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- Jan 28, 2011
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Tags: Infamous Quests; Mark Yohalem; Steven Alexander; Wormwood Studios
I still remember the day I played my first adventure game. I must have been around 11 years old then, a lonely kid in a new country. I came back from school that day to find my father and a friend of his messing around with our mighty 386DX family computer. My father's friend had brought with him a housewarming gift, in the form of several boxes of 1.44MB floppy disks filled with pirated games. One of those games was a monster that took up an entire box of floppies all by itself. Its name was King's Quest VI: Heir Today, Gone Tomorrow.
I was blown away. Never before had I seen a game with such production qualities and such depth. It made my small collection of NES games look like pathetic toys. From that day onward, I was a PC gamer and an adventure game fanatic. I got more adventure games wherever I could find them, pirating some, buying others. I played through all of the LucasArts and Sierra classics, from The Secret of Monkey Island to Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers. I also dabbled in less mainstream titles, like Revolution Software's Beneath a Steel Sky, Adventure Soft's Simon the Sorcerer and Legend Entertainment's Eric the Unready, all of which also turned out to be excellent. Life was good. But all good things come to an end.
My gradual estrangement from the adventure genre actually began not due to anything in the games themselves, but because of my computer. My once mighty machine was becoming long in the tooth, and newer games were becoming unplayable. Nevertheless, when visiting my wealthy, Pentium-owning friends, I couldn't help but notice that my beloved genre was changing. Classic point-and-clicks were dying off and being replaced with Myst clones and FMV games. Was I simply bitter that my computer was unable to run these newer titles, or did I truly dislike them for what they were? I'm actually not sure about that myself, nor does it really matter.
Whatever the case, it was around that time that I received a free CD-ROM with a gaming magazine, which contained a game called Ultima VIII: Pagan. It wasn't a very good game, but somehow it was intriguing enough for me to become further interested in the genre it represented. I used my modem to log onto to that new thing called "The Internet" that everybody was talking about back then, and I began to read. A couple of years after that, I learned about a game called Baldur's Gate that was supposed to be the next best thing in that genre. I bought it when it came out, and from that day onward my path towards becoming a Codexer was set.
But what about my old passion for adventure games? To be honest, after I got into RPGs, I didn't pay much attention to them. I was vaguely aware of a game called Grim Fandango that had turned out to be a commercial disappointment, that there had been some kind of awful action-adventure King's Quest sequel that nobody wanted to talk about, and that the genre was now considered "dead". But I didn't care, because by God, I had Baldur's Gate 2 and Planescape: Torment. Life was good.
Yeah. You all know what happened after that.
* * *
Over the course of the past decade of decline and genre rape, I became aware that the adventure genre was experiencing some sort of resurgence. European developers, with their lower operating costs, were continuing to release new adventure games, and over in the United States, a company by the name of Telltale Games had received the license to produce sequels to some of the old LucasArts properties. Had the genre been resurrected? I'm not sure. Much like in the RPG world, it seems few people took those European developers very seriously, and as for Telltale, in the dark corners of the Internet, certain fans whispered that their games were but shallow imitations of a glorious past.
Perhaps that's why it was no surprise that in February 2012, when legendary LucasArts veteran Tim Schafer launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund a new adventure game, he received over 3.3 million dollars from over 87,000 backers. It was an incredible success, that launched a new age of crowdfunding-supported game development that has benefited RPG fans greatly. At that point, I fully anticipated a glorious future for both genres, old-school adventure games and old-school RPGs marching side by side. Unfortunately, it didn't quite work out that way.
One by one, spurred on by Tim Schafer's success, various Sierra veterans made their way onto Kickstarter to fund spiritual successors to their old titles. And...they didn't do so well. Scott Murphy and Mark Crowe, creators of Space Quest? $539,767. Jane Jensen, creator of Gabriel Knight? $435,316. Corey and Lori Cole, creators of Quest for Glory? $409,150. And then there was the downright humiliating failure of Jim Walls' Kickstarter for a Police Quest spiritual successor.
Crowdfunding campaigns for newer franchises have fared a bit better. Revolution Software's Broken Sword sequel got $771,560 on Kickstarter, while Ragnar Tornquist's Dreamfall Chapters achieved a respectable $1,538,425. But none of them have gotten anywhere near Double Fine's number of backers. Tim Schafer's army of 87,000 seems to have dissipated just as quickly as it materialized.
In short: what the hell, adventure game fans, what the hell?
* * *
In all seriousness, I know I can't be the only confused by these events. Just what is going on with adventure games? Not being part of the contemporary adventure gaming "scene", I really had no idea where to start looking for answers.
Luckily for us, we just happen to have two commercial adventure game developers who post regularly on the Codex. Mark Yohalem, also known as MRY, is the lead designer of the incredible Primordia, a classic adventure game inspired by Planescape: Torment (read our interview with him here). Steven Alexander, also known as Blackthorne, is the lead writer and director of the upcoming Quest for Infamy, a Kickstarter-funded RPG/adventure inspired by the Quest for Glory series.
Time and time again, I've been impressed by Mark and Steven's thoughtful and knowledgeable posts in our Adventure Gaming subforum. These two know the score about adventure games, which is why I decided to write down some questions and have a bit of a chat with them, not just about the state of adventure games today, but also about the genre in general. The conversation you're about to read took place over the course of almost an entire month, and it may be the biggest wall of text the Codex has ever produced.
I'm pleased to present...
