How you found Adventure Games.

[Sam.]

I know we've had a "What was the first Adventure Game you played" thread, and I apologise if I'm re-treading old ground. My question, is "Why?"

Adventure games for alot of their lifetime have been an anomaly, certainly not something that was fretted over in the classroom over who's played/seen/collected what. So I wonder how you found adventure games? What led you to love this genre through thick and thin?

I remember being small, maybe 6 or 7 and being at my grandpa's house, and he was playing Myst. My sister and I would sit and watch, unable to help at first and eventually chipping in ideas on how various puzzles could be solved, where we'd seen things before etc. Soon Grandpa set us up on our own adventure, leaving us to solve the puzzles, to be called on when we got stuck. (We weren't old enough to access the internet for walkthroughs!) Another early game we played was Toonstruck, actually being lent this one to play at home. Soon we were playing Fate of Atlantis together and trying out all of the three paths to get through, exhausting all avenues to get every last bit of brilliant fun out of the game. I don't remember the order we played, but we went through all the Lucas classics, until I bought MI4 on my own and was disappointed.   

My Grandpa, my sister and I had a lot of fun with adventure games and they are important memories to me. I know for some people they are just games and that's great too, but the interactivity and difficulty of this genre brought us together in a way any other couldn't.

Does anybody else have stories like this? How you found the games? Do they mean more than just games?


(Also, does anyone else remember a game called RAMA, set on board a spaceship i think, never completed it!)

[Igor Hardy]

Adventure games for alot of their lifetime have been an anomaly, certainly not something that was fretted over in the classroom over who's played/seen/collected what.

Speak for yourself. They were the coolest games around when I found out about them in the early 90s. In fact I lost interest in my Nintendo because of them.

[Babar]

My father was fairly computer savvy for the time when I was a kid (he seems to have unfortunately fallen behind a bit now), so that sorta drove my love of computers. He got adventure games for me I guess because he didn't want "evil violent" action games to be the totality of my experience (good thing he never looked too closely when I was playing Prince of Persia ). Sometimes he even played with me just watching.

Most of the kids I knew at the time were not in the least interested in adventure games. I met such people later in life.

[Sonny Bonds]

I remember my first adventure game like it was yesterday. My dad got me a copy of Police Quest 1. I was hooked right away, I still remember the part where you pull over the crazy naked guy.



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[Stupot]

I'd played (and loved) a number of adventure games before, but I think the moment I realized adventures were my thing was actually when I played the Broken Sword 2 demo on the cover of PSM... Jeezus I'm old...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vLmFJLbHP1M

[Radiant]

Adventure games for alot of their lifetime have been an anomaly, certainly not something that was fretted over in the classroom over who's played/seen/collected what.

...what? That is precisely what we talked about in the classroom. Back in the days of AGI, there weren't a whole lot of quality games for the PC, so King's Quest and Space Quest certainly stood out. Compared to a single-screen arcade game like Frogger or Space Invaders, it is pretty impressive to have some 60-odd rooms to explore and lots of dialog to read in a game that spans up to three disks. Heck, adventure games probably taught me English.

[Turtiathan]

I remember my brother played an adventure game on the Nintendo 64. That was probably the first time I saw an adventure game. As for AGS, I was told about it by someone who posts here.

One of the things I like about adventure games is they are more likely to have an interesting story since the story is the main focus. A lot of mainstream games are being taken over by big business so the quality in the story and the voice acting has gone down. However, I still have a weakness for shooting and blowing stuff up in video/computer games.

[Igor Hardy]

However, I still have a weakness for shooting and blowing stuff up in video/computer games.

Haven't we all? It's almost like some kind of addiction really.

Sometimes it even extends beyond games in my case.

[SpacePirateCaine]

Well, depending on your definition of adventure, I suppose my first adventure game ever would have to have been "Adventure" (Or Pirate Adventure) on the TI 99/4A. I can't recall getting much further in that one during my childhood than unleashing a mongoose on a snake, but that was the first I can really recall. It was one of my favorite games on the platform, which my Dad bought and brought home to practice programming on. That, and Temple of Doom.

If we're talking about graphical adventures, the first I seem to recall is King's Quest II, which I sort of played at a family friend's house (Played meaning died ten or twenty times trying to climb through a patch of poisoned thorns). What really endeared me to the genre, however, has to have been the original Monkey Island, in glorious EGA with PC speakers back in the day. It was awesome, and reenforced my belief that games can be both fun and funny, and helped bend my 8-year-old mind into knots and build vital problem solving skills.

