The creator of Monkey Island plays and narrates his game, 20 years later.

The genre almost died at the end of the 90's, in part due to the lack of commercial success for Grim Fandango.

There were a few franchises that survived, like the Broken Sword and Runaway sagas, and a few more games by other studios. Then Telltale, founded by a few LucasArts drop-outs, started to bring some new life to the scene.

If you like the adventure games of the 90's, you can play some of them in ScummVM, or DOSBox.

Most of these adventure games were programed using custom languages and VMs. ScummVM reimplements a dozen of such engines, for more than 60 games supported. It can also run some windows games like MI 3, or the first two Broken Sword games. Furthermore, they have been able to get some of the supported games to be released as freeware.

DOSBox, being an X86 emulator can run most if not all of the DOS games of the era. With some work, it is possible to get it to run Win95.

Both of these projects are FOSS and have (among others), a Mac OS X port.

You can buy some more ScummVM or DOSBox games at Good Old Games (GOG).

I've heard that some of the TellTale games are supported by WINE (hence Darwine and Crossover Mac), but I don't know which ones.

http://www.scummvm.org

http://www.dosbox.com

http://www.gog.com

http://www.telltalegames.com

I have some hope for the adventure genre yet, even after being seriously let down by Monkey Island 4 (make sure you've played Monkey Island 3 and Grim Fandango though; they're both excellent!)

That said, I've heard Psychonauts is good, though I haven't played it. My understanding is it's free on Gametap.

One that I missed when I was growing up was Touche: The Adventures of the 5th Musketeer - it's just about as good as the Lucasarts games - Note: there is a version with full voice acting, and this is the only place I know where you can actually get it: http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/3557929/Touche_-_The_adventu...

I haven't played this, but it's supposed to be very good as well (made from ex Lucasarts members): http://www.vampyrestory-game.com/

I found the Sam and Max series from Telltale very underwhelming and disapointing, so I never played past episode 4 in the first season.

On a somewhat related genre note, I've also found the game Beyond Good and Evil to be as immersive and entertaining as the MI series.

Eventually the Telltale catalog will go Mac OS X native, but we haven't had the internal resources to do it yet, and our one attempt at doing the ports through an outside house went south in a fairly frustrating way. Hopefully sometime in the reasonable future, though.

I'd like to know, too. I haven't bought a new game since 1995 or 1996. I've seen some games at my friends' and I tried out some technological milestones such as Quake 3 when it was released on Linux but didn't really catch up on playing anymore. The only thing I've been repeatedly played is Doom -- I use it for processing ideas in the subconscious while keeping my conscious thinking in the gameplay.

I thought that perhaps it's the difference between a 15-year-old and a 30-year-old but then I decided to try out some old games I used to play in the early 90's. I set up F1GP, EOB, EOB2, Syndicate, Monkey Island, Super Frog, Civilization, UFO, etc. and I was hooked! They were just fantastic and FUN! Some even more so than back in the early 90's! I would definitely buy games like those if I knew which of the new ones were good.

Of course, not having Windows is a huge restriction with regard to gaming but a one that has suited me fine all these years. If there turns out to be a killer game somewhere I might just set up a virtual machine for XP and try it out.

In my opinion they have stopped making games like these and the only ones that escape are the exception to the rule. It's not like i am a hardcore oldies fanatic, i still play games, although less frequently compared to 10 years ago. I can find two reasons that led to this situation.

First, the transformation of the game business to the game industry. Unlike the previous generation of game producers/studios today's dominant publishers are thinking strictly with economic terms. It used to be that someone would have a cool idea and he went ahead and make it reality. Just because he enjoyed it and thought it would be fun. The profit incentive probably was there, but it wasn't his main motivation. Today this is the main reason behind making a game. Take for example the number of mmo's, which are a very lucrative game type, that come out. They are a textbook example of a system designed specifically to hook the players into constantly spending money for their leisure. The same case is with sequels. Take the same proved recipe for success, rearrange/change a few elements in it and relaunch it as a (seemingly) new concept.

