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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...