Templars (1996). Founded in 1990, Revolution Software has survived and thrived throughout the many changes within the industry and recently released the latest entry in the Broken Sword series, The Serpent’s Curse.
Noah Falstein – A veteran designer who worked on a number of titles at Lucasfilm Games, including the adventure classic Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989) alongside David Fox and Ron Gilbert. At LucasArts Noah Falstein got to work on another property envisioned by Steven Spielberg, as he led development on the first version of what would ultimately become The Dig (1995). Currently Noah is the Chief Game Designer at a little known internet company called Google.
David Fox – Creator of Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders (1988), David Fox joined Lucasfilm Games as the studio’s third employee in 1982. David was also the project leader on the very first LucasArts adventure game, Labyrinth: The Computer Game (1986). Based on the David Bowie-starring Jim Henson fantasy film, much like other adventure titles from the studio it would shy away from utilising a text-parser. As the company grew David also served as the Director of Operations at LucasArts, overseeing all development.
Dave Gilbert – A designer and one of the pioneers of the independent adventure game resurgence, Dave Gilbert began his career making freeware titles using the Adventure Game Studio software package. In 2006 he founded Wadjet Eye Games, and released two critically acclaimed adventure games The Shivah and Blackwell Legacy. The latter would become the first title in the Blackwell series with the most recent game, Blackwell Epiphany, released in 2014.
Ron Gilbert – Co-creator of the adventure classicManiac Mansion (1987), Ron Gilbert is also known for helping create the term point-and-click with the creation of SCUMM (or the Scripting Utility for Maniac Mansion). As the engine that drove all LucasArts adventures for a number of years, Ron Gilbert’s legacy was all but assured. But it would beThe Secret of Monkey Island (1990), created and designed by Ron, that would remain his most well-known and beloved game. After leaving LucasArts he co-founded Humongous Entertainment where he worked on a number of successful adventure games aimed at a younger audience.
Dave Grossman – After joining LucasArts it wasn’t long before Dave Grossman was put to work as a writer and programmer on The Secret of Monkey Island (1990). Working alongside Tim Schafer and designer Ron Gilbert this would start a long career of collaboration and adventure gaming, with titles like Day of the Tentacle at LucasArts and Sam & Max: Season One at Telltale Games. In November 2014 Dave Grossman joined Reactive Studios as their Chief Creative Officer overseeing the development of voice-controlled interactive experiences.
Jane Jensen – Creator of the Gabriel Knight series, Jane Jensen joined Sierra in the early ‘90s as a writer where she got to cut her teeth writing dialogue and story for titles like Police Quest III and EcoQuest. Her first efforts as a designer would come alongside Roberta Williams with the critically acclaimed King’s Quest VI: Heir Today, Gone Tomorrow (1992). Since departing Sierra Jane has continued to create story-driven adventure games, as seen with Gray Matter (2010) and more recently, Moebius: Empire Rising(2014).
Chris Jones – A game designer who has also earned the titles of actor and filmmaker. Chris Jones is not only the co-creator and designer of the Tex Murphy series of adventure games, but he is Tex Murphy. Under a Killing Moon (1994) not only served as one of the finer attempts at creating an interactive movie, but it helped push the genre into new and exciting areas. As the down on his luck 21st century gumshoe, Chris Jones recently donned the iconic fedora one more time for Tesla Effect: A Tex Murphy Adventure(2014).
Al Lowe – A former high school music teacher turned computing enthusiast, Al Lowe joined Sierra in the early ‘80s as a programmer where he worked on everything from King’s Quest to a line of educational titles starring popular Disney characters. But it would be Leisure Suit Larry in The Land of the Lounge Lizards (1987), Sierra’s adults-only sex-themed comedy adventure series that saw six titles released over the course of a decade that would define his career. Retiring after the fall of Sierra in the late ‘90s, Al Lowe recently contributed to the remake of the first Larry game, Leisure Suit Larry: Reloaded (2014). I had a lengthy chat with him about the series quite recently.
Josh Mandel – Beginning his career as a stand-up comedian, Josh Mandel would join Sierra with the goal to create comedies. Over the years he would get the chance to work alongside Sierra veterans and design some classic comedies, including Freddy Pharkas: Frontier Pharmacist (1993) with Al Lowe, and Space Quest 6: Roger Wilco in The Spinal Frontier (1995) with Scott Murphy. Josh would also lend his voice to the King’s Quest series as it moved into the realm of multimedia, playing the role of King Graham in both King’s Quest V and King’s Quest VI.
Dan Marshall – Independent developer behind Ben There, Dan That (2008) and Time, Gentlemen Please! (2009), Dan Marshall’s first forays into the genre earned him critical acclaim. As both titles blended comedy, story, and puzzles in a fashion that had been all but forgotten about, they served as great modern renditions of a seemingly bygone style. Dan currently heads up the studio he founded in 2008, Size Five Games, where he’s hard at work developing what’s most likely to be the world’s first steampunk cybercrime caper, The Swindle.
Rand Miller – Alongside his brother Robyn, Rand Miller is the co-creator of the computer game sensation Myst. Through its fantasy setting, first-person viewpoint, and cutting edge graphics, Mystquickly became a major component of the multimedia and home computing boom following its release in 1993. As co-founder and CEO of Cyan Worlds, Rand has overseen development on a number of Myst sequels over the years and has most recently been working on Obduction, a spiritual successor due for release in the second half of 2015. Check out our Google Hangout with Rand from mid last year.
Benoit Sokal – Belgian comic artist Benoit Sokal was best known for creating the smoking anthropomorphic duck detective Inspector Carnado in the late ‘70s before joining developer Microids to work on adventure games. As a veteran comic artist and storyteller, Benoit designed the critically acclaimed Syberia (2002) and its sequel. Although delayed due to a lack of funding, the third game in the Syberia series, overseen by Benoit, is due for release in 2015.
