discoalucard
i am a butthurt babby that can only drool in wonder at shiney objects
Someone in that new Pendulo game thread requested an official adventure game topic, so here we go!
Remember that article from Yahoo posted not too long ago about how the adventure game genre was "dying"? That's a fundamentally ridiculous assertion - it did collapse, but that was well over a decade ago, and if anything, they've been gaining steam for the past few years, fueled by companies like Telltale, indie developers, and the proliferation of SCUMMVM. This thread is about celebrating and discussing them!
What is an adventure game?
"Adventure" is such an awful title for the genre, because it's so ambiguous. It got its name from the first text game, Colossal Cave Adventure, which got shortened to the name Adventure over various upgrades and releases, and the name has just sort of stuck over the past 30+ years. When talking about them in this sort of context, usually it means a game where exploration, puzzle solving, and story telling are prioritized over action or anything involving reflexes. Like anything, you can stretch the definition a bit, but here we're talking specifically about point-and-clicks like the thread title indicates.
Why You Should Play Adventure Games
Everytime I hear someone say that stories in games are and will always be awful, it makes a little more of my hair fall out. Stop playing games with crappy stories then! To find these, you'll usually have to delve into adventure games, which consist of more pure-storytelling than practically any other genre. That doesn't mean every game is brilliant, because there's still plenty of mediocrity, but since they don't necessarily have to center around a "must kill these bad guys!" sentiment, they can focus on things like writing, characterization, and plotting. Thematically, they also tread well beyond typical fantasy and science fiction, with many mystery-driven titles as well.
There's also the sentiment that the genre is archaic, that all they did was cause lots of random deaths, with tons of illogical solutions. There is some truth to that, obviously, but the games that exhibit these flaws are amongst the early entries in the genre from the 80s, and by the mid-90s it had largely outgrown many of these issues. They still exist to some extent (especially when it comes to puzzles) but they are not nearly as obtuse as many would like to suggest, and even the older games are playable (and even worthwhile) as long as you approach them with the correct mindset. Remember that GameFAQs is only a few clicks away. Even though playing an adventure game with a FAQ in-hand at all times is hardly the best way to experience them, there is really no shame in referencing them to get you out of sticky situations, and it's much better than just running around in circles or giving up.
What is SCUMMVM (or, How Do I Play These Games)?
SCUMM stands for "Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion", which was the engine used in most LucasArts games. "VM" means "virtual machine". Essentially it's a program that allows you to play many adventure games on modern platforms very easily. This includes PCs and Macs, and has also been ported to practically everywhere, including the Wii and PSP (if they're modded), the DS (if you have a flashcard...be warned that the system resolution is too low to display them properly so they're awkward to play) or even Android phones. All of LucasArts games except the 3D ones (Grim Fandango and Escape from Monkey Island) are supported. Many of Sierra games are as well, up to the SCI2 games (which includes most of their VGA output but omitting some of the later ones like Quest for Glory 4 and Gabriel Knight). Many other adventure games are also supported as well. It's an amazing program and everyone involved in its creation deserves a gold star and a hearty handshake from the retro gaming community.
Where Can I Get These?
GOG.com has a good chunk of Sierra's library, and Steam has a few LucasArts games, like the Indy titles, Loom and The Dig. Monkey Island 1 and 2 also got remakes. The rest are unavailable, but you can buy copies cheaply online and run them through SCUMMVM. Many others are in rights hell unfortunately (like Legend's games) so purchasing a second hand copy on eBay or Amazon is the only way to go.
A History of the Genre
Infocom
Although this thread is about point n click adventures, properly understanding them requires taking a look at Infocom. Though they were far from the first company to create text adventures (one of the most popular genres in the early days of computing, mostly due to the simple graphic display), Infocom created the best and most popular, owing to both their strong interpreter for which to parse complicated commands, and the skills of their writers.
While Zork is far and away their most popular series, I've found that, at least the original trilogy, hasn't aged all that well, in both writing and design. Still, there's a huge history that fans have traced throughout all of the games, so there's definitely something to it.
