Adventure Gamers - Forums

I would like to ask you two questions:

1. What time period do you consider as the golden age of adventure games?

(I would like exact years, no “mid or early nineties”)

2. Which game (or games) triggered it?

I considered adding a poll, but I think there is more place for discussion without it. Maybe I’ll add it later, when some answers start to stand out.

I’d say the Golden Age was 1992-1999.

With King’s Quest 6 possibly being the official start, and Grim Fandango, Gabriel Knight 3, and The Longest Journey being the last of the age.

diego - 15 February 2014 05:55 PM

70s-87 Ancient
87-90 Classicism
93-99 “Golden Age”
2000-2005 Dark Ages/Impressionism
2006-2014 Renaissance

I like your idea of classifying the whole history of the genre in different time period(s.

I would name the “missing period” (90-93) “The Age of Discovery” - with the birth of Sierra icon based interface, IMUSE, talkies, “virtual theatre” and the Myst sub-genre in the end (maybe even more innovations I can’t remember now).

(And good choice for the start of the Classic period with the birth of SCUMM and SCI next year)

diego - 15 February 2014 05:55 PM

70s-87 Ancient
87-90 Classicism
93-99 “Golden Age”
2000-2005 Dark Ages/Impressionism
2006-2014 Renaissance

90-93 Baroque (?)

I would put the golden age at 93-98, if there was one. Before that there was a sharp ascent in quality and quantity and after, a quick downfall. Convenient having Grim Fandango to mark its death, too.

Of course, we’re talking traditional graphical adventures here. The text adventures golden age ended before the end of the 80s and you could put the handheld visual novel golden age somewhere during the 2000s.

Bogi - 15 February 2014 06:26 PM

diego - 15 February 2014 05:55 PM

70s-87 Ancient
87-90 Classicism
93-99 “Golden Age”
2000-2005 Dark Ages/Impressionism
2006-2014 Renaissance

I like your idea of classifying the whole history of the genre in different time period(s.

I would name the “missing period” (90-93) “The Age of Discovery” - with the birth of Sierra icon based interface, IMUSE, talkies, “virtual theatre” and the Myst sub-genre in the end (maybe even more innovations I can’t remember now).

(And good choice for the start of the Classic period with the birth of SCUMM and SCI next year)

I thought of the changes this way -

I remember the late 70’s-mid 80’s games as being divided between intelligent ‘interactive books’ or else very basic and primitive. Your years and divisions make sense to me there. Sierra was making the KQ games by the late 80’s

I second the idea of calling the period after that (‘90-‘93) an “Age of Discovery” as game makers developed new ways of sharing stories with text, icons, and graphics.

Myst marks the next dividing point in 1993, but they aren’t entirely why that was a banner year. Many of Sierra’s and LucasArts’ best games date from around 1992-1993 on - the best Quest games, JP1, GK,Sam & Max Hit the Road, Day of the Tentacle (Monkey Island had already started)... Adventure gaming was completely mainstream at this time (full publisher budgets etc), despite the resurgence of console gaming, and in spite of the fact that most adventures didn’t port over very well.

Publishers didn’t like this (console) drawback, even when AGs were selling very well. Meantime, a whole generation of gamers were growing up with only occasional brushes with what had been their parent’s favorite genre. I remember that console mags rarely mentioned adventure games (even in passing) while computer-based gaming magazines had a lot of adventures reviewed (positively) prior to 98/99. A couple of years later the computer-based gaming mags were aping the console scene. It was all shooters by then, console ports mostly. Dedicated puzzle games got ignored too, though people still liked them.

I’d put 2000-2001 as the end of the Golden Age, not long after “The Longest Journey” and right before Myst III’s release. Seemed like all the game magazines and pundits were still open to the idea that adventures could be mainstream while Myst III was being developed but then gave Myst III shorter shrift than it deserved by the time it was released. Even the idea that adventure games could be ‘cool’ or ‘fun’ was under open attack by the early 2000’s. Most people do let others tell them what is trendy in gaming…

The first Syberia game got only hostile reviews from the gaming mags I saw - or else it was roundly ignored - and this was 2002, just a year after Myst III. Syberia owed its success to word of mouth and forums like this one & GB.

