He wrote this piece in 1989, and then went on and designed Monkey Island 2, which did things like having solutions to puzzels depend on other puzzels in differnet islands in the most annoying way possible, on purpose.
Still, I'm not sure what the definition of "Adventure Game" is. To me, it's usually a game with graphics at the top (not required but most common), and 4 or so lines of text at the bottom. Some times you walk a character around. Other times you just type "exit door", "open drawer", "take key" (or pick from a menu)
Those games might have been dead in some form (King Quest, Monkey Island, etc...) but the basic form has been alive and kicking (a) in the form of Japanese story games and (b) as indie games on places like itch.io. It's covered with "story adventure games"
Of course most of those games would benefit from this list of rules.
It's boom and bust. When adventure games became graphical, they became massively popular, one of the top-selling genres of games. But since 2000 they were in decline, almost to the point of death. Gamers wanted 3D shoot-em-ups or simulators or other genres, more than they wanted the old point'n'click adventures they'd been playing for the past decade.
They haven't really come back, in that form, except as appeals to afficionados. Deponia (2012-2016), Syberia (2002-), Dreamfall (1999-2017) did quite well, but I don't know how many people who hadn't played an adventure game before would willingly pick them up. Then there are nostalgia-bait games which Ron Gilbert is especially guilty of, e.g. Thimble Park, The Cave, Return to Monkey Island. You could also add the remake of Riven to that list.
If by Japanese story games you mean visual novels... they're not really the same genre, even if technically they have you moving around the place collecting things to solve puzzles. I'd also argue that anything David Cage has done (Farhenheit, Heavy Rain, etc.) are not adventure games, he chases after "interactive movies" as mentioned in the article.
Telltale Games was big for a decade with their adventure games, in which Gilbert was somewhat involved as well. The Walking Dead from 2012 was one of the best selling video games of all times.
I grant you, Telltale did make a good number of adventure games in the classic style, e.g. Sam & Max, and then also applied them to licenses like Wallace & Gromit and Back to the Future... but I feel The Walking Dead was a different type of game. More a narrative and character led game, like a visual novel, rather than a puzzle game of any kind... and as that was so successful, they stopped making the point'n'click puzzle-type adventure games.
Would you consider them to be the same genre, an evolution, or a different genre (that perhaps Telltale spawned?)
The Ace Attorney series are visual novel games; I'd call them a crossover of genres.
They have the presentation of a visual novel (first person perspective, characters look straight out at you, most of game is paging through dialogue), but they also have gameplay elements of traditional adventure games (looking around multiple locations for clues, try every item in the inventory to see what response you get, etc.) - I think in Japan they'd call that an adventure game for being overly interactive, but in the West we'd still call it a visual novel.
I haven't tried the Zero Escape series, but after a quick look at one on Youtube, it does look like that same mix of visual novel with adventure game / puzzle elements?
A few years ago, adventure games had a revival on smartphones, especially with The Room series and the Cube Escape / Rusty Lake games. They were greatly helped by the fact that A) adventure games have no action and B) most action games do not work well with touchscreens.
I really recommend playing games from Wadjet Eye, like Gemini Rue, Blackwell, Unavowed, they are all point and clicky adventure games. I think that adventure games aren't dead, they are just a niche.
I think the genre has gotten smaller, but higher quality. Games are more a work of love than a marketing hype.
Thimbleweed Park, Kathy Rain, whispers of a machine, Disco Elyseum, Unusual Findings, Sexy Brutale, Darside Detective, blacksad, obra-dimm, takes two, Orwell, unheard, shadows of a doubt, 12 minutes…
I do agree the quality has increased significantly; we view old adventure games through quite a bit of rose-tint and tend to ignore significant warts. To add to your great selection, I think the whole Blackwell series is a modern adventure game masterpiece.
It was a retrospective publication - after he “retired” the first time.
The guy was making workd wide popular games while I was still at school,
And write this as part of a mission to ground his next game design and shared it internally. Plus this was pre www! Then he republished it years later
I appreciate the dig at Sierra games and their reliance on missable items. But he wrote that puzzles should make sense, and went on to give us the rubber chicken with a pulley in the middle!
I think that chicken was a satirical dig along the very same lines. IIRC, it clearly described the pulley and the resulting puzzle - using a pulley on a wire - isn't exactly cryptic.
That paragraph recounts the reasons why RTS games never work for me. When I'm gaming, I want to do things in my own time, not be on someone else's clock.
Without a time limit, every game just becomes an optimization game. Like playing a board game with a player who will spend two hours thinking each of their turns through to make sure it’s the optimal play.
If you like doing that on your own, go for it. But for me it just becomes boring and not fun. Not fun because if I choose to spend a reasonable amount of time I know I’m leaving good things on the table, and boring if I play every turn optimally. With a time limit, the game becomes about prioritization and making the most of a limited resource (time).