More interesting, I think are games like Leather Goddesses of Phobos (an homage to 50s sci-fi, which is very silly), Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (partially designed by Douglas Adams himself, full of lots of silly fourth wall breaking gags and other bits of cleverness, though it's deviously designed), and A Mind Forever voyaging (a piece of political work that was heavy critical of Republican politics of the 1980s. Imagine someone doing that today and see the shitstorm it would cause!)
Zork did get a few graphic adventures later on, though the only one Zork fans can agree is faithful to the text adventures is the last one, Zork Inquisitor.
LucasArts
Though their first adventure game was technically based off the movie Labrynth, their first real claim to fame was Maniac Mansion, which introduced SCUMM, an interface that removed text input in favor of a purely mouse driven cursor. It was not the first game to do so, but it's the most popular and the best implementation of it during this era.
Their games are fairly user friendly, in that there's rarely any way to die or get stuck (although that philosophy predates The Secret of Monkey Island). However, their games are generally still very difficult when it comes to puzzles.
As for their games:
Maniac Mansion
In the first game, a group of teenagers infiltrate a mansion inhabited by a quack scientist and his crazy family in order to save one of their girlfriends'. It's largely influenced by teen horror movies, and is most likely well known due to its excellent (but unfortunately censored) NES port. Its sequel, Day of the Tentacle, is much more cartoony, as three characters are sent to different points in time (in the past to the American Revolution, and into the future, where the earth is ruled by disembodied tentacles), requiring that you use the different time periods to solve puzzles. It's incredibly well written with some excellent puzzles, and with a great graphic style - probably one of my favorites of all time.
Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders
Uses the same engine as Maniac Mansion. Never quite picked up popularity compared to its others so it never got a true sequel, outside of a few fan games. It has an amusingly quirky atmosphere but its reliance on mazes and annoying, persistant copy protection hurt it. The best version is the FM Towns release, which has a bit of CD audio music and 256 color graphics, but weirdly, was only released in Japan.
Loom
Loosely based on Swan Lake, this game puts you in the role of the young cloaked Bobbin Threadbare, a young man cursed with having been "born" from a magical loom, as he discovers his fate. It's very simplistic from a gameplay standpoint, but the writing and world design is top notch. It was set to be a series which never came into fruition, so it feels somewhat short though.
Indiana Jones
There are two graphical adventures here - one based off of The Last Crusade, and an original game called Fate of Atlantis. Last Crusade offers a unique take on the movie that allows you to take some deviations from the film's narrative, while Fate of Atlantis is a brilliantly written game that could easily stand up with the actual movies (and is better than both Temple of Doom and Crystal Skull, from that standpoint.) Fate of Atlantis also offers three different routes through the game for maximum replayablity.
Monkey Island
LucasArts' most popular series by far, these focus on a hapless wannabe pirate ludicriously named Guybrush Threepwood as he makes his way through a silly pirate hierarchy, fights an evil undead pirate named LeChuck, and attempts to woo the dashing, substantially more competant Governor Elaine Marley. It was heavily influenced by the Pirates of the Caribbean Disney ride, long before the movie, as well as the book On Stranger Tides, which was later used as an inspiration for the fourth Disney movie, thereby tying them together on some level. The second game has the most infamous twist in adventure gaming history at the ending, which sort of had to be retconned in order for later games to make sense.
Longtime fans tend to put the first two games in a class of its own, since the later games were made by different staff, and got a bit cartoonier as they went along. Personally I think the third game (Curse of Monkey Island) is at least as good as the first two, and the fourth (Escape from Monkey Island) is the weakest, but not bad overall. A fifth game, Tales of Monkey Island, was released more recently by Telltale and will be addressed later in this post.
The first two Monkey Islands were remade and released digitally over the last few years, with enhanced graphics and full voice acting. The first one feels cheap and rushed, with an awful redesigned Guybrush sprite, but the second is substantially better.
Sam & Max Hit the Road
Based off of an indie comic book drawn and written by Steve Purcell, who was working as an artist for LucasArts at the time, these feature a canine detective named Sam and a crazy rabbit named Max as they solve crimes and get into ridiculous situations. It's all very twisted and sordid, but ridiculously funny. The original comics are great, and can be bought in a collection in book form from Amazon. A TV series was made in the late 90s, somehow, and while it retains its goofiness, it's also toned down a bit for kids.