The second reason is that the gamers community and culture has changed. It went mainstream a few years ago and that changed it forever. When I first noticed that I felt sorry for the majority of new players who, influenced by the gaming related media, started focusing more on graphics, short term and easy satisfaction that on the game as a whole (storyline and gameplay included). Today's gamers don't like to think that hard and even if they do, virtually they have no choice. It's all about getting a quick fix of adrenaline/enjoyment, Hollywood action film-like, compared to having that feeling of satisfaction when you finish a good book. The fist is simple, short term, and essentially you gain nothing from it. The second one, although it requires more dedication, engages your mind and makes you actually investigate/ponder it's arguments, ideas etc. If you can't relate to that think of the quality of posts included here compared to those on reddit. (Although i am a relatively new member here i am able to make the comparison).

Just my two cents on the matter. (Sorry if some of my points aren't clear enough, English is not my primary language)

I agree, but maybe it was just the sudden gameplay paradigm shift. I remember when Wolfenstein3D came out and I thought it looked cool enough, then Doom, then the rest... all first person shooters. It was enough of a jolt that I lost my kid fascination with games as story-telling and started just seeing them just as toys to pick up every once and awhile.

I'm not saying that era was the end-all-be-all of gaming, just when the "magic" was lost for me.

I went and picked up a $200 PC this week, primarily to run the TellTale games. The engine is wonderful- It's precisely what a modern Adventure game should be.

If you can try the W&G demo under VMware, it might work for you, depending on your setup.

DOSBox works well on the Mac, is free and plays those game that ran on DOS very well. I'm pretty sure at least some of these games only require DOS, not Windows

[Edit: Monkey Island 1 and 2 run under DOS, but 3 requires Win95]

I actually decided to install windows on bootcamp just for this...

The SCUMM engine (aka Spu(TM) or SPUTM) is a VM, and the game is fully scripted using the SCUMM language. You cannot use runtimes not officially supported by Apple in iPhone apps.

There is an iPhone port of ScummVM, but you'll need to jailbreak your phone, and to get the original data files.

http://www.scummvm.org

But the touchscreen interface isn't that good, because your fingers actually hide the cursor and the bottom part of the screen where contextual info is displayed.

Edit: psadauskas beat me to it.

If you've jailbroken your phone, you can: http://wiki.scummvm.org/index.php/IPhone

LSL definitely wasn't the best of the Sierra characters.

I broke out the Space Quest series again recently. Roger Wilco is hands down my favourite character in those adventure games.

Yeah, that was Grim Fandango.

(Fascinating) design doc is here: http://cache.kotaku.com/assets/resources/2008/GrimPuzzleDoc_...

Are you sure that was Monkey Island and not Grim Fandango?

The Space Quest games were always wonderful for me- In particular, I loved the multitudes of ways you could die in the most horrific possible way.. I'd often try things I knew would kill Roger just to see what the writers dreamed up as a Death.

Space Quest 1 in particular was special to me, since my father and I played through it together- It was a great learning experience and a fun way to interact with a story together.

In the early 2001-era, I actually started up a project to create a new Space Quest game.. (Sq7.org). We got Josh Mandel, one of the original SQ authors to write us a script, and dozens of animators around the net to donate time.

It went pretty well, but fell apart over a disagreement with Vivendi- They offered to let us release it, but only if we turned over the Copyright.. We had promised Josh and others we wouldn't ever do that, so we were a bit stuck. That lead to disappointment all around, which was acerbated by the now dated look of the project, due to the long dev time of a Fan game. I'd still love to release a SQ game some day, though- It's such a wonderful premise- The not-so-heroic everyman who bumbles and bungles his way to saving the world.

As an aside, we had also tried pitching Vivendi to do commercial remakes of the Space Quest games, on the (Then band new) Nintendo DS. We had a nice discussion with them about it, and worked our arses off on the proposals, but ultimately, they didn't think it was worth it.

To my mind, TellTale games is really carrying forward the spirit of Sierra adventure games. The new Wallace and Gromit is wonderful, not to mention Sam & Max, etc.

I'm excited by their engines, their storytelling, and their sense of fun, and can't WAIT to see what they do for the Monkey Island continuation.

Same for me with space quest and all the king quests too. Yesterday I bought Another World ('Out of This World' in the states) after some comments on reddit stirred old memories. What I didn't know was both Hideo Kojima of Metal Gear and Fumito Ueda of Ico (my two all time favourite game developers) both cite it as a huge influence. Playing through it again, I could see why.