Actually, Graphic
Adventures (or GABAMCHOTAGCBLSAOFTPOW for short) is the brainchild
of one Philipp Lenssen who had the nifty idea of accumulating the
articles about specific graphic adventures that have been posted on
Wikipedia and assembling them into book form. For those unaware, Wikipedia
is a ‘living’ online encyclopedia that is in a constant
flux of change as readers share and edit information on basically
every subject imaginable.
What Philipp has done is
take this information, edited when necessary and added some screenshots
and interviews from online sources such as Just Adventure. So, as
the saying goes, why buy the cow when the milk is free? Well, if you’re
anything like me (which I truly hope you’re not), then you just
like to have the smell and feel of a book in your hands.
Lenssen is first and foremost
a hardcore graphic adventure fan and knows his material beyond what
is posted on Wikipedia and while I don’t question any edits
he deemed necessary, I do have to wonder about some of his choices.
The first 211 pages are a comprehensive and entertaining read on the
history of Lucasfilm (as LucasArts was known at the time) and the
classic games they were churning out one after another. Part II, is
a history of Sierra, a company that once again gets short shrift as
classics such as Gabriel
Knight: The Beast Within, Gabriel
Knight: Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned, Phantasmagoria
2 and King’s Quest 4- 7 are totally
disregarded.
Instead, in what I consider
to be a major gaffe, the addition of a ‘Part III..And All the
Others’ is a scattershot and watered down attempt to spotlight
additional popular graphic adventures of the era but seems to have
no rhyme or reason as it jumps from Shadowgate,
to Return
to Zork, to Future Wars, to Myst.
What really would have worked much better – and I realize that
I’m jumping ahead here – is to have extended the Sierra
chapter approximately another hundred pages and then simply end the
book and consider it Volume 2 of a three-part series. Volume 1 could
have then been a comprehensive history of the text adventures, many
of which outside of Infocom’s oeuvre remain obscure, and then
a Volume 3 leading off with Myst and its overall
influence on the genre up to present-day classics such as The
Longest Journey and the Syberia
series.
But rather than complain
about what isn’t, I would rather applaud Philipp Lenssen for
taking the initiative to bring the graphic adventure genre to the
forefront and sincerely hope he has plans to continue his project
forward into uncharted territories.