There were talks for sequels for years, but LucasArts infamously put them to rest in the early 2000s due to "changing market conditions" (i.e. them having no faith in adventure games.) Like Monkey Island, Telltale resurrected this series, which will be addressed later.)
The Dig
One of the first games to have Steven Spielburg attached to it, this was based off an idea for his 80s TV show, Amazing Stories, that never got produced due to budget issues. It's one of those stories where a group of astronauts tries to stop a meteor from crashing into earth, but goes off in a whole other direction when they discover a transporter to a faraway alien planet. It's considered weaker than LucasArts other games, because it's much more serious with a focus on puzzle solving over characterization and storytelling, but it's not at all bad.
Full Throttle
The first solo project by Tim Schafer (who had previously worked on the Monkey Island games, as well as Day of the Tentacle), it takes place in a post-apocalytpic-style landscape as biker gangs are subjugted by the whims of an evil corporation promoting mini-vans. Although it seems serious at first, there's actually quite a bit of humor, mostly derived from leading man Ben Throttle. It's very short and easy, and sort of undermined by some badly designed action sequences (using an engine for Rebel Assault, the Star Wars FMV game LucasArts put out around the same time) but otherwise it's a fantastic game.
Grim Fandango
LucasArts' last original adventure game is also one of its best, as it combines the look of Mexican Day of the Dead calaca dolls with 30s film noir in what's still one of the most aesthetically unique games ever made. It ditches the point-and-click interface for something more similar to Resident Evil (though there's still no action), and while it's clumsy, the fantastic style and amazing writing are enough to elevate it. The second chapter of the game, where the hero loses his way on his journey and sets up a casino in the town of Rubacava, is one of the segments in adventure gaming history.
After the fourth Monkey Island game, LucasArts gave up on adventure gaming and started churning out Star Wars games, which is also where they are today.
Sierra On-Line
Founded in the kitchen of Ken and Roberta Williams, Sierra started as a company called Online Systems, who developed Mystery House, the first text adventure game to use graphics. While crude, they were a huge step forward for the genre, which allowed them to grow. Most of their early games pale in comparison to Infocom's efforts, but they once again innovated with Kings Quest, which united adventure gaming with arcade-style action, where you directly controlled a player onscreen using a keyboard/joystick, as opposed to first person games where you typed everything in. (Most actions were still handled through a text parser though.) They were the most prolific developer of adventure games up until the late 90s, where, like LucasArts, they eventually trailed off. Their demise was largely caused by their sale to a company called CUC International. Scandals at other parts of the large company brought the whole organization financially into the gutter, and changes in management largely screwed up game output, causing many developers to either quit or be laid off. They were eventually sold to Vivendi, who later sold them to Activision.
Kings Quest
Mostly based around retellings of fairy tales and other bits of folklore and literature, these all focus on the Graham family and their adventures. While they have a nice classical feeling, they are generally not as well written or designed as most of Sierra's other titles. The major exception to this in Kings Quest VI. The seventh game became a rather daft cartoon; the eigth game badly tried to emulate a Zelda-style experience.
Space Quest
Not merely Kings Quest in space, it eventually grew its own sense of humor, featuring a sardonic narrator, as well as a loose grasp on the fourth wall. The third game had the main character, bumbling janitor Roger Wilco, save the alter egos of the game creators, the Two Guys from Andromeda. The fourth game has Roger travelling through his own (non-existant) sequels. The fifth game is a huge Star Trek parody. There are lots of lame design decisions in each of them, but they're astoundingly funny, especially Gary Owens' (Space Ghost) narration in the fourth game.
Police Quest
Designed by retired police officer Jim Walls, these highlight "real life" elements of being a cop, like catching speeders and drunk drivers, in addition to the more dramatic elements, like fighting drug rings. They're cheesy and probably not the best of Sierra's series, but the second game is quite good, since the whole thing is a Lethal Weapon-type parody of 80s cop movie cliches. Jim Walls later left, and Sierra slapped on the name of LA commissior Daryl F. Gates on the later games, which were much darker and generally not that great. The fourth one is the last "true" PQ game. The fifth game was Police Quest: SWAT, an atrocious FMC game, while SWAT 2 is an RTS. The third and fourth SWAT games are more similar to Rainbow Six and have nothing to do with the Police Quest series outside of a few references to main character Sonny Bonds.
