First adventure game I played was Kings Quest 2 back in the late 80's on a 286 without a hard drive, it was on 2 low density 5"1/4' floppies . I couldn't save the game because I didn't have a spare disk, so had to play the game through from start to finish without dying. It really sucked being caught by the witch. Back then it was called a 3D adventure because you could walk in 4 directions. When I finally got a 20mb hard drive I managed to come across a copy of Space Quest 2, by far superiour to Kings Quest 2, though I still played it on a floppy, I love the sound of a disk loading when you walk between screens. It's funny when I think back, I never played the first versions of games till after I had completed their sequels. From there I played Space Quest 1, and was so excited to finally score a copy of Space Quest 3, it took me months to track down. Then to the kings quests, police quests, and finally on to the best ever, Monkey Island 1. I was lucky that I had friends that I could borrow these games off as I wasn't actually able to afford to buy a game until about 1996, previously, even if I did have any money I never seemed to ever be anywhere where these games were sold, I didn't even think to ask my parents to take me somewhere to get a game, because I could just get on my bike to a friends and rummage around in their disk box and see what they had. The first game I bought was a copy of Kings Quest V, then after that the Heroes Quest Collectors edition with episodes 1 - 4 (which unfortunately now has gone missing).
Back in those days, before a walkthrough was easily found on the internet adventure games would take weeks, even months to complete. I would hog our computer in the living room for hours when I got a new game while I tried to completed it in one sitting , then giving it over to my younger brother for a chance to play when i got stuck. We would agree that I would have the first few slots, and he could have the last few. Space quest 2 was left uncompleted for about 6 months. The massive breakthrough was when I found that you could get through the brain maze to the bush to pick the berries, then rubbing them on your body you were able to get past the swamp monster. The sheer elation of this moment, and waiting in anticipation for the disk to load a brand new screen is hard to describe. I called to my brother "I've gotten past the swamp!", and he ran in going "No way! How did you do it!". And we then sat glued to the screen until we got stuck again at the part when you have to tell the little man to move by "saying the word". I would make up adventure games on paper for my brother to complete, sometimes leaving clues around our house. I wish I had AGS when I was 12, I really do.
I also remember the dismay, after I had rode my bike all the way to my friends house half an hour away to copy the latest game (lets say, legend of kyrandia), only to find out that the last disk had a bad crc, i would try that last disk about 100 times.
Before this of course I had the C64, the best games on this were wizball and head over heals. the main reason I liked these games was because they would load up almost every time on the tape drive. The games that were the hardest to load were the ones that started part way through the tape. I used to have the numbers written down for all these games in the sleeve of the tape case so I could fast forward to that position to try and load it. Of course I'd have to leave the room while this was happening, because that would help it. I think I ended up selling my C64 and all the games for about $20 at a garage sale, probably one of the worst thing I ever did, but $20 was lot of money to me back then.
