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It's boom and bust. When adventure games became graphical, they became massively popular, one of the top-selling genres of games. But since 2000 they were in de

It's boom and bust. When adventure games became graphical, they became massively popular, one of the top-selling genres of games. But since 2000 they were in decline, almost to the point of death. Gamers wanted 3D shoot-em-ups or simulators or other genres, more than they wanted the old point'n'click adventures they'd been playing for the past decade. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adventure_game#Decline_(2000%E2%80%932010) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adventure_game#Decline_(2000%E... They haven't really come back, in that form, except as appeals to afficionados. Deponia (2012-2016), Syberia (2002-), Dreamfall (1999-2017) did quite well, but I don't know how many people who hadn't played an adventure game before would willingly pick them up. Then there are nostalgia-bait games which Ron Gilbert is especially guilty of, e.g. Thimble Park, The Cave, Return to Monkey Island. You could also add the remake of Riven to that list. If by Japanese story games you mean visual novels... they're not really the same genre, even if technically they have you moving around the place collecting things to solve puzzles. I'd also argue that anything David Cage has done (Farhenheit, Heavy Rain, etc.) are not adventure games, he chases after "interactive movies" as mentioned in the article.

cubefox 2y ago
A few years ago, adventure games had a revival on smartphones, especially with The Room series and the Cube Escape / Rusty Lake games. They were greatly helped by the fact that A) adventure games have no action and B) most action games do not work well with touchscreens.
- pdfernhout 2y ago
  While not specifically designed for smartphones, StoryHarp (which I wrote in 1998 in Delphi and then ported to the web in 2018 using TypeScript, Mithril, and Tachyons) can run in a browser on a phone. StoryHarp makes it easier to write simple rule-based text adventures where players click on available options from a list rather than by typing in text (more like Choose Your Own Adventure books). You can try it out here: https://storyharp.com/v3.0/ https://storyharp.com/v3.0/
Deukhoofd 2y ago
Telltale Games was big for a decade with their adventure games, in which Gilbert was somewhat involved as well. The Walking Dead from 2012 was one of the best selling video games of all times.
- amiga386 2y ago
  I grant you, Telltale did make a good number of adventure games in the classic style, e.g. Sam & Max, and then also applied them to licenses like Wallace & Gromit and Back to the Future... but I feel The Walking Dead was a different type of game. More a narrative and character led game, like a visual novel, rather than a puzzle game of any kind... and as that was so successful, they stopped making the point'n'click puzzle-type adventure games. Would you consider them to be the same genre, an evolution, or a different genre (that perhaps Telltale spawned?)
  - BeetleB 2y ago
    For me they are part of the same genre, but a different subgenre. They are more like choose your own adventure stories. But still very satisfying!
rererereferred 2y ago
Not sure about visual novels, but the Japanese Zero Escape and Ace Attorney series are great. Maybe they meant those.
- amiga386 2y ago
  The Ace Attorney series are visual novel games; I'd call them a crossover of genres. They have the presentation of a visual novel (first person perspective, characters look straight out at you, most of game is paging through dialogue), but they also have gameplay elements of traditional adventure games (looking around multiple locations for clues, try every item in the inventory to see what response you get, etc.) - I think in Japan they'd call that an adventure game for being overly interactive, but in the West we'd still call it a visual novel. I haven't tried the Zero Escape series, but after a quick look at one on Youtube, it does look like that same mix of visual novel with adventure game / puzzle elements?
  - sersi 2y ago
    Adventure games that have elements of visual novels have existed for a long time in Japan even though they were often not translated and sold outside of Japan. Examples of this are the The Portopia Serial Murder Case (from Yuji Horii who wrote the scenario for Chrono Trigger), the Jake Hunter games, etc...
- gs17 2y ago
  I'd add Danganronpa to the list for people able to stomach a much more "anime" take on the subgenre.
  - anal_reactor 2y ago
    I loved it so much!
Retric 2y ago
The original Monkey Island was a smash hit for its time and sold significantly less than 1 million copies. So, while adventure games didn’t take off like 3D shoot-em-ups that doesn’t mean they actually declined even if they aren’t posting 200+ million GTA 5 numbers. Monkey Island 2 special edition sold 459k units on steam that’s far better than the original Money Island 2’s 25k on launch.
- pandemic_region 2y ago
  In all fairness, it was easier to get the cracked warez version back then then to find a shop that had these games. At least in my country. So maybe sales numbers don't tell everything in this case.
BeetleB 2y ago
The genre has been doing well ever since The Walking Dead games came out. I recommend people play Life is Strange.
- SJC_Hacker 2y ago
  The Telltale version? Telltale actually went out of business a few years ago. Even so, those aren't akin to the classic adventure games like Maniac Mansion, Secret of Monkey Island, etc. They are more like "Choose your own adventure" novels - but a major criticism is you always end up in the same place at the end so your choices are largely irrelevant.
  - BeetleB 2y ago
    Telltale went out of business, but the genre is doing fine. Others continue to make games. > They are more like "Choose your own adventure" novels - but a major criticism is you always end up in the same place at the end so your choices are largely irrelevant. They are like Choose Your Own Adventure novels, but I think it's unfair to say you end up with the same ending. I know games where, based on your decisions, people may die in the middle of the game. Whether they're alive or not does lead to a different story. Even in The Walking Dead series, there's a game with a very different ending depending on who you choose to get killed. The games are much easier than the old adventure games of the 90's. For me, though, that's a blessing. I simply cannot devote as much time to solving those types of games, and I appreciate they've made adventure games for someone like myself. The point is that if you liked adventure games, you'll likely enjoy these games as well.
YurgenJurgensen 2y ago
I have a firm belief that the original point-and-click adventure boom was an accident. A lot of previously popular but now niche genres follow a pattern: They applied some constraint to their interaction that lead to (relatively) high-fidelity graphics and/or storytelling on weak hardware and with small budgets. Once technology advanced to the point where said graphical fidelity could be achieved without those constraints, all but a few hardcore players left for other genres. Fighting games (where the machine could spend its entire resource budget on two characters and a largely static stage), rail shooters (where the fixed camera and scripted encounters allowed the designers to very easily know how many entities would be onscreen in any given frame, even to the point of being almost entirely pre-rendered), racing games (cars are easy to model, fixed tracks give the designers full control of entity visibility, sprite scaling allowed for 3D-ish effects before 3D acceleration existed), flight simulators and space games (the sky/space is easy to render, planes and spaceships are also easy to model compared to humans). None of these genres are as popular as they once were, probably due to the fact that even a go-anywhere open world game with hundreds of living entities on screen can run on modest hardware these days, so there’s no benefit from a graphical perspective of applying those restrictions. The adventure game and the visual novel once occupied this position. By being a series of (potentially entirely pre-rendered) stills that could only be interacted with in a few predefined ways, you could make impressive-looking scenes even on 16-bit hardware. It would be a very long time before anything as impressive as Myst could be made to run in real time on consumer-grade hardware. I suspect a lot of people only bought these games because they looked pretty, and once that edge was gone, they realised that maybe they didn’t really like the genre in the first place.
- sersi 2y ago
  I think that there's another factor to consider. The market for computer game was both much smaller in the 80s and early 90s but also tended to be much more educated. So, games that are essentially puzzles with stories would have much more appeal to that group of people.
  - Ekaros 2y ago
    I think also culture was much more ready to put "mindful" and engaged deep thought time on content. As lot of games due still end up burning lot of time, but I feel they often are more mindless or more in the moment gaming. Kinda tetris like deepflow. Our attention spans have shortened a lot and there is lot more distractions available.