Leisure Suit Larry
A remake of the earlier text adventure "Softporn Adventure", this puts you in the shoes of a desperately unhip 70s lounge lizard trying to score. Often associated with porn games, it's actually fairly tame in spite of its reputation, with the focus more being on finding different ways to humiliate the eponymous Larry. The series is split between games where you simply need to hook up with women, and one with more linear plots. Somewhere in the middle they introduced "Passionate Patti", meant to be a female counterpart to Larry, but ultimately she wasn't very interesting. There is no Leisure Suit Larry 4 - the series skips from 3 to 5 for reasons that sort of make sense but are too complicated to into here. I also have a weakness for the second game, which puts you on a boat and eventually takes you to a tropical island where you try to impress a village chief by programming in assembly language, but it's basically "How Many Ways Can We Screw You Over: The Game".
Vivendi tried to resurrect this series twice, first with the minigame fest Magna Cum Laude, and second with the atrocious open world platformer Box Office Bust. Neither are good (in fact, the latter is one of the worst games I've ever played), but the former occasionally provokes a few laughes, even though it's much dirtier than the games that precede it.
Quest for Glory
A series I always recommend to non-adventure game players, because it sidesteps most of the issues with older adventure games, namely, the ridiculous deaths. Quest for Glory is really an RPG that just happens to use an adventure game interface, and its writing is far beyond any other CRPG at the time, possessing a colorful world largely bereft (or at least satirical of) fantasy tropes with a fantastic sense of humor too. The fifth (and last) game focuses more on RPG elementst han storytelling, and is the weakest of the bunch because of that, but ultimately isn't too bad.
Unfortunately this one isn't available on any DD services for some reason.
Gabriel Knight
Sort of a blend between Indiana Jones and Anne Rice novels, these put you in the role of serial womanizer Gabriel Knight, a slacker book store owner/wannabe novelist who learns of his family's past as shadow hunters and reforms himself to live up to his legacy. There are three games, focusing on voodoo rituals, the German prince Ludwing (and werewolves), and the Holy Grail (and vampires). The first is a traditional point and click, the second is more of an FMV game, while the third is a weird 3D game. All are varying degrees of pretty good to excellent (disregarding some infamously terrible puzzles like the cat mustache from the third game), mostly due to the extensive research by author Jane Jensen, along with extensively fleshed out side characters and excellent dialogue.
There are tons more other games that would take too long to get into, but there's also two Phantasmagoria games (FMV horror titles), Conquest of Camelot/Longbow (which are "historically accurate" takes on the legends of King Arthur and Robin Hood, respectively), Manhunter (which take place in a post apocalyptic USA with lots of awful arcade segments but a cool atmosphere), Codename Iceman (a spy thriller/sub simulator by the guy who did Police Quest), the Laura Bow games (The Colonel's Bequest and The Dagger of Amon Ra, both mysteries that take places in the 20s), Torin's Passage (an animated adventure by Al Lowe, the creator of Leisure Suit Larry, though largely meant for kid but still with a good sense of humor), Gold Rush (an adventure-like take on Oregon Trail, sort of), The Black Cauldron (re-telling of the Disney movie, very old but probably better than even the Kings Quest games, honestly), and Freddy Pharkas: Frontier Pharmacist, a goofy Western spoof.
Sierra also owned a few other companies that developed adventure games. Dynamix put out The Adventures of Willy Beamish, Rise of the Dragon and Heart of China, each inspired by Saturday morning cartoons, Blade Runner, and Indiana Jones, respectively. Design-wise they're more open ended than usual but have lots of frustrating dead-ends. They have a distinct charm nonetheless.
There are also a few games from Coktel Vision, a French company who put out...well, very French games. Their most prolific was the Gobliiins series, which were very goofy and cartoony, though their puzzles are focused around "escape the room" type scenarios where you control multiple characters. A new installment, Goblins 4, came out a few years ago. There's also Inca (which reimagines the South Americans as a space faring race fighting against flying Spanish galleons...very trippy), along with The Prophecy (sort of boring), Lost in Time, Bargon Quest, and several others. Their big claim to fame is their trippiness and use of lots of CG and digitized footage before the CD-ROM era.
