Adventure Gamers - Forums

Scott Adams’ Adventureland (1978)* is one of the most important adventure games in that it was the very first commercial adventure game released. It showed that there was a market for these types of games on the new-fangled personal computer thingamabobs of the time and that they weren’t just something to fool around with on a mainframe somewhere. It was eventually released on over a dozen different platforms.

Like Dog Star Adventure which I covered a few days ago, its source code was released in magazines, and was used by other developers of the time as a base to create their own games and to learn from.

I still have a cartridge of this game for the Commodore VIC-20, although I haven’t owned a VIC-20 since I got a C64 about 30 years ago. I wonder if it still works? Anyway, the gameplay consists of simply finding treasures and putting them in their proper places in the game world.

*The original 1978 game was just text, but I used a shot from the 1985 Commodore 64 version in order to keep things graphical for the SotD.