| It is considered that the first game in the adventure genre is Colossal Cave Adventure by William Crowther. The game was distributed by the author free of charge on a computer network ARPNET (an ancestor of Internet), and got a huge success! The game was completely text, and gameplay mostly based on player answers to several proposed variants.
In the midst 1970th years, William was invited to a job in the company Bolt, Beranek and Newman (BBN), as one of leading experts in acoustic research. In addition, with the approval of the U.S. government, experts BBN led research and development in computer technology. William Crowther is considered one of the best computer programmers in those years.
There is also an opinion that the first game in the adventure genre was the game «Hunt the Wampus», written in yearly 1970th by programmer Yobom Gregory (Gregory Yob). Anyway "Hunt the Wampus" was the first text shooter with elements of logic, not much kind of genre of adventure. The player is moving to adjacent spaces in a cave and shoots arrows. The goal was - to put an arrow into a bloodthirsty monster Vampus, resting in one of the many rooms in the cave.
In 1977 senior students of Massachusetts Institute of Technology - Dave Leybling, Mark Blank, Tim Anderson and Bruce Daniels, created worldwide known interactive text adventure - Zork! There are rumors that game has to be named "Dungeons", but the word was already trademarked by "Dungeons and Dragons". The game tells of adventures of brave fighter named Zork, who traveled through the landscapes and caves, full of mystical characters, hidden treasures and locations. The hero had to deal with textual puzzles - to correctly answer questions of wise wizards and elves to move on. Game engine recognized not only a pair of words, but allowed to use an inventory item in desired action. Zork authors created world's first company, producing adventure games - Infocom. It was in 1979. During its existence, until 1989, the company Infocom released 36 textual games in adventure genre. Then it was bought up by Activision.
Such titles as Alone in the Dark series, Another World, Ecstatica series, A Little Big Adventure series, Metal Mutant series, Mirror's Edge, Prince of Persia series, Red Dead Redemption, Tomb Raider series, unforgettable Full Throttle and Grim Fandango from Lucas Arts - constitute a gold collection of adventure genre.
Adventure games often are on a friendly footing with quest games, both containing a story and puzzles. Anyway, you can always distinguish a true adventure by an interactive intricate storyline, and having puzzles is far not necessary to form a true adventure. |