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History of graphic adventure games
Finkbug
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January 29, 2011 - 8:47 pm
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Ars Technica has a of the history of graphics adventures. http://arstechnica.com/gaming/.....ntures.ars

Not a fan of Ars' game coverage but they're good at long form overviews of this or that.

 

Related to the talk of the site's birth, I was wondering if some of the older gals (and Scout [Image Can Not Be Found]) would be willing to write up their path into gaming from start to today. It'd be interesting reading and maybe some non-silo for Steer to use on the Tap side. Toger becoming Togeraptor. That's got be good stuff.

grooowrrrr! [menace menace] rrrrowwwr!

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Steerpike
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January 30, 2011 - 12:53 am
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I love that idea. If I can get it on the front page I'll love it more!

Life is the misery we endure between disappointments.

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geggis
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January 31, 2011 - 6:06 am
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I'd like to hear Tog, Yap, Spike and Jen talk about their move from adventure gaming to other types of games. Hell, they don't even need to write an article, they're all in the same boat so they can just have a chat and post their exchange!

Jen
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January 31, 2011 - 11:37 am
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My move was actually from console to PC adventure games. I got started gaming in the early 80s, playing Centipede and Pac-Man and Frogger that were built into bar tables [Image Can Not Be Found]back in the day. Then my roommate-at-the-time got one of those Atari consoles that hooked up to the TV and played cartridges, and we parted ways not long after and I got an original NES. I played tons of Tetris and Super Mario Bros. and the like, and then along came The Legend of Zelda. That was the first game I ever played that had a narrative, and I was hooked! The only thing is, I hated the boss battles (still do), so when I first played a PC adventure game I was tickled pink that there were not only no boss fights but no fighting at all, and I was hooked! After 10 years of playing almost exclusively adventure games, they started to lose their charm, and I moved into RPG. Now I don't play much of anything besides logic puzzle games on my PC and whatever games I can find to amuse myself on my iphone. I am still up for the occasional A adventure, which are few and far between these days, and am in the middle of a couple of RPGs wherein I make progress every three or four or ten months.

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Pokey
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January 31, 2011 - 1:13 pm
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I enjoyed the article. Thanks. I still have nearly all of the old games in that article, but am sorry that I played very few of them. One of the older games that I did finish was Willy Beamish. I started playing games with Myst, as so many others did. Then Riven. I continued with adventure, playing all the great ones, such as Gabriel Knight, Tex Murphy, Journeyman Project, Broken Sword, The Last Express,  Sanitarium, Grim Fandango, The Longest Journey. I believe the oldest game I've played is Conquest of the Longbow, an old Sierra game that I loved. Around 2001, I discovered Outcast, Thief, Max Payne, System Shock 2, Deus Ex and was having more fun playing them than most adventure games. Shortly after that I got into RPG with Anachronox and Morrowind. I haven't played an adventure game in years. I try, but find them boring. They just don't make them like they used to.

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Toger
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January 31, 2011 - 2:20 pm
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I didn't start out playing adventure games. My very first game was the original Castlevania on the NES back in the 80s. My sister and I were house sitting for our mother and she (mother!) had the console. We were instantly hooked, so we bought our own NES. The very next game we played was Legend of Zelda, which we loved to death. We had a massive library of games – including sports games.

At some point, my sister started dating this guy who provided us with "free" PC games like Commander Keen, Duke Nuk'em and Doom. We didn't have our own computer – too expensive – so I played them at work during lunch and got all my co-workers hooked. There were always Doom death matches going on after work. (I also think I was the one who infected a couple of work PCs with a virus due to our "free" games.[Image Can Not Be Found]) I also played Wonderland and Leisure Suit Larry at work. They started calling me gamergrrl at work.

Around this time, we got a home PC to share, and the first game we played on it was Sierra's Perils of Rosella (KQ4, I think). We liked the fact that we actually got to play a female character and we worked in tandem to figure out the puzzles… along with an occasional call to the help line (at $$ per minute!). We were totally smitten with Sierra games (we even drove up to Oakhurst to take the tour) and bought and played almost the entire library – Willy Beamish (son loved that), Dagger of Amon Ra, Freddy Pharkas, Inca, Heart of China, etc. The only ones my sister and I didn't play were the Police Quest series, although my son loved those. We got really good at creating DOS batch files to the point where each game had its own special message to us as the game fired up (we created one for my son's racing games that said "Gentlemen, start your engines!")

