The Death of Adventure Games

Oh, wow. OMM, talk about memories (the linked article is from 2000.) Among other things Chet and Erik were famous for the Time To Crate system of reviewing games by how long it took from starting the game until you saw a crate. Since this was the late 90s/early 2ks, it was generally zero seconds. This was in comparison to real life, where I frequently go years at a time without seeing a single crate, but then again, I am not a genius game designer.

I think the iOS platform is helping the revival of adventure games. Just the ones I've personally played on the iPhone over the last couple of years:

- Monkey Island 1 & 2 Special Edition (remastered graphics)

- Broken Sword special edition

- Hector: Badge of Carnage: EXCELLENT original game (if somewhat short)

- Flight of the Amazon Queen

- Beneath the Steel Sky

- Gobliins

I'm sure I'm missing something... There's also some games that are available on the iPad only, and I think the trend is there: adventure games are coming back.

Hahaha, beautiful article. I'd love to see someone attempt to secure cat hair to their face with maple syrup.

Having to jump through hoops like forging a mustache onto someone's passport before applying a fake mustache yourself in order to impersonate said person is the reason sites like gamefaqs.com exist.

Another stunning realization is that after deciphering that web of absurdity someone took the time to write it down in a guide instead of just shutting the program down, ejecting the disc, dousing it in gasoline, and lighting it on fire.

Decent graphics are murder for adventure games. With some of the oldest adventure games, there were only a few places you could plausibly click on and see a result. Hunting for the interactable object in a 3D textured and shadered world is less intuitive.

Syberia I & II, The Longest Journey/Dreamfall are a couple of amazing adventure game series. Neither are exactly recent (2004 and 2007 respectively), but they're still full of atmosphere and enjoyable to play.

Adventure games continue to be released by indie companies. Some of those are pretty good. For example, Gemini Rue was released just a few days ago. A Tale of Two Kingdoms came out couple of years ago. Both were polished and quite innovative in their own ways. This is more than I can say about many AAA titles today.

I think Scribblenauts + adventure game storylines would actually resurrect the genre in an amazing way. Imagine a harry potter style game where you can create anything to solve simple puzzles.

Would be amazing.

Pretty funny, but point and click adventure games are still popular. There are several titles on Steam released this year for PC.

The NintendoDS has several successful titles: Trace Memory, Hotel Dusk, and others. A new Professor Layton title topped sales for the 3DS, recently released in Japan.

The genre is probably as popular now as ever.

Before I clicked, I thought it meant text adventures. Clearly they're deader than corduroy if graphical ones are now 'old'.

Old man murray was the best content site ever. RIP.

They are not dead, just less popular. Check out Gray Matter (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gray_Matter_(video_game)) or 999 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/999:_Nine_Hours,_Nine_Persons,_...) - very good and recently released adventure games.

I used to be a humongous fan of 2D adventure games. Most notably the Space Quest series. If you've never played them start out with Space Quest 4 and then play SQ6. The audio dialog in the game is unrivaled humor. Full Throttle was also one of the mega-classics of 2D adventure games. I think the downfall of these games came when the studios tried to go the 3D route.

ars technica had a very recent and in-depth article about the Rise and Fall (and re-rise?) of the genre. Definitely worth a read: http://arstechnica.com/gaming/reviews/2011/01/history-of-gra...

I think the relaunch of Monkey Island on the iPhone proved that adventures are far from dead. Are they still mainstream? Maybe not, but I definitely see elements of adventures in modern games. Games like Fallout 3 and Bioshock rely heavily on storytelling. You could argue that some sandbox games like GTA San Andreas (haven't played IV, sorry) are technically adventure games or have adventure components. While I think the point and click (and text-based IF) adventures of years gone by are no longer mainstream, to say that it's dead is like saying that RTS is dead because there's no more fixed-view overhead style Command & Conquer games - they've just evolved.

Double Fine's new game Stacking on xbox live arcade is definitely reminiscent of old-school adventure games, and it's great!

They trash Gabriel Knight III, but I would go back farther and trash Gabriel Knight II and other games of that era. That was when it first became technically possible to have a significant amount of multimedia in a game, so it did things like make you watch your avatar walk excruciatingly slowly from the car to the edge of the screen everytime you wanted to go anywhere, and you had to listen to a bunch of interminable bad acting.

I wouldn't know about Gabriel Knight III because I didn't bother to play it, or other Sierra games, after getting burnt by their earlier CD-ROM era games.

Check out AGDinteractive : http://www.agdinteractive.com/ They remade the KQuests and QFG2 and are building brand new adventure games.

It's not entirely dead. I grew up with adventure games and the best one I've played to date was actually a platformer. Highly recommend Psychonauts to anyone mourning the death of the genre.

Superbrothers are trying a fresh approach to adventure games with Sword & Sworcery EP: http://www.swordandsworcery.com/

It's ironic to see this article just days after the release of Gemini Rue, which is an outstanding adventure game. But I agree with the general message.

I hate puzzle games, personally. Diddle the widget so that the frobulent gibbers the foomatic - extend the prior implication chain a few levels - just gets more than a little old.

I really enjoyed an interactive text-based fiction game recently. But that palled - I realized I could be coding and being productive. >..

There are some good flash adventure games. "Alice is Dead", "Hansel and Gretel" to name two.

11 years old and still relevant.

As commercially available products, they're definitely not dead. Studios keep churning out point-and-click adventure games, just check out www.jayisgames.com, the Nintendo DS, and the smart phone app stores.

However, innovation within the genre is on life support and in critical condition, but it has been like that since long before that article was published.

They still largely depend on puzzles with only a single correct solution, even if you have items in plain view on the screen that in reality would solve the problem (this is the "dream logic" mentioned in the linked article). They also rely on pixel hunting. Nothing has really changed.

Sanitarium was weird, frustrating, surreal, fascinating. I loved when the boss tossed you out of the barn with a complimentary wrench, just what you needed to wire the tractor battery to the gas drum or whatever, and blow up the barn.

Perhaps they'll be back soon. Point and click would work well on the iPad...

FMV killed adventure games

The article's over ten years old, and since then there's been a sorta revival of the genre. There are all the Telltale games, the Monkey Island remakes, and more recently the brilliant Machinarium. Digital distribution services like Steam have helped, of course.