List of adventure games that innovate

[Radiant]

But then punished you severly by ending your game if you so much as forget to have a shave. (Okay I doubt that was in there, but it's an example)

No, THAT was Codename Iceman.

Maniac Mansion and its multiple characters, a concept which was pushed to the next level with Day of the Tentacle and Gobliins 2.

To the previous level, actually. Neither DOTT nor Gobliins 2 has NPCs walking around individually, but MM does. It's arguably also the first humoristic game.

Leisure Suit Larry - 1) sex + adventure game, hitting on girls a concept

Larry 1 is a remake of Soft Porn Adventure (which, yes, was the first adult-ish game)


Maniac Mansion - first mouse-controlled game.

Hugo's House of Horrors - first amateur-made adventure game.

The Hobbit - first game with graphics (iirc)

Zork - first massively cross-platform game

Future Wars - first VGA game

Loom - in addition to what everybody already said, first game designed to have no dead ends and no killing the player

King's Quest IV - first female protagonist

Trinity - I don't like the game much, but the Klein Bottle puzzle is extremely innovative.

Space Quest I - first arcade sequence

[SSH]

Gargoyle Games' Tir na Nog could be argued to be an adventure game and was very innovative for its day (1985).

[Anarcho]

The Black Cauldron...first game (i think) to use the stripped down, one click to interact key.  It's cursed / blessed us ever since.

[Radiant]

The Black Cauldron...first game (i think) to use the stripped down, one click to interact key.  It's cursed / blessed us ever since.

Good point. It's also very good with multiple solutions to puzzles, and it's the first adv. game based on a movie.

[ManicMatt]

Codename Iceman? That's the first I've heard of this game! Must have been good! (Note sarcasm) *finds screenshots* Ah, early Leisure suit larry era.

Leisure Suit Larry 7 - The first and to my knowledge ONLY game ever to use a THIRD sense in the gaming experience with the genius Cybersniff 2000 the Scratch-N-Sniff, scratch the page with your fingernail and SMELL the scenery 

An real life page? I know Discworld Noir had an ingame smellovision where you could see smells as colours/auroa and ask Lewton to have a sniff. That was interesting!

HOWEVER Gabriel Knight wasn't the first adventure game to use a historical story either, the real first game ever to use a historical story was Conquest of Camelot (1989). SO THERE ! 

I think they meant it had historical background, not in an actual historical setting. But then, if they did, then there is the Indy games...

[Anarcho]

Black Cauldron is also one of the first to involve alternative endings.  That was one of the first adventure games I ever played and I still love it.

I wrote to Al Lowe a while back and he was surprised that anyone would even still remember it.

[InCreator]

Curse of Enchantia - er... something absolutely unique. Better see for yourself.

[ManicMatt]

it featured the worse pixel point precision puzzle I've ever encountered in an adventure game? Where there was a plank and even with the solution in hand, me and my older brother couldn't find the pixel, and never finished the game?

Oh, you mean how insane it was.

Interesting that it barely had any dialogue whatsoever, either.

EDIT:

This section of the game:

Spoiler

Go to the huge pile of gold on the right and combine the sock with a gold coin.
Now go to the robot guard and attack him with the lethal coin/sock combo!  Now
you can enter the ship.  Pick up the first plank and look for a small cross on
the floor near the middle of the screen.  Stand thereabouts and use the push
command to drop the plank horizontally.  Now pick up the second plank and stand
in the middle of the first plank and use push to drop it vertically to make a
bridge.  Cross the bridge and pick up the cloth.

[close]

Hmm maybe we never "pushed" the plank. Because that's illogical.

[lo_res_man]

leather goddeseses of phobies had some smell-ovision

[Helm]

Gobliins wasn't innovative for having multiple characters on screen, it was innovative because a large section of the puzlles were timed, you did this with one goblin while you did that with the other goblin.

[Nostradamus]

Conquest of Camelot is based on realistic locations and time-period, but is invented faux-history in the subject at hand. Arthur going to conquer the heathens and find the holy grail? But perhaps I'm wrong.

Well in the Arthur legends\mythology there are many stories of him and\or his knights questing for grail. But a King Arthur in historical reality has never been proven and the majority of the historians don't believe he existed.

LSL7 I believ was also the first adventure game where the narrator was joking and ripping on the player character.

I think sierra games started doing that from the first space quest or something. A lot was 'oh poor roger' but I think earlier games made the player-playing-adventure-game breakage quite sooner than LSL7.