Gary Winnick – Gary joined LucasArts (then known as the Lucasfilm Games Division) in 1984 as its first artist and animator. Working alongside Ron Gilbert he would co-create Maniac Mansion and help kick start the company’s focus on rich story-driven adventure games. As a veteran artist he would oversee the art department at LucasArts for a number of years as the studio released a string of classic adventures. Gary also designed Defenders of Dynatron City at LucasArts which was adapted into a TV special and comic book series. Currently, Gary is working alongside Ron Gilbert on Thimbleweed Park.
THE ROUNDTABLE
IGN: What was the first experience you had playing an adventure game? What were some of your thoughts on how it stood out from other games at the time?
Rand Miller: It was either Colossal Cave Adventure or Zork. My memory blurs between the two, but the feeling they provided was my first sense of actually exploring a virtual space on a computer, as opposed to simply moving through nondescript grids. I remember thinking that it was interesting to have an experience with a computer that would become the basis of a rather bizarre story that I would relate to co-workers the next day. “Last night? Well, I stumbled on a small cabin in the woods, and found a secret trapdoor underneath a rug that lead down to an underground kingdom.”
Let's set the scene.
Al Lowe: The first adventure game I played was on my Apple II computer which I bought “on line.” And by that I mean that it was from an ad in a magazine and I placed a mail-order over a phone line. Before I received it I thought that I should get a couple of games to play, so my son and I had something to do together. So I got an arcade game and I also got Cranston Manor, an adventure game. That was a Sierra game and it was one of their classic games set in a building with a lot of hallways and a lot of rooms. We got hooked, my son was around five years old at the time and it was a game that he and I could play together. I would sit there doing a lot of the typing and he would do a lot of the thinking. And his ideas were just as valid as mine. It was a way for us to experience a game together, and we played adventure games from then on.
Jane Jensen: The first adventure game that I ever played right through was King’s Quest IV in 1988. I had played text adventures before on mainframes, but I’d never seen a graphic adventure game before. I was immediately drawn into the story and into the idea of visually exploring the world. I loved it, so I went out and bought everything else in Sierra’s catalogue.
Get the t-shirt!
Dave Grossman: My first adventure game was Crowther and Woods's Colossal Cave Adventure, also known as just plain Adventure. It's the text adventure the genre is named after. I was in my early teens. I played it at home using a dial-up terminal that was like a fifty-pound typewriter with suction cups on the back that you stuck your phone into. It didn't have a screen, it printed everything out on rolls of expensive thermal paper. I was totally hooked on the game, and my friends and I used up a lot of that paper.
Noah Falstein: That would be the original Adventure in the Colossal Caves. I played it on a terminal in college, probably sometime around 1979. I wasn't very impressed though, the approach was interesting but I found it boring. A year or two later I was working at Milton Bradley and we had a VAX computer that had Zork on it. Now that was fun, the world was interesting and I loved the storytelling in what became the Infocom games. In particular I remember Starcross and Planetfall as grabbing my attention and keeping me engaged. I never really did like parser-based games though, it was mostly the depth of story that made me try a bunch of text adventures.
This guy... is no hero.
Larry Ahern: The first time I ever played an adventure game was the week after I started at LucasArts. They demoed The Secret of Monkey Islandduring my interview, and I was eager to try it out. I had no idea anyone made funny story games like that! I’d played a lot of arcade games, but never transitioned to the PC. I’d played an RPG in college that had me battling a “dragon” (which was technically an ampersand) but that failed to convince me of the platform’s entertainment potential. But there I was, a few years later, looking at fully animated characters, in colour, with story, dialog, and a rubber chicken with a pulley in the middle! Instantly I realised, “This is the kind of work I should be doing!” Of course that statement probably also applied to flipping burgers, given the state of my bank account. Thankfully I got the chance to work on games instead of asking, “Do you want fries with that?”
Dan Marshall: Oh man, I’m not sure. I remember playing Monkey Island on a - get this - black and white laptop. Not sure I got very far, it was pretty difficult to make out what the shapes were, and the display was so crappy. The first point and click I remember playing though, and being utterly in love with, was Sam and Max Hit the Road. It was amazing.
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Myst... was an amazing experience that made me want to create my own game. The sense of discovery, the atmosphere, the sights and sounds, they all captivated me...
Benoit Sokal: It wasn’t my first encounter with an adventure game, but the one that definitely stood out to me was Myst. It was an amazing experience that made me want to create my own game. The sense of discovery, the atmosphere, the sights and sounds, they all captivated me and pushed me forward to experience the entire story. Its mechanics, which were based on things like observation, deduction, and reflection, showed me that the adventure game opened up the very idea of gaming to a different audience, one eager for story rather than obtaining high scores. It was also perfectly in tune with what I loved, bringing in comics, incorporating simple and accessible interactivity.
Chris Jones: I consider Dungeons & Dragons on Intellivision as the first adventure game I played. It was different than an arcade game because it set up a world for you, and it was incredibly atmospheric. As simple as it was, it built atmosphere and tension.
Colossal Cave in action.
Josh Mandel: My first adventure game was Will Crowther’s Colossal Cave. Up until that point, the only computer games I’d ever played were Eliza (which was more of a toy, not a game) and the BASIC game that became known as ‘Star Trek’ and then, later, Star Fleet. To me, the adventure game was the one that immediately made me think of all the different possibilities, all the genres of fiction that could be turned into interactive adventures. And although I found it incredibly frustrating, I couldn’t wait to play it again and have an opportunity to map it all out and solve the puzzles. Unfortunately, it was well over a decade before I had the opportunity to do that.
Gary Winnick: I remember playing King’s Quest and Space Quest, mainly because Ron showed them to me when we were first developing Maniac Mansion. I was very intrigued by the presentation because at that time it felt a bit like I was playing an interactive cartoon. I could definitely see the possibilities, particularly when Ron outlined the concept of ‘point and click.’
Ron Gilbert: I played Adventure on the college mainframe computer when I was in junior high school. It was my introduction to adventure games. I remember me and three other classmates huddled around the screen trying to solve puzzles and drawing large maps. It was the first time I’d played a game like that and it was mesmerizing.
