I don’t really recall which was the first adventure game I ever played, but I do recall a few that made an impression on me and “hooked” me, for better or worse.
So, here it goes, in no particular order.
From my Commodore 64 days:
Infocom’s Deadline and Witness: two games I got at different times and tried to solve with my father. Never finished either of them.
Trillium’s Fahrenheit 451: This game hooked me so hard, it made me read the book whence it came and watch the movie based on it. Reading the book enticed me to read many other works of literature, especially those classics referenced in it, including Shakespeare, Melville, Hugo, etc. The game was my gateway drug to a world of literature, and I will be forever thankful to it. Never finished it either.
From my MS-DOS days:
Sierra’s Space Quest 2: Vohall’s Revenge: A friend of mine had a copy and let me played it while he did his homework. I loved it, and then learned that it was an entire series, and eagerly followed it until the end (and beyond: I am backer to the Space Venture kickstarter). Back then, I remember having seen a similar game (SQ1?) at another friend’s house, on a TRS-80. Played it many times, but only finished it as an adult later on. I play this and all Space Quest titles periodically every other year or so.
Sierra’s Leisure Suit Larry In The Land Of The Lounge Lizards: Similar to Space Quest 2, I played it at a friend’s house (possibly the same one) and loved it! Also like Space Quest I followed it to the end and beyond, and never finished it until later as an adult. I also still play it and all it’s sequels once in a while and finish it every time.
LucasFilms Games’ Day Of The Tentacle: I told this story in another thread, but basically a friend of mine ran a warezfile-sharing BBS and got this game as an exchange. He played it for a few minutes, but I got hooked on it. I didn’t finish it back then (I was really bad at following through), but eventually managed later in life. I’ve played it a few times to completion since then.
From my Windows 95 days:
Roberta William’s Phantasmagoria: I don’t care what people say, I really enjoyed this game and it’s spooky, gothic atmosphere – bad acting and cheesy storytelling and all. I’ve played it several times to completion. I never could stand the sequel, it was horribly bad and never went past the first few hours.
Trilobyte’s The 11th Hour: Based on magazine recommendations for fans of Phantasmagoria, I bought this one to my everlasting satisfaction. I finished it only by playing in dual-brain-mode with a friend (no, not the one with the DOS games). Oh, and what a lovely soundtrack by The Fatman!
Trilobyte’s The 7th Guest: Having loved The 11th Hour, I couldn’t resist nor ignore all the comparisons of it to its predecessor, so when I finally played it, I understood what all the fuzz was about. I managed to finish this one by myself, but still think the sequel superior.
There are many others, but they blur in my head, or did not really make such a big or positive impression on me. A few were the Gabriel Knight and Police Quest games from Sierra, maybe one or two more from Infocom (I recall trying to play The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy early on, but giving up after a few minutes), Buried In Time (the sequel to The Journeyman Project, which I tried and tried and tried to get into, but it was soooo dry and boring), Myst (the same: dry and boring), Asylum, some Marvel Hulk game, and some others.
Back to the topic: I can’t remember my first adventure game. I started with a C64 and some not very good adventure games. One was “The Mask Of The Sun” and “Murder on the Mississipi”. I never solved them.
But then came Maniac Mansion. Since then I’m a fan of adenvture games.
2 words : Maniac Mansion on C64. I read a review of it and was mind blown. A game that you can do so much instead of jump and fire. The genre was so appealing!
Never finished Pyamarama, but it was a favorite of mine too. Until I played Maniac Mansion which didn’t involve jumping over flying scissors and what not… I do remember flying to the moon to get some cheese, which echoed when you call the space police in MM (which I only got to do way later, as the first years of MM were spent getting stuck without a walktrough only reaching the green tentacle room and figuring out a way to get into Edna’s room)
Anyway, my introduction to adventure gaming was reading the review of Zak in Zzap!64 magazine and then buying a legit copy from a real store! MM was around that time, but pirated -although that term wasn’t used, you just copied it from a friend who also had a copy from someone else. Apart from mailordering, it was pretty hard to buy legal copies back then, or find a store that did sell the game you were looking for - and with all the import taxes back then, it was pretty daunting for us kids.
Perhaps even before Zak, I remember a simple DOS game my dad showed me on his computer at work, called CASTLE. It had very simple graphics, like $ is a snake and you are a square or something. It had a text parser too. If I remember well, one of the dungeon walls read : “Bill Gates was here” In comparison, Master of Magic on the C64 was full HD 3D.
But none made the impression on me that Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders (C64) did.
but even better is the original, which you can play online: http://www.dosgamesarchive.com/play/castle-adventure/
(Edit: although if you’re serious about playing it, you should run in a local DosBox such that you can lower the clockspeed- otherwise you can’t beat any foes)
After the essential kids educational games of the 80s-90s; stuff like Super Solvers and Zoombinis, My first memory of a real adventure game was either Day of the Tentacle or Monkey Island on CD-ROM. Still not sure which was the very first I played.
Not long after that, my parent got me this variety pack of LucasArts games from like Sam’s Club or something that contained Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, Full Throttle, Sam and Max, Monkey Island Madness (1, 2, and a demo of 3), The Dig… Thus a love of LucasArts was born.
My dad, being a software programmer, taught us kids how to work the computer, which back then was done through command prompt, before Windows GUI was common places. I learned how specifically so I could pull up and run those games all by myself.
Course, being young, and the internet as slow as it was/basically nonexistent it wasn’t easy to look up puzzle answers when I got stuck, so many of those games went unfinished until sometime later when I was older and wiser (and internet-enabled, let’s be honest).
We also had a copy of Myst, and the strategy guide somehow, but I’m pretty sure we never completed that game at all. I also had a King’s Quest game (the Heir Today, Gone Tomorrow one), and the death/underworlds scenes freaked me out quite a bit as a youngster.
Early 90’s, when I was a kid. There was a walkthrough to Maniac Mansion in Polish gaming magazine. They gave all the commands from the game in caps, which looked like this: TAKE KEY, OPEN THE DOOR… This was a selling point for me, as I barely knew English and actually solving anything in a game like that, was out of the question. I don’t think I even knew solving was the whole point, even following the walkthrough was hard.
So I bought the game on our “black market” (there was no official software in those days in Poland) and I loved it. Before MM, all games I saw on my C-64 were typical arcade games, so it blew my mind to just walk around and to have all these possibilities. You know, like, in real life, haha. I was hooked.
For some reason I didn’t finish the game on C-64 though. I did it on Amiga years later, when I was much more experienced.
Played MM on a friend‘s C64 … and since I did not own one but a Sinclair QL I started programming age 11. No, I was not able to build a Sinclair QL Version of MM - but I was on the hook. Played all LucasArts titles until CMI, tried but hated all Sierra adventures (maybe because the Amiga ports were so weak? I just disliked them even I tried many of them)
Hard to recall, but I believe the first adventure game I got must have been Indy3, and it was likely because of the movie. Somewhat later there was all this talk about Monkey Island at school, but since details were scarce I dismissed it as a silly sounding game of unknown nature. Until I learned what it really was …
Though I must admit that back then I played a lot of different games from all kind of genres, and adventures hadn’t been my favourites yet. That came as I grew older and learned to enjoy the laid-back, purely cerebral experience that sets P&C adventures apart from almost any other type of computer game.