cubefox 2y ago

A few years ago, adventure games had a revival on smartphones, especially with The Room series and the Cube Escape / Rusty Lake games. They were greatly helped by the fact that A) adventure games have no action and B) most action games do not work well with touchscreens.

pdfernhout 2y ago
While not specifically designed for smartphones, StoryHarp (which I wrote in 1998 in Delphi and then ported to the web in 2018 using TypeScript, Mithril, and Tachyons) can run in a browser on a phone. StoryHarp makes it easier to write simple rule-based text adventures where players click on available options from a list rather than by typing in text (more like Choose Your Own Adventure books). You can try it out here: https://storyharp.com/v3.0/ https://storyharp.com/v3.0/

Deukhoofd 2y ago

Telltale Games was big for a decade with their adventure games, in which Gilbert was somewhat involved as well. The Walking Dead from 2012 was one of the best selling video games of all times.

amiga386 2y ago
I grant you, Telltale did make a good number of adventure games in the classic style, e.g. Sam & Max, and then also applied them to licenses like Wallace & Gromit and Back to the Future... but I feel The Walking Dead was a different type of game. More a narrative and character led game, like a visual novel, rather than a puzzle game of any kind... and as that was so successful, they stopped making the point'n'click puzzle-type adventure games. Would you consider them to be the same genre, an evolution, or a different genre (that perhaps Telltale spawned?)
- BeetleB 2y ago
  For me they are part of the same genre, but a different subgenre. They are more like choose your own adventure stories. But still very satisfying!

