The History of the Adventure Video Game
The History of the Adventure Video Game

Author: Christopher Carton

Publisher: White Owl

Published: 2023-11-30

Total Pages: 154

ISBN-13: 1399088505

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Get ready for the adventure of a lifetime! Adventure video games have provided players with epic and hilarious storytelling for over fifty years. What started from the humble beginnings of text adventures led to a blast of point-and-click and graphic adventure games throughout the ‘80s and ‘90s. Trailblazers like Roberta and Ken Williams, Ron Gilbert, Tim Schaffer and Dave Grossman brought timeless characters, stories and puzzles to life, lighting the imaginations and wracking the brains of gamers around the world. This book showcases the companies, games and creators that have made the adventure video game one of the most passionately-adored genres in the medium. In these pages you’ll find histories on influential companies such as Sierra On-Line, LucasArts and Telltale Games, as well as some of the most revered games in the genre. With a bright future emerging as veterans and newcomers forge ahead with new ideas and visual flourishes for adventure games, there’s never been a better time to become acquainted (or reacquainted!) with a colorful and exciting part of gaming history. So point your cursor over the start button and click that mouse!

The Sierra Adventure
The Sierra Adventure

Author: Shawn Mills

Publisher: Lulu.com

Published: 2020-07-09

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781716758720

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The Sierra Adventure: The Story of Sierra On-Line tells the story of legendary computer game company Sierra On-Line, developers of industry defining titles such as King’s Quest, Quest for Glory, and Leisure Suit Larry. Told through the words of the people who worked there, designers, artists, programmers, animators, musicians, marketting, and management, this is the story told in the words of those people who worked there.

What Is Your Quest?
What Is Your Quest?

Author: Anastasia Salter

Publisher: University of Iowa Press

Published: 2014-11-01

Total Pages: 217

ISBN-13: 1609382757

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

What Is Your Quest? examines the future of electronic literature in a world where tablets and e-readers are becoming as common as printed books and where fans are blurring the distinction between reader and author. The construction of new ways of storytelling is already underway: it is happening on the edges of the mainstream gaming industry and in the spaces between media, on the foundations set by classic games. Along these margins, convergent storytelling allows for playful reading and reading becomes a strategy of play. One of the earliest models for this new way of telling stories was the adventure game, the kind of game centered on quests in which the characters must overcome obstacles and puzzles. After they fell out of fashion in the 1990s, fans made strenuous efforts to keep them alive and to create new games in the genre. Such activities highlight both the convergence of game and story and the collapsing distinction between reader and author. Continually defying the forces of obsolescence, fans return abandoned games to a playable state and treat stories as ever-evolving narratives. Similarly, players of massive multiplayer games become co-creators of the game experience, building characters and creating social networks that recombine a reading and gaming community. The interactions between storytellers and readers, between programmers and creators, and among fans turned world-builders are essential to the development of innovative ways of telling stories. And at the same time that fan activities foster the convergence of digital gaming and storytelling, new and increasingly accessible tools and models for interactive narrative empower a broadening range of storytellers. It is precisely this interactivity among a range of users surrounding these new platforms that is radically reshaping both e-books and games and those who read and play with them.

Twisty Little Passages
Twisty Little Passages

Author: Nick Montfort

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2005-02-11

Total Pages: 306

ISBN-13: 9780262633185

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

A critical approach to interactive fiction, as literature and game. Interactive fiction—the best-known form of which is the text game or text adventure—has not received as much critical attention as have such other forms of electronic literature as hypertext fiction and the conversational programs known as chatterbots. Twisty Little Passages (the title refers to a maze in Adventure, the first interactive fiction) is the first book-length consideration of this form, examining it from gaming and literary perspectives. Nick Montfort, an interactive fiction author himself, offers both aficionados and first-time users a way to approach interactive fiction that will lead to a more pleasurable and meaningful experience of it. Twisty Little Passages looks at interactive fiction beginning with its most important literary ancestor, the riddle. Montfort then discusses Adventure and its precursors (including the I Ching and Dungeons and Dragons), and follows this with an examination of mainframe text games developed in response, focusing on the most influential work of that era, Zork. He then considers the introduction of commercial interactive fiction for home computers, particularly that produced by Infocom. Commercial works inspired an independent reaction, and Montfort describes the emergence of independent creators and the development of an online interactive fiction community in the 1990s. Finally, he considers the influence of interactive fiction on other literary and gaming forms. With Twisty Little Passages, Nick Montfort places interactive fiction in its computational and literary contexts, opening up this still-developing form to new consideration.

Before the Crash
Before the Crash

Author: Mark J. P. Wolf

Publisher: Wayne State University Press

Published: 2012-06-15

Total Pages: 270

ISBN-13: 0814337228

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Contributors examine the early days of video game history before the industry crash of 1983 that ended the medium’s golden age. Following the first appearance of arcade video games in 1971 and home video game systems in 1972, the commercial video game market was exuberant with fast-paced innovation and profit. New games, gaming systems, and technologies flooded into the market until around 1983, when sales of home game systems dropped, thousands of arcades closed, and major video game makers suffered steep losses or left the market altogether. In Before the Crash: Early Video Game History, editor Mark J. P. Wolf assembles essays that examine the fleeting golden age of video games, an era sometimes overlooked for older games’ lack of availability or their perceived "primitiveness" when compared to contemporary video games. In twelve chapters, contributors consider much of what was going on during the pre-crash era: arcade games, home game consoles, home computer games, handheld games, and even early online games. The technologies of early video games are investigated, as well as the cultural context of the early period—from aesthetic, economic, industrial, and legal perspectives. Since the video game industry and culture got their start and found their form in this era, these years shaped much of what video games would come to be. This volume of early history, then, not only helps readers to understand the pre-crash era, but also reveals much about the present state of the industry. Before the Crash will give readers a thorough overview of the early days of video games along with a sense of the optimism, enthusiasm, and excitement of those times. Students and teachers of media studies will enjoy this compelling volume.

Adventure Games
Adventure Games

Author: Aaron A. Reed

Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic

Published: 2020-02-20

Total Pages: 241

ISBN-13: 1501346547

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The genre of adventure games is frequently overlooked. Lacking the constantly-evolving graphics and graphic violence of their counterparts in first-person and third-person shooters or role-playing games, they are often marketed to and beloved by players outside of mainstream game communities. While often forgotten by both the industry and academia, adventure games have had (and continue to have) a surprisingly wide influence on contemporary games, in categories including walking simulators, hidden object games, visual novels, and bestselling titles from companies like Telltale and Campo Santo. In this examination of heirs to the genre's legacy, the authors examine the genre from multiple perspectives, connecting technical analysis with critical commentary and social context. This will be the first book to consider this important genre from a comprehensive and transdisciplinary perspective. Drawing upon methods from platform studies, software studies, media studies, and literary studies, they reveal the genre's ludic and narrative origins and patterns, where character (and the player's embodiment of a character) is essential to the experience of play and the choices within a game. A deep structural analysis of adventure games also uncovers an unsteady balance between sometimes contradictory elements of story, exploration, and puzzles: with different games and creators employing a multitude of different solutions to resolving this tension.