Dave Gilbert: My mother made the mistake of buying me a copy of Wishbringer when I was in the fifth grade or so. It's very easy to romanticize the past, but I remember being incredibly drawn in. It was wonderfully written, and I loved exploring the little island that it took place on. I would dream about the puzzles in that game. Quite literally. I dreamed up the solution to one of the puzzles in that game and I couldn't believe it when it worked. Also, around the same time I borrowed a friend's copy of King’s Quest. Like Wishbringer, I enjoyed walking around the world, but what stuck out the most was when I arbitrarily typed in “jump”, Graham actually jumped! That blew my little mind!
Unicorn dog can happen!
David Fox: My first experience was playing the original text adventure game Colossal Cave on a printer terminal in 1976, sitting on my bed at home. I loved how immersive it felt, even though the descriptions were short, and the only pictures were in my head. I loved it! Soon after, when my wife, Annie, and I opened our public access microcomputer centre, we had the complete series of adventure games from Scott Adams’ Adventure International, and I ended up converting them from TRS-80 to Apple II and CPM systems for him.
Charles Cecil: The first adventure game that I ever played was a Scott Adams text adventure on the TRS80 in about 1980. The TRS80 had a whopping 4K of memory, compared to the ZX80 and then ZX81 with just 1K, so it was able to display much more impressive graphics than its British counterpart. As this was at the birth of the computer games era, we were hugely excited to see what others were doing, things were developing so fast.
IGN: As you began a career in game development what drew you to the adventure genre, and were there any specific goals you had when you began work on your first game (where you had some form of creative control)?
David Fox: I love the sense of exploration and problem solving (rather than shooting or fighting) in an adventure game. They also let me play in a complete world, apart from our own, and try things I could or would never try in real life. The first adventure game I designed (with the help of some amazing people, including Douglas Adams), was Labyrinth. But the scope and story were somewhat restricted by the film it was based on. I did have a lot of creative control in choosing what to use, but it still had to be based on Labyrinth. Next, I came on as the SCUMM scripter for Ron Gilbert and Gary Winnick’s Maniac Mansion. This was even more fun since I had more control over what happened in the game via SCUMM. But it was Ron and Gary’s story, so there were some limitations. But I was still able to come up with ideas, the hamster in microwave being one.
Look away, animal lovers.
Noah Falstein: It wasn't until I was at Lucasfilm Games that I began to pay attention, Ron Gilbert and David Fox were the first two project leaders to delve into it (although we were all interested in games as storytelling experiences) and we all worked together to one extent or another on Labyrinth, Maniac Mansion, and Zak McCracken, before finally co-leading and co-designing Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade together. That was the first game where I was a major contributor as it was my project alone before David and Ron came on board so we could finish it in time for the theatrical release of the film. I very much wanted to capture the feeling of the movie but offer an experience that wasn't just an action game playing out scenes from the movie. We worked together to figure out how to fit the gameplay "between" the scenes of the movie so it would feel as if you were playing the role of Indiana Jones and getting to see what was left out. We had the original script and many of the game scenes that were not in the movie were from that. It was fun being a semi-insider, although we didn't really get to work much with the filmmakers.
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade still looks great.
Rand Miller: Our first game (The Manhole) was started as more of an interactive book. But I think that my brother Robyn and I were both so intrigued by the idea of exploring virtual places that it just evolved naturally into a first person visual adventure. That first game had little in the way of story or goals, but it set the stage for us to move to more sophisticated games and, ultimately, to Myst and Riven. Our goals remained the same for all of our projects. That is, to build immersive worlds to be explored.
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The main thing that led me to being creative in general has always been the desire to tell great stories. And whatever form the setting or story may take, what matters to me most is the emotion at its core.
Benoit Sokal: The main thing that led me to being creative in general has always been the desire to tell great stories. And whatever form the setting or story may take, what matters to me most is the emotion at its core. If we can create and convey that level of emotion with a medium like videogames, then we’re already halfway there. The rest feels secondary, even if things like gameplay, controls, and graphics, are important and can make the difference between a merely functional game and an exceptional one. With my own games I envision transporting players and giving them a sort of virtual trip. I draw inspiration from real places and facts, but always try to give them a sort of fantastical twist. This reinvention of the world is one I prefer to deal with, and the best way for me to tackle various social topics.
Charles Cecil: I was invited to write an adventure game for a fledgling computer games company, Artic Computing (one of the very first European games publishers). The concept of writing a story that could be played interactively was extraordinary. Dungeons & Dragons had come to the UK a few years earlier, but I never had the opportunity to play. My first game, Adventure B (it was the second adventure game to be published by Artic) was very much inspired by the Indiana Jones film Raiders of the Lost Ark, which I still consider to be the best ever adventure movie. During that early period, we really were making up all the rules as we went along.
Josh Mandel: I used to play every genre of computer game. I’d take a real-time trip with a Flight Simulator every Sunday morning, for instance, but adventure games were the only ones that made me want to work on games for a living. My goals were very specific. I had been playing the original Leisure Suit Larry, and some of the Infocom comedies, and I thought, “There are so few good comedies out there, and I bet I can write an adventure at least as funny as these.” I had been a comic for a decade leading up to my first job in game development, so I was thinking in terms of how I would manipulate the displaying of text in order to simulate the way a comedian uses timing, and how we could do a better job of setting up the jokes so that they had more impact, and how to build good running gags, and so on.
A classic Larry gag preempting what players might do.
Al Lowe: I learned to program by creating a set of 20 interrelated programs to manage a school music festival, which at the time seemed to me like a real money maker. So that’s one of the reasons we bought a computer but as we were playing adventure games and my son was learning to read, my wife and I (both working in education) thought that we should do a game that was educational. So we created adventure games that looked a lot like Sierra games because that’s what we played. But we simplified them, we only used the spacebar to change between choices and the enter key to choose. So they were more like multiple choice adventure games, where you could move from room to room, talk to people and do simple things. They were simple kids’ games, but they were effective.
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My goal initially just was to work for Sierra in some capacity. But by the time I was able to propose my own adventure game at Sierra, my goal was to write a game that was more mature, dark, and a bit scary – something with a more serious story.