I ment a voice actor narrator.

Larry 1 is a remake of Soft Porn Adventure (which, yes, was the first adult-ish game)

Soft Porn Adventure was a TEXT game. So my point still stands as this is the first graphical game that involved trying to get laid.

Leisure Suit Larry 7 - The first and to my knowledge ONLY game ever to use a THIRD sense in the gaming experience with the genius Cybersniff 2000 the Scratch-N-Sniff, scratch the page with your fingernail and SMELL the scenery 

An real life page? I know Discworld Noir had an ingame smellovision where you could see smells as colours/auroa and ask Lewton to have a sniff. That was interesting!

No, not see smells, I ment a REAL scratch-n-sniff page that came with the game. I have the original game and had this page. That image I posted is how it looked like. During the game the picture of the number to sniff showed up on screen and then you took a fingernail and scratched the number on the page and got a smell. Examples: Sea smell when on deck, Kumquat Kish of sorts after you baked it, smell of cleaning products or yes, a rancid smell of poo in one scene, hehe. It all was a great experience to be added to a game.

[Kweepa]

leather goddeseses of phobies had some smell-ovision

Yes, LGOP came with a scratch and sniff card. And the first scratch was in the toilet. Scary.

http://infocom.elsewhere.org/gallery/leather/sniffnscratch.jpg

[Nostradamus]

OK Steve good point, it certainly was way before LSL7 but again like Soft Porn, Phobos was a TEXT game. An Interactive Fiction game. And that's another genre than graphical adventure games. True, graphical adventure games grew from the genre of IF, but it's still a separate genre. It's like considering FPS a side scrolling shooter because those grew from Eagle's Nest and Duke Nukem (pre 3D) type games.
So in the field of adventure games, not IF ames. Larry7 is the first and only game to have a scratch-N-sniff.

[Radiant]

Codename Iceman? That's the first I've heard of this game! Must have been good! (Note sarcasm) *finds screenshots* Ah, early Leisure suit larry era.

You should try it some time if you're into masochism. Early in the game you get your ID card from a guard. Only it's the wrong ID card. If you don't bother to check this (and why would you) you get stuck near the end of the game. That's just one of the many exciting dead ends you'll see!

HOWEVER Gabriel Knight wasn't the first adventure game to use a historical story either, the real first game ever to use a historical story was Conquest of Camelot (1989). SO THERE ! 

Gold Rush?

Curse of Enchantia - er... something absolutely unique. Better see for yourself.

Isn't that the game with the talk icons that went "Hi." and "HELP!"? Looked nice, yes, never finished it though.

Well in the Arthur legends\mythology there are many stories of him and\or his knights questing for grail. But a King Arthur in historical reality has never been proven and the majority of the historians don't believe he existed.

Come on, everybody knows that after facing the Legendary Black Beast of Aaaargh, Arthur and Bedevere crossed the Bridge of Peril to face the evil French with the Cattlepult.

Soft Porn Adventure was a TEXT game. So my point still stands as this is the first graphical game that involved trying to get laid.

But the thread title says "adventure game". So nyaaah!

[blueskirt]

Maybe I should have been a little bit more explicit in my first post, maybe "innovative" was a bad word. But instead of looking for the first adventure games which had sound, speech, 16 colors, 256 colors, shiny graphics, point and click, sex, commercial AGS game, first person view or whatever, I was more looking for...

You know, suppose you take every adventure games out there, put them in line and strip 'em from their graphics, musics, and storyline, what is so unique in a game that make it worth being played while similar games could be easily forgotten. Something, an element, a part in the game that kinda shine by itself beyond the game itself, something, that would make the game worth being played just once in a lifetime, even if the game had sloppy graphics or a overused story (or at least seen just once if the idea was good but the game was badly realised). (So many innuendos in that last paragraph)

Quest For Glory shine from any other adv. games with a fantasy setting because it has RPG elements, different character classes and a stats system.

Galaxy of Fantabulous Wonderment shine from any other space themed adv. games because it had more than just puzzle solving, in that case it had ressource trading and piracy (Yes, it was done in Star Control and Elite but it's not something you see in every other adv. games)

Indy and The Last Crusade's castle Brunwald shine among any other evil guys' lair because you weren't exploring empty corridors (SQ2), a lair devoid of enemies (BASS) or killed on sight by every bad guys in the place (SQ2, Operation Stealth), instead you had to sneak your way in, avoid patrols, convince other guards to let you pass, fight if the situation turned bad, had to find disguise to progress further behind the enemy's lines... you don't see this in every adventure games. Additionally that it had so many choice of actions that can affect the storyline later, make your quest easier or harder, this too you don't see in every games.

