Written by TAG reviewer team
Special thanks to Aperama for the idea, lot of the research and the first draft of the whole thing
With the Adventure Gamer -blog having recently decided to come up with the designation of a 'Missed Classic'– a game that didn't actually fit in properly with Trickster's original motives in creating this fine place we all know and love now, there was a little discussion on
where adventure games have actually come from and what they've become. It's almost always going to be a thing of conjecture, with lots of debate of pros and cons in listing a game as being unique enough to warrant its own 'section'. For instance, 'hybrid RPG/adventure' could be a section in and of itself, but we're more talking about the interface that we play through than the nature of the game. If we're to be pedants, there are also some games that don't directly fit into a category (like Below the Root, the first game that was ever covered by this blog).
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| Was this just a dead end in adventure game history? |
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| While a great game, it might not have been first of it’s kind, since... |
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| ...Spellbound in the Magic Knight -series already had some CRPG-elements |
It almost goes without saying that there are also adventure game types that feel as though they could very easily be just lumped in with another category. Some might even try to say that a game like The Castle of Dr. Brain might now fall under the heading of a Myst-like games (though obviously that would be the other way around) – an adventure with a story that largely depends upon puzzles as opposed to dialogue, atmosphere etc. as we're used to in more standard adventure games.
The crew that has taken control of this fine blog will now bring you their own take on... A History of Adventure! In a series of very irregularly appearing posts we will introduce what we think are the major genres in the history of adventure games:
- Text-based interactive fiction
- Interactive fiction with graphics
- Parser-based graphical adventures
- Verb-select point and click graphical adventures
- Interactive movies
- Action-select point and click graphical adventures
- Point and click - a new breed
- First person adventures
- 3d interactive adventures
- Episodic gaming
Each post will cover exactly one genre. We will try to determine the basic features of each genre, mention some notable titles and creators and tell a rudimentary tale of its history. Please, feel free to disagree with us and argue your points vehemently. Note that we usually give dates only of the first known iteration of each type of adventure game and usually NOT attempt to state when a genre ended, because many of these types live on, if not in commercial, then in indie market.