I joined Sierra's TSN at some point and discovered gaming with people other than family. I would play Yserbius with three East Coast guys on weekends well into the wee hours of the morning.

When Sierra went legs up, I was out of the loop for new games for quite while and only heard about games from reading PCGamer. That's where I read about Sanitarium and Grim Fandango. I'd never heard of LucasArts until GF. (Like I said, I was a total Sierra fangirl) By then, I'd gotta a PC with a CD which came with the game Myst. I played it, was struck by how gorgeous it was but it wasn't a "true" adventure game for me. If I didn't have people to question in the game or there wasn't a chance of dying by accident (I can't tell you how many times/ways you could die in LSL and each one was hilarious!) then it wasn't an adventure! Once Myst  hit, what I knew as an adventure game ceased to exist. I tried

some of the clones but just could get into them. They were boring and

the amount of dreck that passed as a game to capitalize on the

technology was shameful! Funnily enough, I convinced a lot of people to play games by introducing them to Myst, even though I didn't really like the game. I will admit that some games that took advantage of Myst's technology like the Journeyman series where really good.

A friend had been trying to get me to try RPGs for a while (it was all she played). I'd purchased some – Xeen and Might & Magic series – but never actually got into them until Diablo. I played that to death. (pun intended) I even bought the expansion and played online for the first time in ages. I'd rush home from work and take out my frustration by killing demons. Diablo 2 didn't scratch the same itch as the first one. For me, it was due to the fact that everything would respawn when I shut the game down. If I clear a level, I want it to STAY cleared. My brother-in-law got around it by leaving the game running all the time. I wasn't willing to do since my rig was in my bedroom. How am I supposed to sleep with the fan going all night?

It was one of the Journeyman games that got me back online – I was

looking for tech help to get the 3rd in the series to work as I was

having some sort of sound issue. I never did get the issue resolved, but

I found a website full of other gaming women who told me about games I'd never heard of or had read about and forgotten. Most of the games they recommended were Myst clones and I got burned quite a bit. But some of the games were true gems – Byzantine and Last Express come to mind.

And then I found Jen and Orb. They were true kindred spirits… irreverant, cussing gamer grrls. I <3 them. They opened my eyes to why I like the games that I do – story. If the story is compelling, I'll play it. I don't care if it's got "action" sequences. I refuse to be bound by some crazy notion that the player shouldn't die. If I screw up, I accept that there's a penalty (of course, I'm still afraid to try Demon's Souls [Image Can Not Be Found]).

When developers started that whole cookie-cutter nonsense is when I really started to move away from adventure games. Just because game X sells with its pretty look, horrid voice work and nonsenical gameplay, doesn't mean you should do the exact 

same thing! Puh-lease. If it works once and a whole lot of

fawning people tell you they love it doesn't mean that it's good.

Gorgeous graphics do not a game make and I'm a self-proclaimed graphics

whore. On the other hand, butt-ugly graphics and nonsensical story don't work either. Don't believe the "fans" as they lie. A lot.

And now that I've wondered thither and yon, you know my "story". I need to get back to work. [Image Can Not Be Found]

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Toger
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January 31, 2011 - 2:23 pm
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Why does the edit feature muck up the formatting? [Image Can Not Be Found]

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Pokey
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January 31, 2011 - 3:38 pm
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Toger, I haven't had it do that to me yet.

I learned a lot about adventure games when I joined an adventure games newsgroup in the late 90s. That was where I was introduced to Alice: An Interactive Museum.  A player on the east coast was trying to get through it at the time and we helped each other–she was more help to me than the other way around. Several other people came on asking for help as well. Andrew Plotkin even joined the discussion. An artist in Japan ran into a bug with his Japanese version and I sent him my copy so he could see the end of the game. Later he created a lovely website devoted to the game. We had a big discussion about Lighthouse and found a neat way to escape a dead end. That game had a lot of interesting possible scenarios that I'm sure hardly anyone experienced. I was fascinated by it. I really enjoyed that group. I was on a couple of adventure boards before I found Four Fat Chicks and knew I had a home. It has only gotten better with Tap-Repeatedly.