Remember that article from Yahoo posted not too long ago about how the adventure game genre was "dying"? That's a fundamentally ridiculous assertion - it did collapse, but that was well over a decade ago, and if anything, they've been gaining steam for the past few years, fueled by companies like Telltale, indie developers, and the proliferation of SCUMMVM. This thread is about celebrating and discussing them!
What is an adventure game?
"Adventure" is such an awful title for the genre, because it's so ambiguous. It got its name from the first text game, Colossal Cave Adventure, which got shortened to the name Adventure over various upgrades and releases, and the name has just sort of stuck over the past 30+ years. When talking about them in this sort of context, usually it means a game where exploration, puzzle solving, and story telling are prioritized over action or anything involving reflexes. Like anything, you can stretch the definition a bit, but here we're talking specifically about point-and-clicks like the thread title indicates.
Why You Should Play Adventure Games
Everytime I hear someone say that stories in games are and will always be awful, it makes a little more of my hair fall out. Stop playing games with crappy stories then! To find these, you'll usually have to delve into adventure games, which consist of more pure-storytelling than practically any other genre. That doesn't mean every game is brilliant, because there's still plenty of mediocrity, but since they don't necessarily have to center around a "must kill these bad guys!" sentiment, they can focus on things like writing, characterization, and plotting. Thematically, they also tread well beyond typical fantasy and science fiction, with many mystery-driven titles as well.
There's also the sentiment that the genre is archaic, that all they did was cause lots of random deaths, with tons of illogical solutions. There is some truth to that, obviously, but the games that exhibit these flaws are amongst the early entries in the genre from the 80s, and by the mid-90s it had largely outgrown many of these issues. They still exist to some extent (especially when it comes to puzzles) but they are not nearly as obtuse as many would like to suggest, and even the older games are playable (and even worthwhile) as long as you approach them with the correct mindset. Remember that GameFAQs is only a few clicks away. Even though playing an adventure game with a FAQ in-hand at all times is hardly the best way to experience them, there is really no shame in referencing them to get you out of sticky situations, and it's much better than just running around in circles or giving up.
What is SCUMMVM (or, How Do I Play These Games)?
SCUMM stands for "Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion", which was the engine used in most LucasArts games. "VM" means "virtual machine". Essentially it's a program that allows you to play many adventure games on modern platforms very easily. This includes PCs and Macs, and has also been ported to practically everywhere, including the Wii and PSP (if they're modded), the DS (if you have a flashcard...be warned that the system resolution is too low to display them properly so they're awkward to play) or even Android phones. All of LucasArts games except the 3D ones (Grim Fandango and Escape from Monkey Island) are supported. Many of Sierra games are as well, up to the SCI2 games (which includes most of their VGA output but omitting some of the later ones like Quest for Glory 4 and Gabriel Knight). Many other adventure games are also supported as well. It's an amazing program and everyone involved in its creation deserves a gold star and a hearty handshake from the retro gaming community.
Where Can I Get These?
GOG.com has a good chunk of Sierra's library, and Steam has a few LucasArts games, like the Indy titles, Loom and The Dig. Monkey Island 1 and 2 also got remakes. The rest are unavailable, but you can buy copies cheaply online and run them through SCUMMVM. Many others are in rights hell unfortunately (like Legend's games) so purchasing a second hand copy on eBay or Amazon is the only way to go.
A History of the Genre
Infocom
Although this thread is about point n click adventures, properly understanding them requires taking a look at Infocom. Though they were far from the first company to create text adventures (one of the most popular genres in the early days of computing, mostly due to the simple graphic display), Infocom created the best and most popular, owing to both their strong interpreter for which to parse complicated commands, and the skills of their writers.
While Zork is far and away their most popular series, I've found that, at least the original trilogy, hasn't aged all that well, in both writing and design. Still, there's a huge history that fans have traced throughout all of the games, so there's definitely something to it.
More interesting, I think are games like Leather Goddesses of Phobos (an homage to 50s sci-fi, which is very silly), Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (partially designed by Douglas Adams himself, full of lots of silly fourth wall breaking gags and other bits of cleverness, though it's deviously designed), and A Mind Forever voyaging (a piece of political work that was heavy critical of Republican politics of the 1980s. Imagine someone doing that today and see the shitstorm it would cause!)