Jane Jensen: My goal initially just was to work for Sierra in some capacity. But by the time I was able to propose my own adventure game at Sierra, my goal was to write a game that was more mature, dark, and a bit scary – something with a more serious story.
Ron Gilbert: I love the storytelling of adventure games. I love weaving the story in with all the puzzles until they are inseparable. I don’t know that I had a specific goal when Gary and I startedManiac Mansion. To be honest, it didn’t even start out as an adventure game. We didn’t know what it was at first. It was just a collection of characters and odd idea, then I saw King’s Quest for the first time, and everything fell into place.
Gary Winnick: I find the nature of adventure games presenting a character driven story very compelling, I come from a graphic novel and animated film background and the look and feel of adventure gaming, for me, is a close cousin. As far as a goal, I really wanted to be able to tell a story that was both immersive and fun.
Chris Jones: It was always my goal to incorporate cinema style storytelling, character development, and plot development into games. I was a huge fan of movies and made lots of films in high school and college, so to be able to find a way to merge games and movies was really fun. I wanted the chance to create games where the player felt like a character from a movie.
Under a Killing Moon introduced players to future gumshoe Tex Murphy.
Dave Grossman: I liked adventure games because they were stories more than other games were stories, and having a job where I spent that much time crafting scenes in a digital puppet theatre and writing interactive dialog was just really fun. But it wasn't a choice I got to make for myself, the opportunity in front of me was one where I'd be making adventure games, and I took it. The only conscious choice for me was to stick with it as time went by. And by, and by, and...
Larry Ahern: Honestly, the adventure genre was pretty much all that LucasArts was doing at the time, so I really didn’t have a choice in the matter. But even if that wasn’t the case, I would have been drawn to the style because of the blending of story, puzzles, and animation. I was never a big gamer, never played D&D or war games or anything like that. But I was always big into comics, cartoons, and animation. The thought of taking those forms of media and letting audiences interact with the characters and stories was very appealing.
The first game I really had creative input on was Day of the Tentacle. I remember working as an animator on The Secret of Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge and being frustrated at the inconsistent character designs and lack of a defined style for the animation. I really wanted to create characters that felt like they were all of one world, and then push the boundaries of the animation there. Monkey 2 was a comedy, but it was more subdued, and I wanted to go extreme. I’d never seen a game that tried that. Plus we had a pixel height limit on the characters, and I figured out that by making them cartoony, with larger heads, it meant I got much more expressive faces while still adhering to those restrictions.
Day of the Tentacle's art direction is superb and bursting with personality.
Dave Gilbert: As the saying goes, you write what you know. And I both knew and loved adventure games. I discovered the Adventure Game Studio engine at the exact time in my life when I had the time and desire to create something. People seemed to like what I made, so I kept making more! Could I have written novels or films or plays? Sure, but I was drawn to the adventure genre and I seemed to be reasonably good at it. As for specific goals, my desire at the beginning was to see if I could somehow earn my living from it! I had no goal beyond "I want to make this work." Somehow, I managed to do that. And I am grateful for that every day.
Ben There, Dan That.
Dan Marshall: Well, Ben There Dan That was sort of made as a silly joke, a slap-dash little adventure made following the long, harrowing development of my first game. I set it loose and it really clicked with a lot of people, so I wound up writing a sequel. I don’t think it was so much a massive, burning desire to create a point and click as it was the availability and ease of using Adventure Game Studio after finishing up development on something that didn’t really use any third-party tools.
IGN: In the early days the adventure game genre was the go-to place for players looking for rich characterisation and story in their games. Do you think this has successfully been carried across to other genres, or are there still things that you can only do, narratively speaking, with an adventure game?
Charles Cecil: Pretty much all genres have adapted to incorporate stories, particularly RPGs. Indeed, this is one of the reasons for the decline of the adventure from the mid ‘90s, it no longer had a monopoly on storytelling. Action games make a big song and dance about their intricate stories, but generally these are just linear stories broken up to create the motivation for, and then reward gameplay. Adventures do tell an interactive story in a unique way, although the definition of ‘adventure’ is now so wide (from The Wolf Among us through point-and-click to Heavy Rain) that it isn’t really possible to generalise.
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It's more difficult in most other genres for the gameplay to contribute to the story in a really meaningful way...
Dave Grossman: Certainly other types of games can and have had some success with story. But adventure games have an advantage, in that the gameplay is all about interacting with characters and driving the story forward, instead of, say, interacting with bullets or platforms, or driving a motorcycle forward. It's more difficult in most other genres for the gameplay to contribute to the story in a really meaningful way, and since gameplay is what you spend almost all of your time doing in a game, the story often starves as a result.
Rand Miller: It’s interesting to me how rich story and characterization is showing up everywhere these days, sometimes to a fault. I still think that there is a certain calming purity to the idea of exploring for exploring sake which is, I suppose, what the adventure genre is all about. But even as other gaming genres intersperse some adventuring, once the needle tilts to a more aggressive gaming achievement experience the player’s motivational psychology switches away from the subtle connections of story and environment. The focus becomes almost exclusively to efficiently learn the skill to achieve the goal, at the expense of the wonder at the world around them. This isn’t bad, it’s just different.
David Fox: I think you could bring rich characterization to any story-based game. But the adventure game is a much easier environment for this, partially because of its pacing, and the player’s need to dig into the characters to find out what they want, and what they will and won’t do under your command.
Such a memorable character.
Noah Falstein: Oh, I think that modern games like the BioShock, Mass Effect, Assassin's Creed, and Portal series (all of which started at almost the same time!) certainly tell interesting, involved stories that are the match of most adventure games. Not to mention RPGs with many thousands of lines of dialog. The pacing of adventure games is perhaps still friendlier to those who want to savour the story and think about things without being pushed along by action scenes.
Jane Jensen: I don’t think there are things you can only do with adventure games. It’s more a matter of ‘what else’ is in the game (besides the story) and whether or not that’s appealing. Personally, I don’t enjoy playing action sequences so I prefer a game that has puzzle, exploration, and story over games that may have those but also include heavy action sequences. To me that’s the difference between an adventure game and not-an-adventure-game.
