Having Played Every Adventure From the 1970s, Some Thoughts

From Captain 80 Basic Adventures.

First off, note that all my travails are archived at this link: All the Adventures.

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I was browsing my old posts, and I dug up this one from way back in 2005:

However, most details I’ve seen (on those companies specifically and in general) tend to be on the companies themselves, rather than innovations in game mechanics. There’s a lack of material on the actual content of games, so a student looking for a particular element needs to start from scratch; there’s an intimidating number of works to plow through if someone is searching for a mechanic rather than a plot theme.

I find a real need for the sort of history work done with art and music history, with details about content that go past “in the old days, there were more mazes than there are now” so a future scholar can pick out that obscure game from 1980s that advances his or her point.

Even though I wrote this excerpt long enough ago I forgot it existed, it captures some of my motivation. If nothing else, looking at adventure history this early results in a lot of Firsts, and by playing everything I can say fairly definitively when things were actually first, like “this was the first time relative directions in an IF game were tried” (see: Mystery Mansion) or “this is the first experiment where navigation is done without a compass at all” (Empire of the Over-Mind).

Some other curious firsts:

– First defined player character: Aldebaran III
– First use of choice-based interaction in a parser game: Stuga
– First dynamic compass interface: Spelunker
– First dynamic puzzle generation: Mines
– First free-text conversation in an adventure context: Local Call for Death
– First adventure game comedy: Mystery Fun House

To another very real extent, though, the history is incidental. I just happen to love adventure games dearly. I want to get better and playing them, and I want to see and experience as much as I can.

My current (probably inaccurate) count of adventure games for 1980 is 63 items, more than I’ve written about so far (for the record, 47 games). I realize there is no chance I’ll ever finish every year; time keeps advancing and more adventure keep being written. Let’s see how far we can get, though!