[Kurufinwe]

The most important people in the history of adventure gaming are obviously Will Crowther and Don Woods whose Colossal Cave Adventure started the genre and defined conventions that are still upheld 35 years later. Ultimately, the best definition for an adventure game is simply "a game that plays like Adventure" (to which you may add: "hence the name, duh!").

Ken and Roberta Williams are also very important. Not for their contributions to redefining the gameplay conventions (they did basically nothing on that front) but for striving for many years (1) to make the genre more popular to a general audience rather than just programmers / computer-oriented people and (2) to change the style and feel of the games from book-like to movie-like.

With The Secret of Monkey Island, Ron Gilbert, Dave Grossman and Tim Schaffer invented what we now call the "traditional point-and-click adventure game". The conventions they introduced (everything mouse controlled, no action/arcade sequences, no deaths, no dead-ends...) are still followed today by games such as Gray Matter, Lost Horizon, etc. These conventions were the sign of a tremendously important conceptual revolution. Older adventure games still played like pen-and-paper RPGs, with the game designer being the game master: the storyteller that gives life to the world, but also the player's adversary. A Colossal Cave-type (or Roberta Williams-type) adventure game was a battle of wits between the designer and the player, and the designer was expected to give a fight --- which included goading the player into making mistakes. With Monkey Island, it's not a battle anymore, and the designer becomes a benevolent entity, encouraging the player to enjoy the world and the characters without fear. This of course created a very tricky problem: if the game is not a battle of wits anymore, then why bother with devious puzzles, or even puzzles at all? Yet, without puzzles, what gameplay is left to these games? Twenty years on, we're still looking for a satisfying answer to that question.

Two important types of answers were offered over the years. People like Jane Jensen, Ragnar Tørnquist and Benoit Sokal (all three indifferent puzzle designers) showed that adventure games could be used to tell a serious and compelling story with strong characters and themes. Rand and Robyn Miller, on the other hand, understood that exploration of the world could be a reward in and of itself, and reason enough to play the game. (Those who think that Myst is all about the puzzles clearly don't get these games. Myst is first and foremost, as the original game's tagline said, "the surrealistic adventure that will become your world".)

Finally, I'm tempted to add Dave Grossman and the people at Telltale to this list. While Sierra and LucasArts modelled their games after movies, Telltale are bringing them closer to TV series. A 40-hour action game might have as much plot as a 2-hour movie and gameplay in between, but adventure games tend to have the rich exploration of the world and characters that you'd find in a long-running TV show. I believe that embracing the style, construction and conventions of TV shows rather than movies can be an important change for adventures, and, I believe, a very healthy one. Whether that model will be as influential to the genre as the ones cited previously, or will just peter out remains, of course, to be seen.