Al Lowe: I don’t think there are things that you can only do with an adventure game, but I do think there are things that haven’t been done well yet. It’s not easy to create a story that has characters with depth and personality, and often that’s the last thing to get tacked onto a game. People are usually more interested in the game mechanic and in the quality of graphics and animation, than the story. So story was often and probably still is, kind of tacked on at the end. And that wasn’t the way we did our games at Sierra, which were much more about placing the lead character in situations and seeing how the player reacted to those things. And through that building up the characterisation. I think a telling point is that for years, the central character in all the source code we had was always named ‘ego’. And that was a glimpse into how we thought the games were perceived.
Dan Marshall: I think where adventures excel is in the idea of the auteur. As a player, you’re getting into the mindset of the designer and working out how they’re trying to trick you. It’s all very meta, but I think with the true greats of the genre you’re sort of circumnavigating the ghost of the designer. Playing Day Of The Tentacle, you can see all these little hurdles laid out in front of you and it’s not that you’re looking for a logical solution, you’re looking for “Okay, what does Schafer want me to do?” And I think sadly that’s something that’s dying out.
What are you trying to say, Tim?
Gary Winnick: I think it’s all relative to execution, if well executed any genre can be used to tell a story, I think it can be a bit easier in an adventure game based upon both the players pre-existing expectation when it comes to the genre as well as presentation.
Chris Jones: I still think the best bet for the narrative to be told in an interactive way is an adventure game. It gives you a chance to develop characters in deeper ways with multiple endings, multiple character interactions, and the chance to develop natural relationships with characters. You could meet a character and depending on the interaction, it can evolve in many different ways.
Dave Gilbert: I've always felt that the idea of "rich narrative only being possible in adventure games" is kind of elitist. Narrative has always been possible in all genres, it's just that some genres are more conductive to certain kinds of stories. What adventure games can do, and quite effectively, is put you [in] another person's shoes, immersed in another time or place. It's tricky to pull off, but when done well there is no experience like it.
Benoit Sokal: Today the majority of the games, the biggest and most spectacular looking titles, provide things like context, character, and events. Nevertheless, they still often serve as a pretext for action. So even though adventure game mechanics can be found across many other genres, the adventure game still continues to feel like its own thing. Because it allows the player to take their time to explore the world around them.
Valve and storytelling, eh?
Larry Ahern: I’m probably not the best judge of something like that, since my job and family demands have made it harder for me to find time to play games. But I guess I’ll try to make up some kind of answer. The first nail I saw in the adventure game coffin was when Half Life came out. They took an FPS and actually added some logical story and puzzle elements on top of the mechanics in a way that made it feel a lot more immersive than the usual action game of the period. And a lot of games seem to have followed that model with great success.
On the other hand, there’s often a bit of conflict (ludonarrative dissonance, I think, is what the kids are calling it these days) between the stories developers want to tell and the mechanics they’re using in their games. But because the adventure genre puts the story first, then builds the mechanics around that, I think there’s always going to be a certain tone that you can only find in that genre. And I don’t think adventure games have to be restricted to inventory puzzle mechanics or that kind of thing either. They just need to be structured around story. Heck, they don’t even need to be “adventures.” Where’d we even get that term anyway? Actually, I know the answer, but since I already used ludonarrative dissonance in a sentence, I don’t want to come across as too smart or anything.
Josh Mandel: I see that there’s been tremendous progress in the storytelling aspect of many other genres, particularly RPGs and first-person shooters. They seem to have learned some of the best lessons of adventure games. But from the standpoint of turning a specific narrative into an interactive experience, adventure games are still the best compromise. They’re not as open-ended as RPGs and thus better able to sustain dramatic tension, and they’re also not as constrained by the need to stay focused on action as with first-person shooters.
Ron Gilbert: Humans love storytelling. We used to sit around camp fires and tell stories. It’s how we learned, passed on history and entertained ourselves. It’s just natural for storytelling to become a part of gaming, no matter the genre. I don’t know if there is anything specific to adventure games that make them good at storytelling, but it’s what interests me about making them.
IGN: What’s one of your favourite moments or memories from a title that you worked on?
Via Cool-Hand-Mike on Deviant Art.
Dave Grossman: It's odd, the things that stick with me are not moments that are the most fun or the most humorous. It's the things I screwed up that taught me something in the aftermath. For example, that whole monkey-wrench puzzle from Monkey Island taught me that not only should you never base a puzzle on a play on words if you plan to translate the game into other languages, you should also check to see if the reference applies culturally. Even in places where they do speak the same language as you. Because although that object you use to open a big valve is often called a "monkey wrench" in the country you live, there are lots of places in the English-speaking world where it's called something else and that term has no meaning whatsoever. And if you don't have that specific phrase in your head you can't really figure out how to solve that puzzle, and the game is broken. Whoops!
Dan Marshall: There’s a puzzle in Time Gentlemen, Please! I’m very proud of. You find yourself on an Alien Planet with a non-responsive character, and it turns out you’re inside this little text adventure that was introduced at the start of the game. One that the player has had ample opportunity to mess around with. So you have to keep running back and forth, typing away at the text parser to get things to change on the alien planet so you can progress. It’s this really tight little puzzle, and it’s a lovely homage to the progress of adventure games to boot. I’m really quite proud of all that, it works well.
David Fox: It’s definitely the collaboration we had on these games. Very much like a dance where the partners take turns leading. Ideas come in from all places, including other designers, play testers, etc., and it’s fun choosing the best ones to incorporate in the game, and then see how that ripples through the rest of the design.
Gary Winnick: I just think the entire process of creating Maniac Mansion and then discovering we’d actually reached an audience. Remember in those days there was no internet, we just sent a product out into the market and it actually took months to see a review printed in a magazine.
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I love meeting fans of the Broken Sword series whose lives were affected by playing one of my games...
