All Your History: Adventure Games

[Armageddon]

I've been watching this Youtube show for a long while now, it tell how different game companies got their start and their development process. Today they started the next series on Adventure Games, I'm sure a lot of you know this stuff but I thought it was pretty cool, they'll release a new part every Monday.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jEQLcSvjLbA

[Wesray]

Thanks for the pointer, I love watching that kind of stuff! Pity that it's so short though. Looking forward to the next part!

[Anian]

Yes, definitely a good show, I watch a couple of episodes every now and then. They did a history on almost all the major studios and a lot of side stuff.

[Babar]

Heh...I never thought of that...adventure games aren't called that because of some idea of them taking you on an adventure. They are called that because the first games (namely Mystery House, according to that video), billed itself as an "Adventure-game", i.e. a game like Adventure.

[Dualnames]

I love that show, I've been watching it forever!

[Armageddon]

Part 2!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ppwGKb4Hz6Q

[Armageddon]

And another.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dZR46wA9_V0

Next part should be the last.

[Greg Squire]

Here's part 4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eSP5J7rYwhM
Part 5 will be next week

BTW, last sentence from Part 4 was "Tune in next time to see the end of the genre"  - Yeah right

[Armageddon]

Part 5! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8a0sbxihSJE

I don't like how he keeps saying action games are better.

[Greg Squire]

Looks like Part 5 was the last one.  I don't like how they were saying action games were better either.  I'm glad they didn't put another nail in the coffin and say that Adventure games are completely dead.  They did talk some about the genre's recent revival into mainstream with TaleTale's efforts and Tim Schafer / Doublefine's successful Kickstarter campaign.

Everyone talks about how there was a shift to action games, and they just chalk it up to "technology was changing and that's what people wanted", which makes it seem like people's taste's were changing.  I contend that it wasn't so much a shift of tastes, but it was just that another market that was emerging that overshadowed the adventure game market.  People forget that the PC/Mac wasn't mainstream back in the late 80's, early 90's.  Nowadays everyone has a home computer, but back then it was not as common.  They were more expensive and harder to use.  Home computers were niche devices then, so typically they were owned by "geeker" individuals (IMHO).  I would contend that the average home computer user then was more "cerebral" than the general population at large, and that's why Adventure Games appealed so much to this crowd (as they like puzzle solving).

The general population has always gravitated to action games.  In the heyday of the arcade. most of those games were action games (but there's other reasons too, as they were trying to maximize profits).  The consoles became an extension of the arcade and were targeted at the general population, and again, action games were always the top genre there.

So by the mid 90's, the price of computers was becoming more affordable, easier to use, and the internet was becoming mainstream. All this led to the home computer becoming mainstream and no longer being a niche product. Action games started selling to this new mainstream computer user, and it was now dwarfing the sales of adventure games. Ovearall I think adventure games were still selling at the same levels that they were before, but now expectations on what a computer game should bring in was shifting upwards.  Thus it "felt" like a decline, rather than being an actual decline (at first).  Then later because of this perceived shift, publishers stopped backing adventure games, which then led to a decline in them being made.  However I contend that the demand for adventure games and people's tastes didn't change.