You had good indies from Boakes & others during this time frame, and increasing absorption of AG story-telling techniques into other genres (FPS, action-adventure, casual puzzlers/HOGs, etc.) Very few big publishers were willing to fund more than one true adventure game a year, and those that did get released sold only ‘okay’ - hardly surprising in a hostile press environment and with minimal marketing. Even Sam & Max (loved for the sake of old LucasArts) had to fight for respect after that cultural shift had taken firm hold. Telltale & HerInteractive were both seen as seen as only small Indy developers / publishers for several years, despite their commercial success, and I suspect this was entirely due to the fact that they primarily made true adventure games. I think of this era 2001- 2005 as the “Indy Companies Rising to Fill the Niche / Classic AG Develops Survivor Strategies.”

Now, finally adventures are regaining recognition and are being re-integrated into mainstream gaming, though I think this is largely because so many games in every genre are Indy productions now. So 2006-2014 = “Indies Triumphant?”

Of course, this has some drawbacks too. The current innovators are mostly more familiar with other genres and tend to blend their efforts toward platforming, fighting, puzzling, to an extent that obscures the immersive story experience. The other trend is toward “interactive stories,” hence the rise of puzzle-less AGs like Dear Esther - described as a ‘long walk - with literature.’ I hear “Gone Home” is similar. Are these truly adventure games? Are AGs morphing toward one or more new ‘standards?’

Seeing as Renaissance implies an awakening of intelligence and a rebirth of quality, I couldn’t think of a more inappropriate term for the rise of Telltale games.  Also, what does Impressionism have to do with anything?

Back when AGs did their Top-100, I did some stats based on the results. One of the things I did was correlate the Top-100 with a possible history of adventure gaming. Stupid imageshack has eaten up the graphs, making the original post useless, so I’ll repost the relevant part here:

When looking at the years at which the games were released, it’s useful to have both the raw number of games (top) and the results weighted by rank (bottom):

I think those graphs are absolutely amazing: they give a perfect picture of the history of graphic adventures. We may have our gripes about some games on the list, but I think these graphs confirm that the top-100 is a very fair and accurate representation of the genre.

You can clearly distinguish several periods:

1987–1993, the Sierra-LucasArts era: The classical era. The graph shows the companies perfecting their craft, releasing more and more great games. 1990 to 92 have the same number of games on the list, but the quality is steadily increasing, climaxing in . . .

1993, the golden year, the turning point: 1993 is the year when the Sierra/LEC classical style reached its peak, with games such as GK1 and Sam & Max. But it’s also the year when Myst and The 7th Guest shook everything up. Sierra and LEC had failed to see the potential of the CD-ROM, but these two games showed that the new technology could be used to create a completely new experience. 1994 was a slow year, when everyone was trying to build the infrastructure to catch up with Myst, but the best was to come . . .

1995–1998, multimedia madness: The glorious era. After the success of Myst, people over-evaluated the potential of the genre for commercial success. And nobody really knew what might work. So for a few years, you had games that combined the inventiveness and risk-taking of independent productions with the budget of Hollywood movies. Those were crazy, nonsensical years. Those games that we got from this glorious period are to be treasured, because it will never happen again: those games were commercially disappointing (or outright failures) and the bubble burst, leading to . . .

1999–2003, the death of a genre: After the end of the multimedia madness, the new hot technology was real-time 3D. And this time, the genre was utterly unable to embrace the new tech to renew itself. Those were the lean years, with just a few 2.5D gems to tide us over.

2004– , recovery: Looking at the list and at the graphs, things have been going better and better. 2010-2011 were around the levels of 1990-1991. We’ll never see another 1996, but maybe a new 1993 is around the corner, just in time to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the Golden Year of Adventure Gaming.

Thats a great analysis

Kurufinwe - 16 February 2014 03:09 AM

Graphtacular post

I can find absolutely nothing to disagree with here.  Nice work, Sir! 

I don’t understand the metric for games weighed by score. Is it just a straight up sum of the scores all games that came out that year received?

Antrax - 16 February 2014 04:06 AM

I don’t understand the metric for games weighed by score. Is it just a straight up sum of the scores all games that came out that year received?

It’s weighted be rank, linearly. Game #100 gets 1 point, game #99 gets 2 points, etc. It was supposed to be a rough measure of “quality” among the Top-100 games.