Comic 415 - Adventure games are dead
Posted on Wednesday, the 17th of June at 12:00 AM, 2020
in 2020
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But the ironic thing is, they only think that adventure games are dead, because they HAVE evolved.
It seems as though the people who are the most into the adventure game genre, are also the most oblivious when it comes down to the adventure game genre. Mostly because since they're so into the nostalgic side of things, they believe that it's the only side.
(It's like being really into retro tech, and then complaining that we haven't made any advancements in technology in decades.)
This is no doubt true of many other things in the world, but I've noticed it the most with adventure games, because that's the group I'm a part of.
Compare a classic Lucas Arts adventure game to a classic Sierra adventure game or to an Activision adventure game.
The early Sierra games were a step up from your Text Adventure games, in that you had to type your command and there was no list of words for you to just know. You just had to logic it out. How to get to the top of a tree? Perhaps try "climb the tree"
Compare that to Lucas Arts games that gave you a verb list where you would select one of perhaps 9 verbs and then you would try that verb on some object you could see on screen.
Fast forward the Sierra games and then they switched to a point and click interface. No text box to type in, or Lucas Arts style verb list. No, you had a hand icon, an eye icon, and a talk icon as well as all your inventory.
Or look at the Activision adventure games. This is a game company where if you type in "Classic Activision Adventure Games" into Google, Doom 3 comes up. Companies just love putting the tag Adventure Game on every game even if it doesn't make sense.
So sure most of us think of Lucas Arts games and Sierra games as your classic adventure games, but it's because of the term never actually getting defined that it "seems" dead because you simply can't find the adventure games you are thinking of when you search for adventure games.
This isn't to say that classic adventure games are dead. It just means we need better "google-foo" to find them.
I hadn't really thought about the lack of a true definition, but now that you've said it, that does explain a lot.