Zork did get a few graphic adventures later on, though the only one Zork fans can agree is faithful to the text adventures is the last one, Zork Inquisitor.
LucasArts
Though their first adventure game was technically based off the movie Labrynth, their first real claim to fame was Maniac Mansion, which introduced SCUMM, an interface that removed text input in favor of a purely mouse driven cursor. It was not the first game to do so, but it's the most popular and the best implementation of it during this era.
Their games are fairly user friendly, in that there's rarely any way to die or get stuck (although that philosophy predates The Secret of Monkey Island). However, their games are generally still very difficult when it comes to puzzles.
As for their games:
Maniac Mansion
In the first game, a group of teenagers infiltrate a mansion inhabited by a quack scientist and his crazy family in order to save one of their girlfriends'. It's largely influenced by teen horror movies, and is most likely well known due to its excellent (but unfortunately censored) NES port. Its sequel, Day of the Tentacle, is much more cartoony, as three characters are sent to different points in time (in the past to the American Revolution, and into the future, where the earth is ruled by disembodied tentacles), requiring that you use the different time periods to solve puzzles. It's incredibly well written with some excellent puzzles, and with a great graphic style - probably one of my favorites of all time.
Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders
Uses the same engine as Maniac Mansion. Never quite picked up popularity compared to its others so it never got a true sequel, outside of a few fan games. It has an amusingly quirky atmosphere but its reliance on mazes and annoying, persistant copy protection hurt it. The best version is the FM Towns release, which has a bit of CD audio music and 256 color graphics, but weirdly, was only released in Japan.
Loom
Loosely based on Swan Lake, this game puts you in the role of the young cloaked Bobbin Threadbare, a young man cursed with having been "born" from a magical loom, as he discovers his fate. It's very simplistic from a gameplay standpoint, but the writing and world design is top notch. It was set to be a series which never came into fruition, so it feels somewhat short though.
Indiana Jones
There are two graphical adventures here - one based off of The Last Crusade, and an original game called Fate of Atlantis. Last Crusade offers a unique take on the movie that allows you to take some deviations from the film's narrative, while Fate of Atlantis is a brilliantly written game that could easily stand up with the actual movies (and is better than both Temple of Doom and Crystal Skull, from that standpoint.) Fate of Atlantis also offers three different routes through the game for maximum replayablity.
Monkey Island
LucasArts' most popular series by far, these focus on a hapless wannabe pirate ludicriously named Guybrush Threepwood as he makes his way through a silly pirate hierarchy, fights an evil undead pirate named LeChuck, and attempts to woo the dashing, substantially more competant Governor Elaine Marley. It was heavily influenced by the Pirates of the Caribbean Disney ride, long before the movie, as well as the book On Stranger Tides, which was later used as an inspiration for the fourth Disney movie, thereby tying them together on some level. The second game has the most infamous twist in adventure gaming history at the ending, which sort of had to be retconned in order for later games to make sense.
Longtime fans tend to put the first two games in a class of its own, since the later games were made by different staff, and got a bit cartoonier as they went along. Personally I think the third game (Curse of Monkey Island) is at least as good as the first two, and the fourth (Escape from Monkey Island) is the weakest, but not bad overall. A fifth game, Tales of Monkey Island, was released more recently by Telltale and will be addressed later in this post.
The first two Monkey Islands were remade and released digitally over the last few years, with enhanced graphics and full voice acting. The first one feels cheap and rushed, with an awful redesigned Guybrush sprite, but the second is substantially better.
Sam & Max Hit the Road
Based off of an indie comic book drawn and written by Steve Purcell, who was working as an artist for LucasArts at the time, these feature a canine detective named Sam and a crazy rabbit named Max as they solve crimes and get into ridiculous situations. It's all very twisted and sordid, but ridiculously funny. The original comics are great, and can be bought in a collection in book form from Amazon. A TV series was made in the late 90s, somehow, and while it retains its goofiness, it's also toned down a bit for kids.
