The greatest Adventure Game of all time...

[CoffeeBob]

I'm not really sure which one's my favourite... It's pending between The Secret of Monkey Island, Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge and Space Quest III: The Pirates of Pestulon.

[S42 Man]

Gotta love gabriel Knight 1, not only for the cachy music, wicked plot, and cool characters, but for the PIXELATED DEATH SCENES!!!!!!! Yes BLOOD!!!!!. number 3's good too, but the moving around gets annoying, and grace just doesnt sound the same as in the first. (Havnt played the second, but then again, who has i asks?)

I know this is old, but what do you mean "Who was i asks?"Ã,  If you did not know, The Beast Within: A Gabriel Knight Mystery was voted as the best adventure game, best story, and game of the year in 1995.

I say that the Broken Sword Series(especially Smoking Mirror) and the Gabriel Knight Series(2 and 3 on top) are tied for the best, while the King's Quest Series is a close 2nd.

[AlbinoPanther]

Guybrush come here quickly.You see this do you see all this men and probably one woman arguing about.

All this words but only one is at the top:



thank you Ron you are true creator of adventure game genre.

[Hamelkart]

Amen to that.

[mysterybowler]

It has to be Grim Fandango for me. The land of the living bit still freaks me out.
And I love Glottis.

[Xenos]

I think that expecially MI2 was a revolution for computer gaming scene....
MI1 and MI2 demonstrated that computer games could be a new form of art like cinema or literature....

I also love Grim Fandango for its originality...

I'll try my best to make somethng comparable to them....

[Wellington]

Well, a lot of the games mentioned above are downright incredible.

But I'm going to root for the underdogs here. Text adventures. Not only the Infocom classics - which were great - but some of the new ones being made - which are vastly better some ways.

Okay, how can an adventure be the best adventure game ever if it has no graphics and no music? Well, on the bright side, you don't have to spend hours walking around. Type N. N. E. E. N. N and you're across the game map. Compare that to Syberia, which, although very good, consisted largely of walking - even if you solved every puzzle in a quick guess!

So, my top five favorite adventure games ever of those _not mentioned above_ are:

5. Anchorhead

"He always returns to his blood."

I'll just link to a review:

http://www.ministryofpeace.com/if-review/reviews/20030228.html

This one's dark, like STB or Trinity, but it's also much more fun, in a twisted way, than either. It's about the puzzles and the brooding and the amazing atmosphere, but it's Lovecraftian darkness so you can't take it too seriously.

Can you?

4. Slouching Towards Bedlam

"If there are words for this... they have not yet been written."

A shorter game that makes the best use of multiple endings I have ever seen. You have something very close to free will, but whether or not you get certain endings depends on how thoroughly you REALIZE that. And it's hard to say which ending is best, and which is worst.

It's steampunk - really good steampunk - with an unsettlingly dehumanizing writing style. It also has one of the best puzzles I've ever played; I got a eureka moment on it while walking down the street, and I hadn't even realized there was a puzzle THERE before.

It's great.

3. Trinity (A 1986 Infocom game.)

"Sharp words between the superpowers. Tanks in East Berlin. And now, reports the BBC, rumors of a satellite blackout. It's enough to spoil your continental breakfast. "

This one's a weird inclusion, because in addition to having no graphics, music, or on-screen action, it has some really awful save-and-restore puzzles and a lot of puzzles whose solutions relied more on symbolism than logic. But this makes sense, given the game's time-looping premise. And Trinity may be the most flat-out memorable game I've ever played.

You mirror-reverse the world. You swing the sun through the sky. You float through space in a bubble. You cross the River Styx, sprint across the desert of New Mexico, sneak through the Trinity test site, rush to defuse the first A-bomb. And, the ending is incredibly haunting.

2. Savoir-Faire

Now this one's just plain FUN, and brilliantly programmed and conceived. Magic systems in adventure games tend to either circle around artifacts or the CAST X ON Y approach, but Savoir-Faire has only two bits of magic you can use, and they're amazingly well-done, and make for some subtle, sneaky, brilliant puzzles.

The game warns that it's easy to get into an unsolvable position, but it's fair. You can beat it with saves, restores, and careful play, and I didn't get frustrated at all with it, except in the good way. This game's like the opposite of Trinity in many ways. It's sort of an old-school game with a hint of treasure hunting and a backstory that only really becomes important in the last few moves of the game. But it goes for wit instead of weight, and it scores.

Is it pretentious? Well, sometimes. But I'd rather have pretension than a game that's afraid to pretend to anything.

(City of Secrets could also be on this list, but I didn't want to put two games by the same author, no matter how incredibly ambitious and good they are.)

1. Space Quest IV

"Casually glancing at the status bar, you notice you're in Space Quest 12."