Charles Cecil: I love meeting fans of the Broken Sword series whose lives were affected by playing one of my games, whether through a relationship shared with someone with whom they played, a love of art that they then pursued, someone who decided to write their own adventures, or the desire to travel to places featured in the games. I am very proud of our medium, and am surprised that the press and so many people are still so negative towards the industry.
Ron Gilbert: Despite Maniac Mansion and Monkey Island being such touchstone games, I think the most rewarding part of my career was making adventure games for kids at Humongous Entertainment. Kids are such a pure audience. It means a lot to me when people come up and say they play adventure games today because they grew-up playing Putt-Putt or Pajama Sam.
S&M: An incredibly well animated game.
Larry Ahern: I remember working on a few animations for Sam & Max Hit the Road between bigger projects and just wanted to do something that made Steve Purcell laugh. I was a big fan of his work, but since I wasn’t involved in writing or designing anything for the game, I wanted to find some way to leave my mark. Steve gave me the Cone of Tragedy scene to animate and said “just come up with something.” The Cone was a horrible carnival ride that was only defined by its name (and your imagination), so I thought long and hard about it and finally decided that the ride would spin, then a bunch of Swiss Army Knife blades would pop out and move back and forth like one of those big knives in the window of a knife shop. That, combined with Max giving Sam CPR afterwards, did the trick and had Steve chuckling. Also, he mentioned the scene once in an interview, so I feel obligated to validate that, while simultaneously indirectly heaping more praise on the steaming pile of hyperbole that is key to the Cone’s legend.
Noah Falstein: I was the first project leader on The Dig, and as such, was the only one to run multiple brainstorming meetings with George Lucas and Steven Spielberg as participants. That was a high point in my career, particularly when the two of them would get into banter about each other’s ideas. We also had some separate meetings with Steven, who was and still is a huge game enthusiast. His son Max, who I met on the phone while Steven played Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and called us up for hints with Max watching him play, is now a game developer. I was also working on our Their Finest Hour: The Battle of Britain game at the time, and I enjoyed watching Steven play an early build of that while ILM guys had to wait until he was done to talk to him about some early Jurassic Park dinosaur test clips.
Jane Jensen: I’ve always loved watching the voice actors work in the studio. And I will always remember the day we went into the warehouse at Sierra in Oakhurst and watched the first triangular boxes of Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers go through the assembly line. That was a great day.
Gabriel Knight: mature, realistically depicted and thoroughly researched.
Josh Mandel: It would be impossible to beat the experience of working with the Freddy Pharkas programmers: Steve Conrad, Bill Shockley, and Cindy Brown. I mean, the whole team was fantastic, and working so closely with Al Lowe was something I’d never imagined. But Steve, Bill, Cindy, and I shared an office and we pretty much ate, slept, and breathed Freddy for months, day and night, solving issues and adding features and just being astoundingly driven and productive and cooperative.
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[Working on Freddy Pharkas] gave me an uplifting sense of camaraderie like I’ve never experienced before or since.
When everybody has a creative stake in the outcome, even the arguments are valuable. It gave me an uplifting sense of camaraderie like I’ve never experienced before or since.
Al Lowe: I don’t know if this is a good story but one day we were working on King’s Quest IV and we had a crazy deadline, like one month to code this game. That was because the two guys that were hired to code it waited until the last minute to tell everybody that they didn’t know what they were doing. So Sierra basically shut down all other projects for about a month, and all the programmers went to work on this one game. And everybody did a couple of scenes but we worked around the clock, literally until we fell asleep in our chairs. And then we’d go to a nearby motel where we had a rotating system where you’d sleep, wake up, and then someone else would go into the room. It was crazy. I remember one programmer coming to me and giving me his timesheet and he had 120 hours of work in a week on it. That may not sound like a fun story but earlier that week I had teased him a few times about going home early, so that was pretty funny!
A better memory though would be the thrill that came from directing the voice overs for the Larry games. I really got a kick out of going to Hollywood and hiring actors that spent their time doing various animated films, cartoons, commercials, and working with them in a creative environment. We would do a lot of improvisation in the studio too, and if they came up with an idea I could just as easily change the game. So it was very fun and loose coming up with the different voices, accents, and personalities through that whole process.
Rand Miller: I think the experience of first interviewing people who playedMyst is fairly high on the list. They were given the game for a week, and then we covertly watched as they were interviewed. Their comments and excitement were powerful medicine at a time when we had precariously created an experience with only “us" in mind, not really knowing if anyone beyond “us” would like it.
Myst was a cultural phenomenon.
Benoit Sokal: I tend to think that the best memories are yet to come, and still expect a lot of great times making the next Syberia. But I will always remember, with great emotion, the release and the fantastic reception we got with the first game. I’m amazed, that even after a decade, people are still showing their support and love.
Dave Gilbert: Working with the voice actors. Game development is a very solitary thing, and I always look forward to calling up the actors and start working with them. They bring such a life and vivaciousness to a project that is so inspiring. Working with Abe Goldfarb and Rebecca Whittaker on Blackwell was especially fun. My biggest regret about finishing the series is that I won't be working with them as much anymore.
Chris Jones: My favourite moments were watching other actors work. For example, Michael York had such a powerful presence. We basically gave him a book of dialogue to memorize in a very short amount of time, and he arrives on set and delivers an engaging performance. I’m a novice, so my goal was to minimize my lines because I didn’t want to look bad! I’ve been very impressed by the professionalism and the talent of many of the actors in the Tex Murphy series. We only had Steve Valentine in for a day, but he was very warm and engaging with everyone on set. While we were setting up the next shot, Steve would be in the stairwell, studying the next scene intensely. June Lockhart was very excited for her role and (spoiler alert!) death scene. Kevin Murphy was a total pro and such a pleasure to work with too. I’ve just loved having the chance to work with people I’ve admired.
IGN: The adventure genre up to a point was always something that kept up with technology, from text parsers and icons systems to voice acting and even video. Where would you like to see the genre going with today’s technology?
Not pictured: dithering.
