Articles

by Jeff Strand February 1, 2002

The Seriously Whacked Point of View “The Evolution of the Adventure Game, Part Two” (For Real This Time)

First of all, I need to
correct a mistake from Part One of this series (and no, not the obvious
mistake that the column was written in the first place). At one point
I talked about how Zork Zero reduces your intelligence points
when you swear at it, which is quite obviously a golden moment in
adventure game excellence. Well, I meant Beyond Zork. I’ve
never used profanity in the presence of Zork Zero, but I can
only imagine that the reaction is well worth it, especially since
“Zork” sounds like a highly customizable curse word anyway.

That loathsome error out
of the way, it’s time to proceed with our discussion of the evolution
of the adventure game. When I stopped babbling last time, adventure
games had started using graphics but still relied on an all-text parser.
The game environment was often extremely harsh and your character
could die at any moment, forcing players to save their game frequently.
Today characters rarely die, although you still have to save frequently
because the game itself can die at any moment.

Getting killed was often
the only way to solve a puzzle. For example, you’d walk north into
a room. Suddenly you’d be drenched with a bucket of ogre saliva and
dissolve into a pool of ooze (though you’d have to read the written
description, since the primitive graphics would probably not make
it clear that you were, in fact, ooze). Game over. After restoring,
you’d replay that sequence, this time knowing beforehand that you
needed to open your Umbrella of Ogre Drool Resistance for safe passage.
These days, such a thing is considered poor game design, and you can
bet that the whiners at Just Adventure would knock your sorry butt
down a letter grade or two, but it used to be very common.

Something else you rarely
encounter anymore are dead ends, where you’re stuck in a no-win situation
and have to restore to an earlier saved position to complete the game.
That used to happen all the time, and not just because of lazy design.
No, no, no, no, no, these game designers would try to get you
in that spot, simply to indulge the evil found in their black, black
hearts. For example, you need to get through a door, but Bob the Guard
demands an offering of belly button lint. So you type in “EXAMINE
BELLY BUTTON” and are treated to a blocky graphic of something
that resembles no known navel in the history of mankind, something
you would only speak of in hushed tones, but you find the necessary
lint, give it to Bob the Guard, and he lets you pass.

But then, six screens later,
you discover that you need the lint to craft into a rope in order
to descend into the dreaded Uvula Cavern! What you were really
supposed to do was beat the zork out of Bob with your Umbrella of
Troll Drool Resistance. You now have restore and replay that whole
section. In an example that wasn’t made up just to get in a cheap
uvula joke, I fondly remember playing Dallas Quest, a 1984
game based upon the popular episode of the series where J.R. posed
as the leader of a tribe of South American cannibals. There were more
available items than you could carry, and once you got on the plane,
there was no turning back. So if you picked the wrong items at the
beginning of the game, you’d find yourself unable to complete certain
puzzles…and we, as players, were fine with that! We were happy to
restore! Anything you wanted, Mr. Game Designer! Then we’d march over
to the nearest leather bar and…okay, I’m getting way off
the main point. Sorry.

(Semi-Important Note: Because
I was concerned that my memory of Dallas Quest might be equal
to my memory of algebra, high school German, and traffic laws, I checked
the Internet to see if I’d just hallucinated the whole dead-end aspect.
Unfortunately, the Internet was clogged up with stuff like “The
Seriously Whacked Point of View,” and I can’t be sure that I
didn’t just make up the whole preceding paragraph. Read it at your
own risk.)

The next major step in
the evolution of the adventure game arrived with the release of King’s
Quest. While the game still used a text parser, much of the interaction
was done by actually moving the character around the on-screen 3-D
environment, rather than simply typing in directions. King’s Quest
had a profound effect on me as a young gamer, in that it turned me
into a jealous, bitter, resentful male hag, because it was too sophisticated
for my Commodore 64. Yes, it was clearly the coolest game ever
created, and I couldn’t play it! I distinctly remember seeing
magazine ads that said “King’s Quest: Coming Soon For Everyone
In The Entire World Except Jeff Strand, Neener Neener Neener!“

Anyway, King’s Quest
changed the face of adventure gaming forever, and I’m not just saying
that because Roberta Williams was/is a babe. We began to see animated
sequences that furthered the story and developed the characters, and
companies started to advertise their games as “cinematic,”
even though it’s a pretty safe bet that if an actual movie theatre
had shown one of these games being played, it would have taken them
months to scrape the Raisinets off the screen.

But alas, the poor text
parser was not long of this world. In fact, you could say it was pretty
much zorked. For with the mouse came a whole new way of playing adventure
games, and I’ve got exactly two weeks to find out what that was.

To be continued…