Because of the limited capacity of early micro computers, games used to either have graphics, or a deep story-line. But as computers grew more capable during the 80s, so did the capacity of adventure games to incorporate more graphical elements and even sound.
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| Roberta Williams, pioneer and game designer. |
It was an Apple II game based on Agatha Christie's book "And Then There Where None" (1939), and it was revolutionary; it was the first adventure game to have graphics!
Although crude black and white vector stills, it became a hit.
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| Mystery House (1980), Apple II |
The game was later considered a prequel to the game "King's Quest".
"Hi Res Adventures" was comprised of 7 games, the last of which was "The Dark Crystal" (1983) based on Jim Henson's movie with the same title.
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| "Wizard and the Princess" (1980), Apple II |
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| "The Dark Crystal" (1983), Apple II |
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| Box for "Adventureland" (1982), Atari |
The series was planned to consist of 12 games, but after the third Adventure International unfortunately went bankrupt.
The first game featured The Hulk (1984). The second Spiderman (1984), and the third Human Torch and the Thing (1985).
"One of the reasons I was writing games was that there's weren't any to play, and I wanted to play games." - Scott Adams
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| "Questprobe featuring the Hulk" (1984), Adventure International, C64 |
- Veronika Mengler, talking about "The Hobbit" (1982)
Meanwhile in Australia, Alfred Milgrom had started Melbourne House, a book publisher in 1977.
Milgrom was interested in computers and in 1981 he posted an advertisement at the University of Melbourne, looking for computer-science students interested in working part time on a game-development project. Veronika Megler was the first to reply. Milgrom gave her a very simple brief: “Make the best adventure game ever. Period.”
She had only ever played one adventure game before, typically enough "Adventure".
"The Hobbit" was released in 1982 developed by Beam Software and Published by Melbourne House. Not only was it a licensed game based on the world famous book of the same name, but each copy of the game actually included a copy of the book!
It became highly regarded for its innovative text-based physics system, and an improved parser, much more complex than the standard 2-word parser commonly used. It allowed the player to talk to and order other characters around. The physics system allowed such things as for the player to pick up a dead dwarf, and wield it as he would any heavy weapon.
It was also in real time, characters would do things, and things would happen when the player didn't type anything, as opposed to other similar games, when you had to actively type out "wait". Characters moved, interacted with the world and each other independently from the player, resulting in a lot occurrences the developer hadn't even imagined.
This made the game world a lot more dynamic than even many modern games manages.
Unfortunately the extreme complexity of the game unavoidably caused a lot of bugs. Ironically the first update to fix the bugs also caused new ones that made the game unbeatable. This was of course fixed with the following updates.
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| The Hobbit, 1982, Beam Software, ZX Spectrum |
In 1984 Roberta Williams revolutionized the industry ones more.
In 1983 IBM approached Sierra On-Line asking them to make a game capable of showcasing the multimedia capabilities of their upcoming computer the IBM PCjr.
The result was King's Quest (later renamed King's Quest I: Quest for the Crown).
It was the first adventure game to feature animations, the first to support 16 color EGA graphics, and the first to use third-person pseudo 3D, where the character was able to move in front, behind, and over objects.
And to quote an IBM advertisement, it featured "unusually smooth and realistic animation and an impressive variety of sound effects".
The character was moved with the joystick or the keyboard, and other interactions used a text-parser.
The development costed $850,000 and IBM paid for much of it.
IBM ended up discontinuing the PCjr in 1985 due to it's poor reception, and as a result King's Quest didn't sell very well, almost making the struggling Sierra On-Line go bankrupt.
But thanks to the game engine "Adventure Game Interpreter" (AGI) Sierra was able to port the game to Tandy 1000, standard PCs, and the Apple IIc, which made the game a success.
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| King's Quest, 1984, Sierra On-Line, IBM PCjr |
They released "Enchanted Scepters" the same year. It was the first Macintosh game to have digitized sound. It used a drop-down menu with clickable options for common actions as an alternative to the games text-input. Other than typing "get <item>", it was also possible to click on the image of the item you wanted to pick up.
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| "Enchanted Scepters" (1984). Macintosh. Silicone Beach Software |
They started programming for the British Nascom computer, their earliest software where arcade games and utility programs.
The brothers had played "Adventure" and finding themselves wanting a version for British micro computers. It was no easy feat to squeeze the 200K mainframe program into 32K, but that's exactly what they did. Not only that, but they found they actually had enough space left to expand on the game with 70 extra locations. And so, in 1983 "Colossal Adventure" was released. In 1986 it was re-released with graphics.
It became the first part in a trilogy inspired by the works of J.R.R. Tolkien, dubbed "The Middle Earth Trilogy". But due to licencing issues it was later renamed "Jewels of Darkness", and any references to Tolkien's work was removed, when the games where enhanced with graphics.