Al Lowe: You didn’t go back far enough! The first game sold that even had graphics was Mystery House, which was an adventure game. And sure it had these horrible stick figures that Roberta Williams drew in black and white on a screen, but it was graphics. And then when Roberta wanted to do another game, she complained to Ken because the Apple could only do four colours, plus black and white. And so Ken invented dithering, which was used in Wizard and the Princess. And that’s the process of mixing a pixel of this colour and a pixel of that colour so that when blended together your eye would see a different colour.
As for your question! I’ve thought for over thirty years that at some point games would become like motion pictures or films. Or that what people really wanted was to star in their own movies, and go so far as to scan their face and entire body and then place them in the game and become the star. I first envisioned that idea in 1981 because it seemed to me like that was where the future was going. You can see intimations of that in things like facial recognition, motion capture, and so forth, so it won’t be long before someone produces a game that lets you become a hero.
Gary Winnick: The term Interactive Movie has always been a buzzword for us, particularly coming from a company with the history of LucasArts. That being said I think one of the definitive links between here and there would obviously be adventure gaming.
Rand Miller: I don’t think our goals at Cyan have changed much from those early days. We want to use the latest technology to the best of our abilities to build immersive worlds to be explored. Better technology just provides a more convincing portal to those worlds.
Obduction is Cyan's current project.
Benoit Sokal: What also led me to video games and especially adventure game creation, was my fascination with computer generated images (CGI). For me, CGI is one of the main advantages of working with computers to tell a story. I often spend a lot of time and energy refining lighting and colour details, and even though you can tell a story with just a few pixels or a simple drawing, I have to admit that it’s just a lot more pleasant to see detailed and pretty visuals. The technique is not the goal, but it helps to visualize the world or setting as the author imagined. I personally think that these beautiful images and art we see in games should be appreciated on nice, large screens too. Maybe one day we can walk directly into these worlds through technology.
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We’ll all sit around, plugged in and fed through tubes as we play adventure games for our entire lives.
Ron Gilbert: I don’t know what the next step is, but it will eventually become like the holodeck and then just injected right into our brains. We’ll all sit around, plugged in and fed through tubes as we play adventure games for our entire lives. Yeah, pretty sure that is what’s going to happen.
Charles Cecil: There are some interesting games that mix linear with emergent narrative, this is an area that I am particularly interested in. The key is to write a game that still appeals to a core adventure audience, while adding new elements that broaden that appeal.
Dave Grossman: Well, where I am now, at Reactive Studios, we're using increasingly effective voice recognition technology to let you control audio experiences by talking to them. I happen to think that's pretty cool.
David Fox: I’d love to see more immersive adventures. Either in a virtual reality (VR) space, or VR Movies, or overlaid on existing environments (like theme parks) with augmented reality (AR) support. If you haven’t read the Dream Park books, check them out.
Jane Jensen: I’d love to work with VR.
Chris Jones: For me, the adventure game’s real core has always revolved around the story. Technology is great, and I see how virtual reality can be a new way for a player to immerse themselves inside the game. However, the most important part is an engaging storyline. If the story doesn’t work, it doesn’t matter how you tell it.
Tex's most recent adventure was 2014's Tesla Effect.
Noah Falstein: I'm mostly interested in the storytelling aspects, particularly in ways to do dialog with procedural components. I think we're decades from computer being able to write good dialog on the fly, but I do think that there are ways to make story-flow more procedural. Hal Barwood and I collaborated on an adventure game a few years ago called Mata Hari. There were problems out of our control that plagued the project but we started experimenting with dialog choices in the form of tokens you could collect, which we felt had great promise. The tokens resulted in different dialog depending on who you played them on and they represented information or concepts you'd heard. I'd like to go further with that someday.
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If the narrative and design are strong, you don’t need all the cutting edge bells, whistles, and scenic vistas of the Uncanny Valley.
Larry Ahern: I’m ready for some good augmented reality or virtual reality adventures. Recently, I’ve been interested in location-based gaming too, so I think there are some interesting things to be done in that space. As opposed to that small square of couch cushion space where so much of gaming typically lives. Also, you know, I’m getting older so I really need an excuse to get more exercise, and Dance Central doesn’t work for me. On the other hand, the great thing about the adventure genre is it works really well on decades old technology. If the narrative and design are strong, you don’t need all the cutting edge bells, whistles, and scenic vistas of the Uncanny Valley.
Dan Marshall: I’d love to see an adventure game that doesn’t necessarily rely on the “right key for the right door” approach to design. I remember getting frustrated at one of the old Broken Sword games because I needed to jam a door shut. I had the perfect inventory item for it, but it wasn’t the “right” solution, so the game wouldn’t let me do it. I’d love to see someone try an “anything goes” approach to puzzle design.
Dave Gilbert: Honestly, I am really content with the way things are. It's never been easier or more accessible to make a game and get it out there, and the thriving indie scene is proof of that. I don't think the genre needs to evolve or change so much as we need to keep telling better stories with the tools we currently have.
Blackwell Legacy - an acclaimed adventure from Dave Gilbert's Wadjet Eye Games.
Josh Mandel: On a much less ambitious scale, I think now’s as good a time as any to bring back the parser. Our current obsession with point-and-click grew out of our infatuation with GUIs (graphical user interfaces), and for a long time, it was actually out of fashion to type at all if you didn’t have to. But with the advent of Twitter and texting, everyone’s back to typing, and, in fact, have miraculously become comfortable doing it on handheld devices like smartphones and tablets. The whole “hunt the verb” issue is really easily remedied with proper design and QA, and the parsers we could develop today would be far more sophisticated than the ones from twenty years ago.
IGN: Finally, people want to know. What (or who) killed the genre in the late ‘90s, are they still on the loose, and have the police found the culprit?
Noah Falstein: That's too obvious. It was done in by a shooter. In first person.
Ron Gilbert: DOOM killed the adventure game. I don’t mean that as a dig at DOOM, it was a great game, but it introduced a whole new audience to gaming. Also, it’s not really that adventure games died, they kept selling as well as they always did, it’s just that the rest of the market grew and grew a lot. Adventure games didn’t keep up. But we’ll get our revenge and are to some degree. Due to a larger and more mass audience, we’re seeing adventure and story based games doing very well.