There were talks for sequels for years, but LucasArts infamously put them to rest in the early 2000s due to "changing market conditions" (i.e. them having no faith in adventure games.) Like Monkey Island, Telltale resurrected this series, which will be addressed later.)
The Dig
One of the first games to have Steven Spielburg attached to it, this was based off an idea for his 80s TV show, Amazing Stories, that never got produced due to budget issues. It's one of those stories where a group of astronauts tries to stop a meteor from crashing into earth, but goes off in a whole other direction when they discover a transporter to a faraway alien planet. It's considered weaker than LucasArts other games, because it's much more serious with a focus on puzzle solving over characterization and storytelling, but it's not at all bad.
Full Throttle
The first solo project by Tim Schafer (who had previously worked on the Monkey Island games, as well as Day of the Tentacle), it takes place in a post-apocalytpic-style landscape as biker gangs are subjugted by the whims of an evil corporation promoting mini-vans. Although it seems serious at first, there's actually quite a bit of humor, mostly derived from leading man Ben Throttle. It's very short and easy, and sort of undermined by some badly designed action sequences (using an engine for Rebel Assault, the Star Wars FMV game LucasArts put out around the same time) but otherwise it's a fantastic game.
Grim Fandango
LucasArts' last original adventure game is also one of its best, as it combines the look of Mexican Day of the Dead calaca dolls with 30s film noir in what's still one of the most aesthetically unique games ever made. It ditches the point-and-click interface for something more similar to Resident Evil (though there's still no action), and while it's clumsy, the fantastic style and amazing writing are enough to elevate it. The second chapter of the game, where the hero loses his way on his journey and sets up a casino in the town of Rubacava, is one of the segments in adventure gaming history.
After the fourth Monkey Island game, LucasArts gave up on adventure gaming and started churning out Star Wars games, which is also where they are today.
Sierra On-Line
Founded in the kitchen of Ken and Roberta Williams, Sierra started as a company called Online Systems, who developed Mystery House, the first text adventure game to use graphics. While crude, they were a huge step forward for the genre, which allowed them to grow. Most of their early games pale in comparison to Infocom's efforts, but they once again innovated with Kings Quest, which united adventure gaming with arcade-style action, where you directly controlled a player onscreen using a keyboard/joystick, as opposed to first person games where you typed everything in. (Most actions were still handled through a text parser though.) They were the most prolific developer of adventure games up until the late 90s, where, like LucasArts, they eventually trailed off. Their demise was largely caused by their sale to a company called CUC International. Scandals at other parts of the large company brought the whole organization financially into the gutter, and changes in management largely screwed up game output, causing many developers to either quit or be laid off. They were eventually sold to Vivendi, who later sold them to Activision.
Kings Quest
Mostly based around retellings of fairy tales and other bits of folklore and literature, these all focus on the Graham family and their adventures. While they have a nice classical feeling, they are generally not as well written or designed as most of Sierra's other titles. The major exception to this in Kings Quest VI. The seventh game became a rather daft cartoon; the eigth game badly tried to emulate a Zelda-style experience.
Space Quest
Not merely Kings Quest in space, it eventually grew its own sense of humor, featuring a sardonic narrator, as well as a loose grasp on the fourth wall. The third game had the main character, bumbling janitor Roger Wilco, save the alter egos of the game creators, the Two Guys from Andromeda. The fourth game has Roger travelling through his own (non-existant) sequels. The fifth game is a huge Star Trek parody. There are lots of lame design decisions in each of them, but they're astoundingly funny, especially Gary Owens' (Space Ghost) narration in the fourth game.
Police Quest
Designed by retired police officer Jim Walls, these highlight "real life" elements of being a cop, like catching speeders and drunk drivers, in addition to the more dramatic elements, like fighting drug rings. They're cheesy and probably not the best of Sierra's series, but the second game is quite good, since the whole thing is a Lethal Weapon-type parody of 80s cop movie cliches. Jim Walls later left, and Sierra slapped on the name of LA commissior Daryl F. Gates on the later games, which were much darker and generally not that great. The fourth one is the last "true" PQ game. The fifth game was Police Quest: SWAT, an atrocious FMC game, while SWAT 2 is an RTS. The third and fourth SWAT games are more similar to Rainbow Six and have nothing to do with the Police Quest series outside of a few references to main character Sonny Bonds.
