That´s true. I´m not entirely sure if it´s a cultural thing, though.
But germany has a 70+years history of admitting mistakes, while in the US admitting mistakes is generally regarded as a sign of weakness you´re not supposed to show.
Uh-oh I´m afraid I´m going down a bad path there…
I don’t think that this is/was the reason. The - ehrm - shareware version of Doom was very popular in germany. 
And maybe we have to clarify the word “censorship”: The games were not censored or banned. You just had/have to be an adult to buy those games and it was forbidden to advertise those games. That’s all. (And in fact, I bought Doom in a software store at that time. :))
But that´s my point, does´t that take away from “official” sales numbers?
Also I´m aware that being put on the index does not equal censorship. Censorship (or self censoring) factors only in if some content of the game gets removed to get a pass and be released in basterized form not intended by the developers like…ahem Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade. But that´s another very very difficult topic.
And not being able to officially advertise and being displayed in the big store chains also doesn´t exactly help sales.
But illegal copies affected the sales of Monkey Island too.
If we look back at the early 1990s, most of the players were kids with a limited amount of money per month. They copied all games and shared them on the schoolyard. So at that time all games were affected. The more popular a game was the more copies were made.
The original question was: Why do Germans love adventure games? And MI and Doom were both very popular in Germany.
I just wanted to clarify that for all non-german people here in the forum. 
Yes. The sales decreases (at least in most cases). But - if we look at the 1990s again - especially a game “on the Index” made the game more interesting for the kids. Doom was a good example for that: Every player knew Doom and had played it.
So if action games would be very popular at that time, the sales of similar games had been increased.
But maybe the german adventure players are more willing to spend money for a game.
Yes, since both games were pirated (for different reasons) the whole sales equation is made very difficult.
I also recognize that “pirating” in germany actually helped games reach an audience.
As I´ve mentioned elsewhere I probably wouldn´t have known about Maniac Mansion hadn´t I stumbled over it in a C64 “disc box”, the consequence was buying Zak and the following games legally.
I don’t know any sources but I’ve heard that Sierra sold much more games in USA than LFG/LA while LFG/LA had more success in Europe.
Maybe it was related to marketing, or maybe those more sadistic adventure games worked better there for some reasons.
The gameplay of Sierra games were often more trial&error vs. LFG/LA with more sitting there or wandering around, pondering about solutions. This sounds more like self-flagellation being a thing in USA than in Germany.
An asprect I miss in this thread is the quality of the LA adventures’ German translations / localisations. They where great for that time. Yes, there are some major flaws (“rubber chicken with apulley in the middle” translated in a way that it made it harder to solve the puzzle) and the voice acting in the first talkie versions did not age well. But the overall translation quality is very good. I think that made it much easier for younger audiences to get started with the games.
Thinking back to my childhood in the mid/early 90s, it was quite hard to get good story driven games in German language that where capable to run on an 486. The Pentium computer was only for my father’s work purposes - like playing Quake when I was in bed. 
Yes and no. We played Maniac Mansion, Zak, etc. (at least the first time) in English.(*) The translations came out later. Beside that, we had Rainbow Arts. They produced a lot of popular action games like the Turrican series. Since the beginning of the video gaming age the adventures had only a small shelf in the stores (compared to other genres).
But @Nor_Treblig made a good point:
It was much easier to get the LA adventures in local stores. You had to order most of the Sierra games via mail-order. But as I said above: All games were pirated that time. So everyone knew at least Larry.
Yes. That’s why I liked the LA adventures much more. The Sierra adventures were just frustrating. Beside that, the LA adventures had the better and far more interesting stories. And better puzzles. So maybe we Germans like good stories, good puzzles and don’t like to die in a game.
(*) And we improved our English with these versions (at school we haven’t learned such beautiful words like “chainsaw” ;))
Maybe I’m a bit younger than you. I bought the classic LA adventures in their budget versions (Bestseller Games) from my pocket money in 1995 or 1996. I started to learn English in 1996, so English games where not an option for me to that time. So localization was great to access a larger audience and market.
Another question: How long did you guys have to wait for a translated version of the games back then?
Good question. I can’t remember. I assume a few month? I haven’t found release dates for the german versions. But we have played the first LA adventures in English.
Maniac Mansion in italian was around year 2000.
Zak in italian (first translation) was around mid '90s.
The german versions were released a little bit faster. (Thanks to Boris)
Funny you mention that, because I wanted to know that myself so I looked up some archived Commodore magazines in german on pdf (I´ll link them later when I find the time) to find out exactly that.