Hey! What did the adventure genre ever do to you?
David Fox: I think the culprit might be technology. As adventure game designers began trying to make each game more impressive than the last, the number of people on the team had to grow exponentially, as did costs, budgets, and schedules. Cut-scenes changed from moving a puppet-character back and forth on a screen, to full-screen, fully animated productions. One way to deal with that was to make the games shorter. Another, was to just not do them! I heard that several adventure games were killed at LucasArts because while the games got more expensive, the audience didn’t grow enough to justify the expense.
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I don’t think the genre actually died in the 90s, it just went into hibernation. Or maybe it was a coma. Either way, that sleeping bear, or partially vegetative and severely muscle-atrophied amnesiac, is now awakened. So beware!
Larry Ahern: I don’t think the genre actually died in the 90s, it just went into hibernation. Or maybe it was a coma. Either way, that sleeping bear, or partially vegetative and severely muscle-atrophied amnesiac, is now awakened. So beware!
Dave Grossman: I spent a fair amount of time in the '90s and '00s telling people that adventure games weren't dead, only sleeping. And there does seem to be a resurgence going on right now. But something certainly did happen to them, and I think at least some of it comes down to a lot of poorly thought-out games having been published, and these became the face of the genre. Adventure games got a reputation for being pointless exercises in "guess what random thing the designer wants you to do next" because many of them were made without much understanding of craft or empathy for the audience. And my fear is that the current up swell will fall victim to this as well. It's a common misconception that adventure games are easy to design, in fact, they are pretty tricky to get right. Not that I'm opinionated or anything.
Benoit Sokal: I’m no games industry analyst, but we should always remember that for a long time the adventure game was one of the major genres. As other genres slowly took over and even incorporated adventure game mechanics, work on adventure games began to decrease. They generated less income than other games so that meant less money to make them. With crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter though, the appetite for traditional adventure games proved that people still wanted to play them, even if publishers believed the opposite. I think that the adventure game still has a lot of life left in it.
Rand Miller: Honestly I think that the complexity of designing and building these beasts killed the genre, or at least slow[ed] it down. It’s hard enough making games when you have the entire gameplay mechanics nailed down. Like for example in a FPS the mechanics are well known and defined from years of previous development. 1) Get a better weapon, 2) kill something with it so you can, 3) go to 1. Or a driving game. 1) Get a better car (or track), 2) drive faster so you can, 3) go to 1.
I’m not dissing those games at all. We all love those achievement oriented games, and we wait anxiously to see how the next big one will be skewed and skinned. But I think adventure games are different, the gameplay mechanics have to be designed and built from the ground up with each new title. If Riven had the same basic puzzles that Myst had, but we had just put a different skin (story and environment) on it, it would have been laughable. Riven had to have new story, environment, and friction. The puzzles had to be freshly and cleverly designed from scratch along with the rest of the elements. And all of those elements had to work together in an elegant and convincing way. Doing all of that from scratch for every adventure game is time consuming, expensive, and hard. Don’t get me wrong, I love doing it.
Classic bespoke Larry animation...
Al Lowe: It seemed obvious to me, in terms of Sierra at least, that it was killed by the accountants and the suits. Publishers started this horrible cycle of “prove to us that this game will sell before we give you the money to make it.” And I think that was the end of the genre because that didn’t really work for adventure games, particularly comedy ones. Comedy games are pretty unique in that they take a lot of specific animation and dialogue to pull off a joke or gag. In an action game you can create an explosion to blow something up and re-use it a hundred times over, and that’s much more cost effective.
Josh Mandel: I think the culprits were the publishers who looked at Myst’s sales numbers and decided that selling a few hundred thousand units was no longer a good enough return on investment. Every game, they proclaimed, had to be a Myst-killer. And by the time they found out what every designer could’ve told them, that you can’t lead through imitation, they soured on the whole genre. Fortunately, the fans have had the last laugh.
Gary Winnick: I think it was a combination of the market changing from more dedicated computer gaming to console platforms and the proliferation of much larger numbers for shooters and action games. As the audience and delivery platforms continue to evolve along with the addition of new funding models like Kickstarter, and associated indie development, there’s obviously a resurgence of adventure games happening.
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Schafer pretended to kill it but kept it in his basement so he could do a Kickstarter and “bring it back”. It’s all a big scam.
Dan Marshall: Schafer pretended to kill it but kept it in his basement so he could do a Kickstarter and “bring it back”. It’s all a big scam.
Dave Gilbert: This is all circumstantial, but I believe the genre faked its own death and is now living on an island in the South Pacific under an assumed name, drinking Mai Tais and playing volleyball with the girls from Dead or Alive.
Jane Jensen: Last I heard, the main suspect was a rabid dog that lived under a bridge near La Cienga and Vine. Don’t know if they’ve caught him yet.
A treacherous path...
Charles Cecil: It was PlayStation, albeit inadvertently. The phenomenal success of PlayStation in the late ‘90s led retailers to focus on mainly stocking PlayStation titles. Publishers decided that the PlayStation audience just wanted visceral 3D-based games, despite pretty clear proof that the audience was actually much more eclectic. The first Broken Sword, for example, was ported to the original PlayStation, sold 500,000 copies and was voted 5th best PlayStation game ever by readers of Official PlayStation Magazine. And yet, the publisher at the time still didn’t want to commission further adventure games for PlayStation. The ability to publish digitally has removed the chokepoint of retail, allowing indie games to thrive and even led to the resurgence of the adventure game. PlayStation has been at the heart of the video games industry for almost 20 years, and instrumental in making games appeal to a wider audience. So I would ask that they are forgiven for this particular crime.
Tex Murphy: Police have probably given up by now, but not me! I’m still after the culprits and I’ll track them down if it’s the last thing I do.
A big thanks to everyone who participated in this roundtable discussion for taking the time to share your thoughts and experiences, as well as for being all around polite, jovial, and super awesome people![/S]