Sophomoric. Funny, but not as pushy and loud about it as the Leisure Suit Larry games. Filled with little jabs at B-grade science fiction movies. Came with a little magazine that was at least as funny as the game, and in the tradition of the Infocom box stuff. Had some neat puzzles, though also had a nasty walking dead or two, and didn't have SQ3's reliance on action sequences. Also, was the first animated graphic adventure I played, and introduced me to the fun of solving puzzles better than your parents can even though you are seven years old.

Hey, this is the list of my personal favorites. I'm allowed to put something silly at the top.

[Gamer_V]

I'd either go for Full Throttle or the Quest for Glory series... but it's hard...

[esper]

Wellington: You completely forsook the grandmother of all games: ZORK, and it's many incarnations (I like Zork 0: the Coconut of Quendor the best). It seems as though only one of the games you picked waas a real Infocom game. Although I have to agree that Anchorhead is really good. And what about that old favorite, Leather Godesses of Phobos!

I think the best adventure game of all time was Nocturne, which I just posted about elsewhere....

[Wellington]

Wait - I thought Beyond Zork was the one with the coconut, and Zork Zero was the one with the curse...

Anyway, Zork I is a brilliant game, and Zork 0 is fun, if a bit generic (it's got the Towers of Hanoi, peg jumping, and so on), and Beyond Zork has some neat RPG elements and also some horribly frustrating RPG elements... but I don't feel that Zork 2 and Zork 3 aged quite as well. Maybe it's because they have just enough plotline to suggest there's a story there, but not enough story to be compelling. Zork I doesn't pretend to be anything more than a treasure hunt, and is fun on that level.

(I like the Enchanter series more, really. Enchanter is consistently fair but challenging, Sorcerer has one of the best time travel puzzles ever written, and Spellbreaker is a great puzzlefest with a cool ending.)

LGOP was like Space Quest, but generally better and in text. It would likely be on my list if it weren't for that horrible, horrible maze. It was fair, and you got a map, but _man_ was it repetitive and plodding.

If there's an Infocom game I'd add to the list, it would probably be The Lurking Horror.

[esper]

Ah, right you are. Beyond Zork was the Coconut of Quendor... That be it. Of course, Zork 2 and 3 weren't any good because they were just building on the success of their predecessor, which never comes out alright. They were pretty much the same game with different plot elements.
I had the priviledge of playing Zork 1,2,3, 0, and Beyond Zork, LGoP, Hitchhikers Guide, and Lurking Horror on my Commodore 64 back in the day, but Infocom re-released them for PC about 10 or so years ago. I bet they are still available, and most definitely could be found on Ebay. As for Anchorhead and some of the others, they are freeware. And I'm pretty sure there's a place where you can play Zork I as a Java applet if you look hard enough online...

[Hamelkart]

OK, since I made top 5 list, here is 6-10 one.

6. Day of the Tentacle
7. The Dig
8. Beneath a Steel Sky
9. Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis
10. Discworld

And now, 11-15... 

[Reko]

Eeh. I can't possibly say just one, so I'll put it in categories:

Sierra: Space Quest 5. Really nicely put together game, very smoothly going. And I also have a soft spot for the Sierra-style speech.

LucasArts: MI2, Sam and Max. Both were very immersing and had incredibly 'Wow. I'll miss you.' endings. Personally, I feel DoTT didn't immerse very well. It seemed to lack soul, which MI2 and Sam and Max had in leaps and bounds.

Cyan: Riven I'd say has to be around here. It's well disguised, but it's an adventure game, and what an adventure game.

AGS: GfW, with 5 Days close behind. GfW is really quite wonderous for an AGS game. I feel like it'd be a bit of an overstatement to put Poom here, but I think it's underrated.

Other: BaSS was excellent. The Hugo Trilogy was one of the first adventure games I played, with the second being the best of it (except for the pesky maze, but I guess it's just about excusable).

[Tuomas]

Now that I found Victor Loomes again it must be it and The Big Red Adventure... something very very nostalgic.

If I didn't remember those two, I'd surely go for MI1 or Zak, which was the first I played through

[TheCheese33]

Professional: Zork: Grand Inquisitor

AGS: Da New Guys!

[Juliuz]

For me it's definately Monkey Island 3!

I love the grapics and puzzles in the game, and since this is the first game in the saga I played I kind of fell in love with it

Other than that I really love Beneth A Steel Sky and grim fandango!

[Haddas]

I have to Agree with Zork: Grand Inquisitor. One of the best games ever made.

[TheCheese33]

I wonder...why did Activision cancel the Zork series after Grand Inquisitor? They don't even mention it on their website anymore! They should've decided to make another one; if not a Zork game, maybe a different series! It also leads to the conclusion that graphics have not only enhanced adventures, but also have doomed them (why the hell did they get rid of video actors in Myst? Look at Myst 5!). Zork MUST be revived.

[RyRayer]

I played The Dig yesterday and I have to say that, this is just awesome.
Anyway here's my TOP 3.

1.The Dig
2.Monkey Island 2
3.DOTT

[HackSlacka]

Grim Fandango and MI2, no question