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| "Colossal Adventure" (1986), Amiga, Level 9 Computing |
The trilogy is set in a not too-distant future when humans have started colonizing space. For the first two installments the player has the role of Kim Kimberly, an undercover agent, whose goal in "Snowball" (1983) is to save the colonist's spacecraft from crashing into a star, and in "Return to Eden" (1984) to stop the defense system at the destination planet of Eden from destroying the craft. In "The Worm in Paradise" (1986), the player, with the role of an unnamed citizen of Eden, must travel around the city of Enoch, learn its secrets, earn money and save the planet.
"Snowball" was initially released only for the BBC Micro, Sinclair ZX Spectrum and Nascom, but was later followed by versions for the Commodore 64, Camputers Lynx, Oric-1, Atari 8-bit, as well as for the Memotech MTX, Amstrad CPC, Enterprise and MSX.
"I'm aware of the female audience. I always try to write nonsexist prose." - Pete Austin
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| "Return To Eden" (1983), BBC Micro Model B, Level 9 Computing |
London based Magnetic scrolls' "The Pawn" (1985), originally for the British Sinclair QL computer, is notable for being the first game to really utilize the Amiga's sophisticated sound chip, and the option to have speech-synthesis reading the entirety of the games text as you played.
The Amiga version of the game was released in 1986, and unlike the Sinclair version had graphics.
"We got fed up of adventures that constantly said 'YOU CAN'T EXAMINE THAT' meaning that no-one had bothered to write any text for it so we tried to describe everything that was referenced in the room descriptions and elsewhere. This is why you end up with a description of a pocket as a 'Loose bag inserted into your trousers...' and the carrot described as 'A conical orange vegetable, don't you know anything?'" - Robert Steggles, talking about the production of "The Pawn" (1985)
| Intro Music to "The Pawn" (1986), Amiga, Magnetic Scrolls |
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| "The Pawn" (1986), Amiga, Magnetic Scrolls |
The protagonist this time around is a 17 year old boy named Gwydion who is held captive by the wizard Mannanan in the land of Llewendor.
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| "King's Quest III - To Heir is Human" (1987), Atari ST, Sierra On-Line |
Scott Murphy and Mark Crowe, who had already worked together on the Sierra game "The Black Cauldron" (1986), wanted to create a humorous science fiction adventure game.
So, in 1986 Sierra's second "Quest" series started off with "Space Quest: The Sarien Encounter". It was a Science Fiction comedy, starring janitor Roger Wilco.
It quickly became a hit, and was followed up in 1987 with "Space Quest II: Vohauls revenge"
"It was the anti-King’s Quest. We knew there had to be a different audience out there for what we were thinking and liked." - Scott Murphy on Space Quest
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| "Space Quest: The Sarien Encounter" (1986), DOS, Sierra On-Line |
"We wanted to give the player the opportunity to see what it’s like to be a police officer. And judging from the fan mail that would soon come, we were successful in doing that. Some of the mail was from active police officers." - Jim Walls, about "Police Quest" (1987)
The game was relatively realistic, and the player had to follow police procedure in order to progress in the game. As a result the games manual is full of listings of proper police procedures from the time.
Allegedly it was even used in some capacity to train actual police officers.
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| "Police Quest: In Pursuit of the Death Angel" (1987), DOS, Sierra On-Line |
The game was however released with both engines, enabling those with older hardware to play the game as well.
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| "King's Quest IV: The Perils of Rosella" (1988), DOS, Sierra On-Line. Left: SCI engine. Right: AGI engine |
Also in 1988 the sequel to "Police Quest" was released using the SCI engine.
"Police Quest II: The Vengeance" again features Sonny Bonds, now promoted to the Homicide division.
This was actually one of the first adventure games I played, and considering I barely knew any English at the time, the parser driven interface was quite a challenge, not to mention words like "warrant", it wasn't exactly in the vocabulary of beginners English lessons. However I'm sure games like this did help a lot in my learning process.
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| "Police Quest II: The Vengeance" (1988), DOS, Sierra On-Line |
The game advertised itself as "three games in one" since it was the first Sierra game that allowed the selection of a character out of three classes: Fighter, Magic User, and Thief. This in turn affected how the player could solve puzzles and what quests the player would encounter.
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| "Hero's Quest: So You Want to Be a Hero" (1989), Amiga, Sierra On-Line |
Sierra also started up a new series, written by Roberta Williams, with a female protagonist: Larua Bow.
The first game in the series was titled "The Colonel's Bequest", and was an adventure mystery, heavily inspired by "Mystery House" (1980).
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| "The Colonel's Bequest" (1989), DOS, Sierra On-Line |
Activision acquired the company in 1986, and in 1989 their last three interactive fiction games was released. The only three that had graphics, but still images next to the text-section, similar to Sierra's "Hi Res Adventures" started almost a decade earlier.
To be fair they weren't really wrong. There is still an underground movement for interactive fiction, it just doesn't seem to be commercially viable any longer.
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| "James Clavell's Shōgun" (1989), DOS, Infocom |
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