Scout
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January 31, 2011 - 10:04 pm
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My gaming background is pretty stupid and lackluster which is why I never have considered myself a hardcore gamer but more an occasional enthusiast. I watched friends play some kind of game on a university mainframe back in the mid 70s a couple of times but it never registered. Then I played the Zorks and a few other Infocom text games a friend loaned me in the early to mid 80s. and loved them. Then someone showed me King's Quest games and I was horrified. You have to remember I was working in photo and film labs with high resolution film images day and night and the first graphic adventure games looked like a child's drawing in dirt to me. Also I didn't like all the talking and yakking and all the people everywhere. So I was pretty grumpy gus about it all and doing other things.

When I saw Myst I thought finally… something that doesn't burn out my eyeballs with the ugly. The gameplay mystified me though. When I finally figured it out it was fine then. Also I finally had a halfway decent computer so I started looking back over the last 10 years and only then did I get the bug. Remember I was in my late 30's by then and didn't grow up with Sierra or LA as entertainment for me and my buddies. But in the late nineties I went on a crash course to collect and play as many adventure games as I could. Amber, Monkey Islands, Dig, Fate of Atlantis, Gabriel Knights, 3 Skulls, Ark of Time, Puppet Motel, Chewy Esc from F5, Loom, Flight of the Amazon Queen, Last Express, Nightfall, Noctropolis, Synnergist, Byzantine, Celtica, Zork Nemisis, Kyrandia, Black Dahlia, Day of the Tentacle (my perfect adventure game) Sam & Max, Broken Sword, Sanatarium, Grim Fandango, Gabriel Knight 3, Longest Journey. As you can see I started catching up, sort of and I'm leaving out dozens and dozens more adventure games. But after The Longest Journey it just seems to stop adventure game wise for me.  TLJ was the pinnacle for me despite the heavy dialouge. Soon after I think the adventure gaming impulse got swallowed up by RPGs, though I still played a lot of the very, very old adventure games just for kicks till that too lost its luster.

So I was a total snobby snotty Sam about adventure games from 1988 to 1998 and then did a 180 turn and played them till I burned out on them.

Finkbug
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January 31, 2011 - 10:31 pm
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Scout, was it that early location Myst with the lens flare? I disliked the game but it was that static shot that hooked me to finish a friend's copy, hogging his computer for a couple days. Ooh pretty. Beat the snot out of the pixelated porn from the BBS that was one mile inside local calling range so nothing would show on the bill and the parents wouldn't know the computer could access phone lines.

I've talked to others who like me remember only two things about Myst: that visual and a guy yelling blue pages.

grooowrrrr! [menace menace] rrrrowwwr!

Scout
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January 31, 2011 - 11:09 pm
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I think Myst and Ralph Nader sort of share a common fate. Both are labled spoilers of some perfect world that never really existed in the first place.

But, to answer your question, it was just the look of the game, period. Also I was so far removed from all things gaming at that point that the huge hype pushing Myst finally picked up on my radar. If you weren't gaming in 1996, it simply did not exist in the media. I was into music and emus.

Finkbug
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February 1, 2011 - 12:40 am
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Emus good. Ranching them bad. The tort reform museum very bad.

grooowrrrr! [menace menace] rrrrowwwr!

Scout
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February 1, 2011 - 4:15 am
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My friend raised them and had her Weber inside their pen for god know why. I would go in to flip the burgers and have to fend the beaked one off with a 10 gallon garbage can lid.

Actually I want to start and run a museum. Emus in the Seventies.

Hire some Russian diorama artists to tell the story. From bubble to bust to attack at the Weber.

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geggis
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February 1, 2011 - 9:06 am
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Jen and Tog, thank'ee! There's me thinking you'd started on adventure games... [Image Can Not Be Found]

Nice to hear a bit o' history from everybody else too. I'd post my own but I'm at work and, y'know, got work to do and stuff. [Image Can Not Be Found]

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Armand
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February 1, 2011 - 12:17 pm
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Hmm, I'd assumed you guys had started off with adventure games as well for some reason, but a lot of it reflects my own gaming history. started with Calico Vision (pong) went to Nintendo, got a computer and started playing Kings Quest 6 which at the time was the most jaw dropping beautiful game I'd ever seen. Played a ton of Sierra games, my favorites aside from the Kings Quest series were the Quest for Glory games where you had RPG elements and fighting, not to mention you could save your hero at the end of one game, and carry them onto the next.