I don't really recall having a lot of friends who played adventure games - most of my friends were console gamers, so it was more Zelda and Mega Man in the schoolyard, but the same family friends that exposed me to King's Quest were as much adventure gamers as I was back in the day, so there was plenty of brainstorming on how to solve puzzles, nights spent huddled in front of a computer screen suggesting what to use on what else... Ah, memories.

I do recall playing through all of the Quest for Glory games - even had a copy of Quest for Glory when it was still called Hero Quest (There should have been more graphical adventure RPG games out there. Great stuff). Between that and Monkey Islands I and II, I misspent most of my asocial childhood. I'd hope that any PC gamer in their late 20s or higher would have had plenty of exposure to the genre in their childhood, as it was basically that or RPGs up until Wolfenstein 3D broke out.

[moshboy]

I honestly don't remember my first experiences with adventure games. I know it was a text adventure but I have no idea which one because I was very, very young. I think the first time adventure games really started to tug at my curiousity was around the time I played the first Maniac Mansion. I wasn't great at solving puzzles (and I'm still not) but I liked the idea of it and it was always wanting to see what a new section looked like that kept driving me to play.

[Ghost]

Adventure games for alot of their lifetime have been an anomaly, certainly not something that was fretted over in the classroom over who's played/seen/collected what.

You can quite well guess a person's age by that kind of statement. We even did the Map Dance from MI1. A friend of mine won eternal fame by shouting "Behind you, a three-headed monkey!" to distract a teacher during a pretty hard test. Still, the girls usually thought we were quite weird...

My "first contact" was Interactive Fiction. "Wishbringer" and "Nord and Burt" and the like. The first graphics adventure I played was, lemme think, LSL1. Compared to what games of other genres had to offer at the time, that was high-end eye candy. I always liked the idea of playing through a story, getting all sorts of cool rewards (dialog, animations, surprising plot twists) for stuff I did. It's as simple as that, even today I appreciate games that "gimme something". Blasting through a fleet of ships in Xenon was way cool too, but it was insanely rewarding and just "right" to type in a command/click around on that SCUMM and, well, seeing that you guessed right. There always is this sense of a world being build just for me to explore. Escapism AND a nice brain challenge. Yeah, that's right up my alley.

Heck, adventure games probably taught me English.

Yup, same here. I remember that scene in one of the Zork games that had me so confused- there was a bucket that seemed to be of little to no use. When I kicked it, however, I... died. I didn't understand that. A teacher explained the saying to me a few days later, and from then on, English was that much more than vocabulary.

[Ali]

Some time after 1995 my friends told me about a game they had on their Amiga. You were a guy who wanted to be a pirate and you got fired out of a cannon with a pan on your head, they said. A few days later I went round to their house and played Monkey Island with them. A little while later we played Monkey Island II.

Then they grew up, met girls and got on with their lives. (During which time, I met a girl who came round my house to play Curse of Monkey Island.)

[Babar]

You can quite well guess a person's age by that kind of statement. We even did the Map Dance from MI1. A friend of mine won eternal fame by shouting "Behind you, a three-headed monkey!" to distract a teacher during a pretty hard test. Still, the girls usually thought we were quite weird...

Or where they grew up, I guess. Although I...became aware... around the time of the first blast of 2D point & click adventure games (the first one I remember was Space Quest 3), most of my friends didn't share my interest, although those who had access to computers or video game consoles talked about Prince of Persia and such in school (discussing which of the buttons you all had to press to make a particularly long jump, only to realise many years later that a single jump button was adequate ).

I also met a girl who I used to play Curse of Monkey Island with..but that was years later, even after I had played it originally...so it was mostly me trying to not yell out "THAT'S NOT HOW YOU DO IT! YOU'RE SUPPOSED TO USE THE COOKING OIL ON HIS BACK! IT'S SO OBVIOUS!"

[Ponch]

I played the Leisure Suit Larry games. It taught me all I know about women. 

[Ghost]

I also met a girl who I used to play Curse of Monkey Island with..but that was years later, even after I had played it originally...so it was mostly me trying to not yell out "THAT'S NOT HOW YOU DO IT! YOU'RE SUPPOSED TO USE THE COOKING OIL ON HIS BACK! IT'S SO OBVIOUS!"

:o That almost sounds like prOn! Let's make a movie out of seemingly random quips from adventures.

[Babar]

All I can think of right now is "I'm selling these fine leather jackets"

But I remember a couple years ago someone took the voice-pack from some LucasArts games (including Indy & the FoA) and re-edited them for a lot of humour. Those files seem to have been lost to the internet now, though