It seems to me both Maniac Mansion (1987) and Zak McKracken (1988) where released in october and they got their initial reviews together with english screenshots then. Then by the following january they got brief mentions that the german translations are out.
So from that I gather:
Maniac Mansion US and Germany (english) October 5 1987
Zak McKracken US and Germany (english) October 1988
Maniac Mansion (german) January 1988
Zak McKracken (german) January 1989
But definitly not much longer than that. I personally played both very close to each other (first MM then Zak) sometime around 1990 in german.
Didn´t take as long as expected, here ya go…
Maniac Mansion initial review in german Happy Computer 10/87
Confusingly the box on the far left mentions the release date of the german version to be estimated late september early october but not what year. Considering that article is in fact FROM the month of october I guess they meant the following year. Seem it came much earlier than expected because:
Earliest mention of the german version I found in ASM 01/88
Zak McKracken initial review in german Happy Computer 09/88
Earliest mention of german Version of Zak of the Amiga Port (with screenshot) from Powerplay 02/89
And if you´re curious about the interview they mention at the end of the first Maniac Mansion article you can find that here
I thought they were very good. But now when I compare the German voices of DOTT… well, the English ones make them look quite bad.
I also may be slightly younger since originally I always had the German versions of those games and only much, much later played them in English too.
Yes, the dates seems to be right. I remember that we played Zak until we got to the mars, then we got the german version.
I also noticed that MM. Zak and MI1 (Last Crusade of course came out to tie in with the summer blockbuster it was based on) all came out in october. Maybe LA had a schedule for a few of those release dates.
Yeah. I’m more of a marketing theory fan as well, evidently. 
I can only back that up with personal experience again of course, because indeed I haven’t played any of the Sierra stuff. YET. I remember that some folks at school were talking about Police Quest, so it was around somehow, but I never even once came into contact with it. I may be creating memories retroactively here, but if I remember correctly, the thing they DID talk about was how they forgot something at the beginning and then got stuck later on without being able to go back, so, no thank you.
Sigh maybe. There definitely was a pirate culture back then, particularly among the teenagers. But maybe it’s against my religion to call that helpful. I won’t do it.
Germany’s movie voiceover work of the 70s to early 90s was by far superior to anything that came after, mostly because they weren’t obsessed with accuracy. In that vein, Boris Schneider-Johne didn’t give a flying fuck about an accurate translation: If he could insert a joke or a fourth wall break that only worked for a German audience, that’s what he wrote instead of a translation. So it’s absolutely true that we were, just like e.g. in the German “Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure” dub, culturally eased into the experience.
Indeed, that could have been a decisive factor for the spread, and an achievement of Boris’ especially. Not that I see his translations in any way uncritical; his command of German orthography wasn’t up to snuff back then, and as of right now, he still has to explain some embarrassing choices right there in the Thimbleweed Park verb panel, because his last explanation didn’t take. 
And just like with religion that goes against reality, good comparison! Mind you that kind of “piracy” was a special case and can´t be compared to the kind of piracy of today.
Just imagine Bill & Ted had come out after The Big Lebowski, it would be vastly different. But that´s hard to imagine, just as hard as everyone refering to Jeff Bridges as “Hoschi”.
Well, one had to buy it first for others to pirate it. The rich kid did. And boy did we hate the rich kid, but he got the games. Still, in the vein of scepticism instead of the supernatural, I really don’t think that the increasing number of willing rich kid sycophants increased game sales in any way. Of course, when rich kid just didn’t want to buy Fate of Atlantis, I took 120 Deutschmarks i.e. far more than a month’s allowance and bought it myself. So if the piracy helped, it didn’t help much – and all for the wrong reasons. The free supply dried up, so I put money down. Rich kid doesn’t comply, DRM just too good, makes no difference. Immanuel Kant would have wept. 
We don’t have an established surfer lingo, so the German translators of B&T basically just went with creating an entirely new youth sociolect, and items of that fictional language found their way into actual sociolects. Which is insane. One of my teachers back then called people “Hoschi”. 
We don’t have much of an established pirate lingo as well, so that dimension was just lost in Monkey Island; it wasn’t “substituted” by anything really. We got new and different jokes instead, but this dimension just ceased to exist.
To make the derailment complete: I like the German Big Lebowski dub, even though they crucially failed to translate Bush’s “will not stand this aggression” line so it doesn’t become clear that Lebowski parrots it later on. It’s always these little things once you watch the original. I still watch “What’s up Doc” with the German dub, even though they completely botched Judy’s C minor seventh line, which I loved in the original.
Where was I.