Phod

Nice article Emily, thanks for it.

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tabacco

I was let down by Gametap. I really love the games, but after a patch it started randomly hanging on my machine when starting/stopping any emulator. Their tech support department finally gave up and told me I should just cancel my account.

After a brisk nap

Interesting article, fov. I'm leery of subscription services in general, and I play computer games so sporadically that it wouldn't make sense for me anyway. But I'm happy to see that older games are being revived commercially. It's kind of like when TV studios realized they could make money by putting out their back catalogue on DVD, suddenly all these great TV shows were available again (Twin Peaks, Profit, My So-Called Life, ...).

Heh. I don't know what world you were living in in the late 80s-early 90s, but I don't think any game ran "out of the box" back then. You were lucky if you only had to fiddle with the soundcard settings and didn't need to restart your computer from a boot disk to play the game.

Or am I reading you wrong?

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AGA

By the way, you refer to "a weird little maze game from 1980" not being the adventure game Adventure. The adventure game was actually called Colossal Cave Adventure, although it's often shortened to Adventure or Colossal Cave.

I have encountered the maze game before myself, whilst looking for the IF game

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fov

I was using a Mac in the 80s and 90s. No fiddling.

(Although I did play Police Quest 1 and 2 on a PC in 1990 or so, and don't remember having to do anything particularly drastic to it. I played directly off the disk... the computer didn't have a hard drive.)

After a brisk nap

Actually, as far as I can tell it was originally called Adventure (the program name was ADVENT, being limited to six characters, and when you start the game you get the line "Welcome to Adventure!! Would you like instructions?"), became known as Colossal Cave later, and is now often called Colossal Cave Adventure as a compromise.

As for the Adventure "maze game," that would be the Atari 2600 game, and it did launch the adventure genre. The other adventure genre, that is; the one we tend to call "action-adventure" for the sake of clarity. The Atari Adventure eventually led to Zelda, and from Zelda and Prince of Persia all action-adventures follow.

But we've discussed this before, at length.

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After a brisk nap

Ah, that world.

Well, trust me. Some people may find DOSBox a little bit tricky, but it's much easier to get most DOS games to run now than it ever was when they were released.

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fov

Really? I had no idea. Is it very well-known? Since Colossal Cave Adventure is pretty much always cited as the first adventure game, I'm surprised I've never heard of this other one.

In any case, I didn't get very far with it.

AFGNCAAP

Ah. Memories...

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avatar_58

I fully agree. I have over 400 games all setup via dosbox+dfend. After I burn them to DVDs I'll never have to set them up again. Hows that for convenience?

Jackal

Just for the record (not that anyone claimed otherwise), the article doesn't disagree with this. What it says is "it's not the Adventure text game that served as the catalyst of the genre." Which it definitely isn't, console or no. As a PC-oriented site discussing a PC gaming service, it seems logical that the "genre" referred to here is the one we're accustomed to, without the qualifiers.

(Incidentally, I actually agree that there is a second viable console-centric branch of "adventure" genre terminology.)

the gnome

Beside this very minor point, which actually is insignificant, it was a very interesting article and one that saved me (for the time being) quite a lot of money... I guess I'll have to wait 'till GameTap matures...

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After a brisk nap

I was talking more about the "GameTap's description mistakenly attributes the 'launch of the entire adventure genre' to it" bit. That's probably not entirely fair. Maybe GameTap had the two games known as Adventure confused, and maybe they didn't. It's a very fine point, though, I admit, and the meaning is quite clear.

Yeah, I skimmed through the whole old thread just now (and now I need to go wash my brain out with Lithium), and I noticed that you popped your head in in support, before leaving insane_cobra and me to fight a 17-page war against SJH.

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Jackal

Ah, right. In that case, I'll hide behind the inclusion of the word "entire". Your point is well taken, though, and I don't want people to think we (as a site) were somehow "officially" discrediting any console orientation.

Did I? I thought I managed to keep my nose completely clean on that one. You were doing such a good job without me, so I got to blissfully sit on the sidelines.

fov

It's the "mistakenly" that causes the confusion, I think. Apparently it makes it sound like we're ignoring action/adventures as a genre. In reality, I just thought GameTap had made a mistake.

I'd be happy to take out that word, if it makes a big difference in meaning.

After a brisk nap

Oh, I don't think it does. Like the gnome says, it's really insignificant.

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dGalloway

An excellent, and true, article. I actually like Gametap so far (I'm in the middle of the two week free trial), but its adventure offerings are less than pleasant. The big problme may be that they have much of the Myst series, which I unfortunately own already, and the DOS games run a bit choppily on my laptop. Fortunately, they're advertising Quest for Glory II, one of my favorite adventure games of all time.

fov

Check your audio acceleration. I had some choppy sound when I first used GameTap, and it turned out to be because I had my audio acceleration all the way down.

Gordon Bennett

As I understand it, the Atari 2600 Adventure game was actually based on Colossal Cave, at least conceptually. Between the memory limitations and lack of a keyboard, it's probably as close as you could get to it on that machine.

The 2600 game is quite famous, most notably for being the first game to ever feature an easter egg. The story, as I understand it, is that Atari's policy forbade game progammers to receive personal credit in the game or packaging. So, when Warren Robinett wrote the cartridge for Atari, he hid a single invisible pixel as an object (the source of the name "easter egg") which allowed the player to pass into a hidden room with his personal credit written inside.

It's not a bad game, and worth playing through. Level 1 is easy, as long as you bear in mind that the mazes don't actually join up properly, the arrow is a sword, and it will kill the ducks, who are called dragons in the manual for some unfathomable reason, with a single touch.

You can only access the egg from Levels 2 and 3, but then you have to deal with the bat. I hate that bat. I hated it then, I hate it now, and I will alwayd completely detest that inventory-stealing creature forever.

fov

I did figure this out. Felt quite smart when I did.

I don't think I got past level 1, though. I couldn't figure out what to do with the object that had two parallel (sort of) lines. Was it a bridge? I thought so, but couldn't use it for anything, and couldn't get into the next castle.