Read the full article: AdventureDex: A Conversation about the State of the Adventure Genre
I still remember the day I played my first adventure game. I must have been around 11 years old then, a lonely kid in a new country. I came back from school that day to find my father and a friend of his messing around with our mighty 386DX family computer. My father's friend had brought with him a housewarming gift, in the form of several boxes of 1.44MB floppy disks filled with pirated games. One of those games was a monster that took up an entire box of floppies all by itself. Its name was King's Quest VI: Heir Today, Gone Tomorrow.
I was blown away. Never before had I seen a game with such production qualities and such depth. It made my small collection of NES games look like pathetic toys. From that day onward, I was a PC gamer and an adventure game fanatic. I got more adventure games wherever I could find them, pirating some, buying others. I played through all of the LucasArts and Sierra classics, from The Secret of Monkey Island to Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers. I also dabbled in less mainstream titles, like Revolution Software's Beneath a Steel Sky, Adventure Soft's Simon the Sorcerer and Legend Entertainment's Eric the Unready, all of which also turned out to be excellent. Life was good. But all good things come to an end.
My gradual estrangement from the adventure genre actually began not due to anything in the games themselves, but because of my computer. My once mighty machine was becoming long in the tooth, and newer games were becoming unplayable. Nevertheless, when visiting my wealthy, Pentium-owning friends, I couldn't help but notice that my beloved genre was changing. Classic point-and-clicks were dying off and being replaced with Myst clones and FMV games. Was I simply bitter that my computer was unable to run these newer titles, or did I truly dislike them for what they were? I'm actually not sure about that myself, nor does it really matter.
Whatever the case, it was around that time that I received a free CD-ROM with a gaming magazine, which contained a game called Ultima VIII: Pagan. It wasn't a very good game, but somehow it was intriguing enough for me to become further interested in the genre it represented. I used my modem to log onto to that new thing called "The Internet" that everybody was talking about back then, and I began to read. A couple of years after that, I learned about a game called Baldur's Gate that was supposed to be the next best thing in that genre. I bought it when it came out, and from that day onward my path towards becoming a Codexer was set.
But what about my old passion for adventure games? To be honest, after I got into RPGs, I didn't pay much attention to them. I was vaguely aware of a game called Grim Fandango that had turned out to be a commercial disappointment, that there had been some kind of awful action-adventure King's Quest sequel that nobody wanted to talk about, and that the genre was now considered "dead". But I didn't care, because by God, I had Baldur's Gate 2 and Planescape: Torment. Life was good.
Yeah. You all know what happened after that.
* * *
Over the course of the past decade of decline and genre rape, I became aware that the adventure genre was experiencing some sort of resurgence. European developers, with their lower operating costs, were continuing to release new adventure games, and over in the United States, a company by the name of Telltale Games had received the license to produce sequels to some of the old LucasArts properties. Had the genre been resurrected? I'm not sure. Much like in the RPG world, it seems few people took those European developers very seriously, and as for Telltale, in the dark corners of the Internet, certain fans whispered that their games were but shallow imitations of a glorious past.
Perhaps that's why it was no surprise that in February 2012, when legendary LucasArts veteran Tim Schafer launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund a new adventure game, he received over 3.3 million dollars from over 87,000 backers. It was an incredible success, that launched a new age of crowdfunding-supported game development that has benefited RPG fans greatly. At that point, I fully anticipated a glorious future for both genres, old-school adventure games and old-school RPGs marching side by side. Unfortunately, it didn't quite work out that way.
One by one, spurred on by Tim Schafer's success, various Sierra veterans made their way onto Kickstarter to fund spiritual successors to their old titles. And...they didn't do so well. Scott Murphy and Mark Crowe, creators of Space Quest? $539,767. Jane Jensen, creator of Gabriel Knight? $435,316. Corey and Lori Cole, creators of Quest for Glory? $409,150. And then there was the downright humiliating failure of Jim Walls' Kickstarter for a Police Quest spiritual successor.
Crowdfunding campaigns for newer franchises have fared a bit better. Revolution Software's Broken Sword sequel got $771,560 on Kickstarter, while Ragnar Tornquist's Dreamfall Chapters achieved a respectable $1,538,425. But none of them have gotten anywhere near Double Fine's number of backers. Tim Schafer's army of 87,000 seems to have dissipated just as quickly as it materialized.
In short: what the hell, adventure game fans, what the hell?
* * *
In all seriousness, I know I can't be the only confused by these events. Just what is going on with adventure games? Not being part of the contemporary adventure gaming "scene", I really had no idea where to start looking for answers.
Luckily for us, we just happen to have two commercial adventure game developers who post regularly on the Codex. Mark Yohalem, also known as MRY, is the lead designer of the incredible Primordia, a classic adventure game inspired by Planescape: Torment (read our interview with him here). Steven Alexander, also known as Blackthorne, is the lead writer and director of the upcoming Quest for Infamy, a Kickstarter-funded RPG/adventure inspired by the Quest for Glory series.
Time and time again, I've been impressed by Mark and Steven's thoughtful and knowledgeable posts in our Adventure Gaming subforum. These two know the score about adventure games, which is why I decided to write down some questions and have a bit of a chat with them, not just about the state of adventure games today, but also about the genre in general. The conversation you're about to read took place over the course of almost an entire month, and it may be the biggest wall of text the Codex has ever produced.
I'm pleased to present...
Read the full article: AdventureDex: A Conversation about the State of the Adventure Genre
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to all involved.