It only grew from there however, with games like X-Com and Master of Magic, Might and Magic, and so on. I love my PC!

Also, I looked up that Alice game, and the second entery on google (after the wiki) was the 4 Fat Chicks link with a review from Orb. One of you mentioned someone with that handle didn't you?

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geggis
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February 2, 2011 - 11:08 am
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It was before my time here but Orb did Toger's, Jen's and until recently, Scout's avatars. She also did the original rating images ie. gold star, chunk poo etc. Edit: See below!

Part of my gaming history is conveniently in my Staff entry but I can't understate the effect my granddad's Sinclair Spectrum and later my beloved Amiga 500 had on me. I was probably too young to know whether the Spectrum was really any good but the Amiga 500 was a phenomenal machine that occupied a really sweet spot between a PC and a console. It had the great graphics and sound of a console (it was most notable for its incredible sound fidelity thanks to the Paula chip) but had the functionality and personality of a PC (see Workbench and Deluxe Paint III).

I remember watching Movies, Games and Videos and seeing Guybrush rowing through his coffin in Monkey Island II and thinking "Oh my god. I want that now." After playing through a copied version of The Secret of Monkey Island (I was young and knew no better) I got Monkey Island II for Christmas, all 11 disks complete with the Mix 'n' Mojo piracy wheel. Steve Purcell's artwork (front, back) made the physical opening of it one of the best Christmas memories I have. My parents somewhere down the line got us an adventure game called Curse of Enchantia which we all played together through to completion. There was no speech or text in the game, just icons and little pictures to communicate things, it looked superb at the time and was a lot of fun to work through together. After that I think it was Lure of Temptress which had this great system where characters would have their own routines and wander around the village so you had to explore to find people. That was the first adventure game we played where the protagonist could die and it made certain sections really tense, which was pretty cool. We all tried to play through Beneath a Steel Sky but the constant disk swapping (15 disks!) meant that my mum would nod off so we never really got anywhere with it (I've since played it through and really enjoyed it). We dabbled with Kings Quest but couldn't get along with the text parser, it must have been an early one because I'm sure they dropped that later in the series.

It was only when we got our PC some years later that we started playing adventure games again. Movies, Games and Videos did a review of The Dig which made us all OMG so we rushed out and bought that. The characters, the setting and exploration — we were mesmerised. The soundtrack by Michael Land was fantastic too. Later came Day of the Tentacle (my favourite too Scout), Full Throttle, Discworld, Torin's Passage (or Back Passage as we called it because it was shit). I've not played many since those days though so who knows what I'll be like with adventure games now. Grim Fandango seems to be cheesing me off big-time at the moment.

Right, work.

Jen
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February 2, 2011 - 11:15 am
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Orb is my best friend and was cofounder of FFC with me. She also holds a legendary Halloween bash every year.

Scout
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February 2, 2011 - 1:14 pm
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Orb's Halloween party is on my bucket list.

I think Pokey still has her Orb avatar, not sure though so Pokey would have to confirm. Pokey was around at the very beginning too I think.

Gregg mentioned the Discworld games. One of my all time fave graphical adventure games was Discworld 2. Discworld 1 was great also but rather difficult.

Jen who was the mysterious 3rd chick? I know part of the joke was that there wasn't four founders but three but that four sounded better than three. Or was there just two all along?

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Toger
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February 2, 2011 - 2:07 pm
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I've only managed to make one of Orb's Halloween bashes and it was indeed legendary... Instead of Sex on the Beach (a drink), there was sex on the front lawn! Sadly (or fortunately [Image Can Not Be Found] ) I'd already left by then.

If I remember correctly, there were really only two, but the third was named... Hilda? Heidi? Or something with an "H" and was merely an internet figment.

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Jen
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And sex on the laundry machine (same woman, different guy), and a giant cumstain on the guest bed I was to use (yuck! super yuck!) (same woman, yet another guy).

 

The other two were Helga and Phoenix. They did not last long.

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