Chris Jones's History of AGS

This is the original history of Adventure Game Studio as written by Chris Jones in the first AGS Website:

I first started developing the Adventure Creator in 1995 when, after completing Space Quest 4, I realized that such a simple idea (of a character moving over pre-rendered backgrounds) could be so effective. I wrote it in Borland Turbo C++ 3.0, and it supported the standard VGA 320x200x256 graphics mode. I made a simple game with 6 rooms using it, and that's how it stayed. It never even left my hard disk. (This game later became the AC 1.00 demo game).

Then, in October 1997 I first had Internet access, and so I uploaded the Creator to my website (which I created almost immediately). And there it stayed, with my page counter registering an average of 1 hit per day.

September 1998, almost a year later, I had my first e-mail about the Creator, from someone wanting to register it. Well, at the time I was shocked. This made me decide to improve the Creator. It had been the same since '95, and was a bit basic.

So, in October 1998 the first update to the Creator was uploaded. The only improvement was the ability to define the character's position on the opening screen, but it was an update. By this time the number of hits per day had gone up to about 6, and I was receiving 4-5 e-mails per week about the Creator.

I then started work on the next release. It included updates to make the system easier to use, and one of the major points was a graphical script editor. This was released on 18 December 1998. I struggled for a while to think of a version number for this new release. I thought, maybe call it v1.1, but then I thought - the improvements aren't enough to merit that. So then I thought - maybe v1.01? But that sounded too important as well. So in the end it was released as v1.00 Service Release 1.

January 1999 saw the release of version 1.1. It included for the first time SVGA 640x400 support, MIDI music and sound effects, and foreign language support. Since then, many new versions have been released and the Creator has become more and more powerful and (hopefully) easier to use.

In September 1999, the Adventure Creator was renamed to Adventure Game Studio, and version 2 was released. This involved a complete re-write of all the code from scratch, as well as many new features designed to make the system a lot more powerful and at the same time easier to use.

Since then, AGS has gone through many new versions adding new features, to make it into what it is today. I hope you like it.

What will the future hold? Well, a Windows IDE is frequently requested feature, but that will take a lot of time to write. Until then, I'll just keep adding features that people want. I'd love to have your feedback on the message board.

Chris Jones