Leisure Suit Larry
A remake of the earlier text adventure "Softporn Adventure", this puts you in the shoes of a desperately unhip 70s lounge lizard trying to score. Often associated with porn games, it's actually fairly tame in spite of its reputation, with the focus more being on finding different ways to humiliate the eponymous Larry. The series is split between games where you simply need to hook up with women, and one with more linear plots. Somewhere in the middle they introduced "Passionate Patti", meant to be a female counterpart to Larry, but ultimately she wasn't very interesting. There is no Leisure Suit Larry 4 - the series skips from 3 to 5 for reasons that sort of make sense but are too complicated to into here. I also have a weakness for the second game, which puts you on a boat and eventually takes you to a tropical island where you try to impress a village chief by programming in assembly language, but it's basically "How Many Ways Can We Screw You Over: The Game".
Vivendi tried to resurrect this series twice, first with the minigame fest Magna Cum Laude, and second with the atrocious open world platformer Box Office Bust. Neither are good (in fact, the latter is one of the worst games I've ever played), but the former occasionally provokes a few laughes, even though it's much dirtier than the games that precede it.
Quest for Glory
A series I always recommend to non-adventure game players, because it sidesteps most of the issues with older adventure games, namely, the ridiculous deaths. Quest for Glory is really an RPG that just happens to use an adventure game interface, and its writing is far beyond any other CRPG at the time, possessing a colorful world largely bereft (or at least satirical of) fantasy tropes with a fantastic sense of humor too. The fifth (and last) game focuses more on RPG elementst han storytelling, and is the weakest of the bunch because of that, but ultimately isn't too bad.
Unfortunately this one isn't available on any DD services for some reason.
Gabriel Knight
Sort of a blend between Indiana Jones and Anne Rice novels, these put you in the role of serial womanizer Gabriel Knight, a slacker book store owner/wannabe novelist who learns of his family's past as shadow hunters and reforms himself to live up to his legacy. There are three games, focusing on voodoo rituals, the German prince Ludwing (and werewolves), and the Holy Grail (and vampires). The first is a traditional point and click, the second is more of an FMV game, while the third is a weird 3D game. All are varying degrees of pretty good to excellent (disregarding some infamously terrible puzzles like the cat mustache from the third game), mostly due to the extensive research by author Jane Jensen, along with extensively fleshed out side characters and excellent dialogue.
There are tons more other games that would take too long to get into, but there's also two Phantasmagoria games (FMV horror titles), Conquest of Camelot/Longbow (which are "historically accurate" takes on the legends of King Arthur and Robin Hood, respectively), Manhunter (which take place in a post apocalyptic USA with lots of awful arcade segments but a cool atmosphere), Codename Iceman (a spy thriller/sub simulator by the guy who did Police Quest), the Laura Bow games (The Colonel's Bequest and The Dagger of Amon Ra, both mysteries that take places in the 20s), Torin's Passage (an animated adventure by Al Lowe, the creator of Leisure Suit Larry, though largely meant for kid but still with a good sense of humor), Gold Rush (an adventure-like take on Oregon Trail, sort of), The Black Cauldron (re-telling of the Disney movie, very old but probably better than even the Kings Quest games, honestly), and Freddy Pharkas: Frontier Pharmacist, a goofy Western spoof.
Sierra also owned a few other companies that developed adventure games. Dynamix put out The Adventures of Willy Beamish, Rise of the Dragon and Heart of China, each inspired by Saturday morning cartoons, Blade Runner, and Indiana Jones, respectively. Design-wise they're more open ended than usual but have lots of frustrating dead-ends. They have a distinct charm nonetheless.
There are also a few games from Coktel Vision, a French company who put out...well, very French games. Their most prolific was the Gobliiins series, which were very goofy and cartoony, though their puzzles are focused around "escape the room" type scenarios where you control multiple characters. A new installment, Goblins 4, came out a few years ago. There's also Inca (which reimagines the South Americans as a space faring race fighting against flying Spanish galleons...very trippy), along with The Prophecy (sort of boring), Lost in Time, Bargon Quest, and several others. Their big claim to fame is their trippiness and use of lots of CG and digitized footage before the CD-ROM era.
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