The GUI of Loom, playing notes on a staff to accomplish various actions, instead of using hands/eyes/mouth icons, verbs or text parser.

Even if I never liked that game, Kyrandia 3: Malcolm's Revenge for being able to change your mood from nice to evil and get various and different reactions to your actions. Grrr! Bearly Sane for its rage-o-meter which affected your reactions depending on how pissed off was your character.

Runhot, if it was released, I remember it involved the player to change his mood between normal, sporty and stealthy, like Little Big Adventure (another one which stand above). Even stripped from the graphics or the storyline, everyone would have remembered that particuliar bit in the gameplay.

Bad Mojo, Bad Mojo which arguably has the plot of a "Escape from my room" Quest game, but where the character was a tiny little cockroach, crawling in the dust sheeps, the vents or the folds in a bed sheet.

I think that's enough examples.

As for MM, DOTT and Gobliins 2, I was more talking about you controling several characters. It's not done in every adv. games. DOTT improve from MM because every characters were all stuck in a different timeline, all faced different problems and had to cooperate by either exchanging objects or making an action that would modify the course of time and help another character, it's indeed an improvement from MM's controling multiple characters.

Gobliins 2 also improve because while every of the 7 characters of MM have the same abilities and talents except for 1 talent which happen to be the one you'll finish the game with, Gob2 involved 2 characters with distinct and opposite personalities traits, abilities, qualities, flaws. One goblin was gentle, caring, weak, easily scared, nice mannered and smart while the other was harsh, uncaring, strong, scary, wild mannered and too dumb to press a button. And each goblins would react differently to every single things, characters and inventory items in the game (I bet their sprite artists got commited in a asylum after the game was released). One would gently smell the perfume of the flower you spend the last 5 minutes to get a hand on, while the other would uncaringly give it a look, eat it and laugh in your face, forcing you to go back and retake it again. Sure it involved a lot of timing puzzle, but also a whole lot of juggling between both personalities of your characters. Same thing with Knightsquire, 2 completly different characters.

I don't talk about Gob1 or Gob3 here because in the first one, the multiple characters was mostly just an extension of GUI, every goblins represented an action rather than a whole character like in Gob2. And in Gob3, the sidekicks were mostly there just to continue the timed puzzles style used in the previous games.

Now that I think of it, Bureau 13 had you to select a few characters of a total of 6, each with multiple talents, to accomplish your quests.

Into The Light where your character was blind and you had to use your 4 remaining sense to guide you out of the troubles you were in. A nice little twist which didn't make the game to be just another drop in the sea.

It sound like I'll have a lot of adventure games to try one of those days. Particuliary In Memoriam. It sound deviously awesome and out of the box.Ã, 

-edit: Various typos and Into The Light-

[Helm]

I'm also more interested in what you say and not 'first game to have sex in it' but I think we've compiled a quite large list of games of that type too, yes?

[blueskirt]

Indeed, and all of these are now added to my already long list of games to play.Ã, 

[Rui 'Trovatore' Pires]

The Hobbit - first game with graphics (iirc)

Surely that honor belongs to Mystery House?

[Da_Elf]

bards tale anyone? originally on apple 2 if i remember correctly although i got into it on the c64
although ill never forget my early days on pc enjoying every moment of every KQ game. thanks be to AGDI for re-uniting me with the advneture game world.
loom is indeed up there in my list too.
even some early porn in LSL

[Radiant]

DOTT improve from MM because every characters were all stuck in a different timeline,

From a technical point of view, MM is way more ingenious because the characters actually need to cooperate simultaneously (e.g. send char one to the basement to turn off the power and another to the attic to do something while the power is off, and remember to have all your chars out of the way while Ed walks thru the house).

Gobliins 2 also improve because while every of the 7 characters of MM have the same abilities and talents except for 1 talent which happen to be the one you'll finish the game with

You should play MM again because this just isn't true. Each of the six kids you get to select from has one or two unique talents, AND the game has several multiple endings available  depending on which kids you pick. You can arrest the meteor, send it back into space, turn it "good" and get it eaten by something hungry. It could stand more dialogue, of course, but some characters do react differently to some parts of the environment.