I understand it as the game can adjust the time behaviour of NPCs to improve the players experience. If you are a spy who needs to meet your contact at the cafe at 1pm then getting delayed by an interesting side quest and arriving at 1:20, in the real world you screwed up and your mission is done. If you do that in a game then it’s boring and you probably won’t realise and wait hours at a cafe. Instead the NPC can simply arrive 20 minutes late. There were games then that had the real world clock approach and would be hard to play - I think for monkey island he actually built a scheduler to avoid this
I think the criticism is of less self-contained time limits that involve multiple puzzles/locations. You can retry the mug'o'grog puzzle if you're not quick enough, I think.
> It can be badly done in a turn based game too, see XCom 2.
I disagree. I hated turn limits in XCom1 (we're talking about remakes, not original 1993 game, right?), because they weren't really justified by the game world, but in XCom2 when you are the scrappy resistance on quick hit and run missions it really helps build up tension.
The original 1993 game has a great example of how to put time pressure on the player without an explicit time pressure: terror missions. Diddle around and you get an army of chrysalids on your butt.
> you are the scrappy resistance on quick hit and run missions it really helps build up tension.
They had a demo day. I played the first mission, or maybe made it to the second. Ran out of turns because I explored an empty corner on the way to the objective. Uninstalled.
And yes, i finished the first xcom remake multiple times. Hated every bomb disarm mission with a passion.
If you ask me, they kinda painted themselves into a corner with the aliens on fixed patrol routes that you could just wait around until the position was perfect. You couldn't do that in the original xcom. But instead of fixing that, they added ... turn limits. It's just bad game design.
Possibly too much world of warcraft. I've seen this trend in games starting a few years after wow was out. People thinking that if Blizzard does it into a MMO, it's okay to do it in a single player game too.
I disagree on this. I played through the remake once and never tried it again. But XCom2 was great and i liked it far, far better than the first part. Btw in most timed missions you don't lose on the spot when the timer runs out, you just face more and more reinforcements, which is completely justified by the setting.
To fixed patrol routes. A younger designer who played too many MMOs can think that's the only way to place enemies in a game: either standing in one place or patrolling a fixed route.
That may work in a rpg, but look where it got the tactics game in xcom 2.
Not an adventure game, but it’s amusing the degree to which Infocom & Douglas Adams flaunted rules like this to the extreme of high art for The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
I wondered if at least some of Gilbert's criticism was aimed at HHGttG. I'm sure there's at least one case of "pick it up early on or you'll later find out you've wasted most of the game" and one of his 'bad puzzle' descriptions sounded like it could have been a nod to the infamous Babel fish puzzle.
HHGttG was incredibly well written and creative, but I think it was probably a bit 'mid' as an adventure game.
It's interesting how this was republished just at the cusp of the rise of indie games. And indie games certainly have been exploring lot of the ideas mentioned.
Not necessarily. The ending sequence with the plane on a motorway in "Full Throttle" had me on the edge of my seat when I played it for the first time, and on replays, too.
Out of modern takes I really liked the game "The Captain" that's like a chain of old point and click adventures strung together with sort of rougelite like mechanics.
Looks good. Gemini Rue is good if you're looking for something adventure gamey. Return of the Obra Dinn is good if you're looking for something related but different.
The article is from 1989 and this used to be one of the common writing styles back then. Of course, times have changed now and (at least to my ears) "they" sounds more natural than "she" in the current century.
Tabletop RPG books c. 1989 were doing all kinds of stuff with generic pronouns. I believe Vampire (1991) primarily but not exclusively used "she". Other games would use "she" for the GM and "he" for players, stuff like that.
Classically ‘he’ was used to be more universal. It was always understood to include women as well. But that language is frowned upon. When I read ‘they’ I think plural people not singular like ‘he.’
Curious about how LLMs for generating graphics can revive adventure games and have a second thought about this article.
Generating images in Adventure Games was a bottleneck since they were mainly static and fixed within a small set. Now you can generate original images based on the adventure situation.
I think the adventure game portion of Lucas Arts was in the process of dying at that point. They didn't release another adventure game after Escape from Monkey Island in 2000. They would have already cancelled a Full Throttle sequel. They had a couple of attempts after this but they were both also cancelled within a couple of years.
Grim Fandango was very good, but honestly the genre got worse after it, not better. Overall the introduction of 3d to the adventure genre had a pretty shaky start. Although there were a couple of exceptions, the genre in general backpedalled for a while.
"I wrote this back in 1989 while I was designing Monkey Island."
The first Monkey Island. Of course the design advice seems fine, since he (and the old LucasArts) applied it in several acclaimed titles that make all the "best computer games ever" lists after the article was written :)
Grim Fandango was released in 1998, it is literally 26 years old… also at that time Adventure Games were being eaten by RTS, JRPG, and soon after shooters. It was easy to feel low when looking at the scene.
So you have that...
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