The Frontiers of Adventure By: Paul Panks (lumberjacks76@lycos.com) ----------------------------------------- After conquering a session of Morrowind on the PC, I sat back for a moment to reflect on the history of the genre. The frontiers of adventure gaming have been explored extensively throughout the past three decades, but as I viewed the flashy, real-life graphics on my computer screen, I couldn't help but wonder what unexplored frontiers still lay ahead. Adventure games have a long and circuitous history. Back in the days of hulking mainframes, paper punch cards and ARS teletypes, primitive versions of today's complex adventures blipped and bleeped their way across the electronic backbones deep within the binary dinosaurs of university and research institutions (mostly at Stanford, Berkeley and MIT). Will Crowther and Don Woods developed the first adventure game in the early 1970s, and before long software companies such as Infocom (Zork), Sierra On-Line (Wizard and the Princess) and Magnetic Scrolls (The Guild of Thieves) were churning out dozens of adventure games every year (largely on the continued strength of J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy and the rising popularity of Dungeons & Dragons). The adventure game steadily became more impressive, evolving from archaic one or two word 'nanofests' (quickie adventures) to full- blown epics (such as Magnetic Scrolls' The Pawn and Electronic Art's popular Bard's Tale series). At some point during the mid- 1980s, however, text and graphics adventures diverged onto separate paths, wholly separate from one another. Infocom's breakthrough Return Zork saga firmly separated the text adventure genre from the all-graphical saga of games like Myst and Monkey Island. Modern 3-D adventures askew the adventure family tree even further, with Bethesda Softwork's Morrowind providing adventure gamers an extremely immersive gaming environment similar to the Grand Theft Auto series by Rockstar Games. In Morrowind, for example, would-be fighters can talk to citizens, pick fights, go on quests, join and severe alliances (through competing factions called guilds) and basically raise hell up and down the coast of a vast and beautifully rendered empire. From the pleasing sounds of the falling rain to the visual blood and guts of rasterized combat, Morrowind immerses the player into a world almost completely indistinguishable from their own (other than the obvious time period differences). To fully appreciate just how far adventure games have come, consider that the first BASIC text adventures in the late-1970s had, on average, no more than two dozen or so objects and rooms while exercising a known vocabulary of perhaps fewer than ten verbs and commands. More complex adventures quickly expanded upon the early limitations of microcomputers, which were hampered by more than just RAM considerations; many early adventure game writers wrote adventure games solely as a means of learning the operating system and programming languages of a new computer! Although prolific early authors such as Scott Adams and David Malmberg helped move adventure games into a more professional sphere of craftsmanship, the going was nonetheless very slow for the adventure game genre in developing into what millions of gamers enjoy today. The convergence of adventure games into a uniquely social interaction phenomenon, as the Multi-User Dungeon (or MUD) quickly came to be, was also largely slow and painful. The first MUDs were developed on the Alto system, which employed a sophisticated (for the time) graphical display and networking system only available largely to a few participating universities and research institutions. This allowed users to 'log in' and partake in large, multi-user online games before today's Internet was even a glimmer in the eyes of web luminaries Microsoft, Yahoo and Google. Despite the fact that early online services such as Compuserve and Q-Link provided adventure enthusiasts with several online adventures, costs were prohibitive and often outside of the casual budget of those willing to subscribe. Nevertheless, services such as Q-Link offered Commodore users unique online worlds, including the infamous Club Caribe. Magazines also got in on the act, offering adventure game news, reviews and, in some cases, even type-in program listings (Cleve Blakemore's Dark Fortress, published in the January 1987 issue of Ahoy! magazine, comes to mind as being particularly clever; Dark Fortress allowed up to two players to explore a fantasy land using two separate screens, one 40 columns, the other 80 columns and controlled by a single computer). Famous fantasy author Orson Scott Card also contributed several adventure game articles to the pages of Ahoy! in the mid-1980s. Both Card and Blakemore have since gone on to publish critically-acclaimed adventures. I, too, have made contributions to the genre, albeit home brew in quality. Some of my adventure games, such as Westfront PC, HLA Adventure and Mystic Castle, have even appeared in computer magazines and on download sites as far away as Finland and Norway. This just goes to show that adventure games have a universal appeal spanning multiple continents and generations. It is thus a vast understatement to say that adventure games are a complex, growing and evolving genre and have been since their inception in the early 1970's. While the works of Will Crowther and Don Woods have long passed into history, the fulfillment of their early efforts will continue to burn brightly in the caverns and recesses of the next generation of creative minds and programmers. For a frontier is never fully conquered. Happy Adventuring! THE END -------------------------------------- Sources: (1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Club_Caribe (2) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MUD (3) http://www.if-legends.org/~pdd/ (4) "The Zork Anthology, the 5 Original Text Adventures" by Diane Mack, 1994. (5) http://www.if-legends.org/~msmemorial/memorial.htm