rererereferred 2y ago

Not sure about visual novels, but the Japanese Zero Escape and Ace Attorney series are great. Maybe they meant those.

amiga386 2y ago
The Ace Attorney series are visual novel games; I'd call them a crossover of genres. They have the presentation of a visual novel (first person perspective, characters look straight out at you, most of game is paging through dialogue), but they also have gameplay elements of traditional adventure games (looking around multiple locations for clues, try every item in the inventory to see what response you get, etc.) - I think in Japan they'd call that an adventure game for being overly interactive, but in the West we'd still call it a visual novel. I haven't tried the Zero Escape series, but after a quick look at one on Youtube, it does look like that same mix of visual novel with adventure game / puzzle elements?
- sersi 2y ago
  Adventure games that have elements of visual novels have existed for a long time in Japan even though they were often not translated and sold outside of Japan. Examples of this are the The Portopia Serial Murder Case (from Yuji Horii who wrote the scenario for Chrono Trigger), the Jake Hunter games, etc...
gs17 2y ago
I'd add Danganronpa to the list for people able to stomach a much more "anime" take on the subgenre.
- anal_reactor 2y ago
  I loved it so much!

Retric 2y ago

The original Monkey Island was a smash hit for its time and sold significantly less than 1 million copies. So, while adventure games didn’t take off like 3D shoot-em-ups that doesn’t mean they actually declined even if they aren’t posting 200+ million GTA 5 numbers. Monkey Island 2 special edition sold 459k units on steam that’s far better than the original Money Island 2’s 25k on launch.

pandemic_region 2y ago
In all fairness, it was easier to get the cracked warez version back then then to find a shop that had these games. At least in my country. So maybe sales numbers don't tell everything in this case.

BeetleB 2y ago

The genre has been doing well ever since The Walking Dead games came out. I recommend people play Life is Strange.

SJC_Hacker 2y ago
The Telltale version? Telltale actually went out of business a few years ago. Even so, those aren't akin to the classic adventure games like Maniac Mansion, Secret of Monkey Island, etc. They are more like "Choose your own adventure" novels - but a major criticism is you always end up in the same place at the end so your choices are largely irrelevant.
- BeetleB 2y ago
  Telltale went out of business, but the genre is doing fine. Others continue to make games. > They are more like "Choose your own adventure" novels - but a major criticism is you always end up in the same place at the end so your choices are largely irrelevant. They are like Choose Your Own Adventure novels, but I think it's unfair to say you end up with the same ending. I know games where, based on your decisions, people may die in the middle of the game. Whether they're alive or not does lead to a different story. Even in The Walking Dead series, there's a game with a very different ending depending on who you choose to get killed. The games are much easier than the old adventure games of the 90's. For me, though, that's a blessing. I simply cannot devote as much time to solving those types of games, and I appreciate they've made adventure games for someone like myself. The point is that if you liked adventure games, you'll likely enjoy these games as well.

YurgenJurgensen 2y ago

I have a firm belief that the original point-and-click adventure boom was an accident. A lot of previously popular but now niche genres follow a pattern: They applied some constraint to their interaction that lead to (relatively) high-fidelity graphics and/or storytelling on weak hardware and with small budgets. Once technology advanced to the point where said graphical fidelity could be achieved without those constraints, all but a few hardcore players left for other genres. Fighting games (where the machine could spend its entire resource budget on two characters and a largely static stage), rail shooters (where the fixed camera and scripted encounters allowed the designers to very easily know how many entities would be onscreen in any given frame, even to the point of being almost entirely pre-rendered), racing games (cars are easy to model, fixed tracks give the designers full control of entity visibility, sprite scaling allowed for 3D-ish effects before 3D acceleration existed), flight simulators and space games (the sky/space is easy to render, planes and spaceships are also easy to model compared to humans). None of these genres are as popular as they once were, probably due to the fact that even a go-anywhere open world game with hundreds of living entities on screen can run on modest hardware these days, so there’s no benefit from a graphical perspective of applying those restrictions. The adventure game and the visual novel once occupied this position. By being a series of (potentially entirely pre-rendered) stills that could only be interacted with in a few predefined ways, you could make impressive-looking scenes even on 16-bit hardware. It would be a very long time before anything as impressive as Myst could be made to run in real time on consumer-grade hardware. I suspect a lot of people only bought these games because they looked pretty, and once that edge was gone, they realised that maybe they didn’t really like the genre in the first place.

sersi 2y ago
I think that there's another factor to consider. The market for computer game was both much smaller in the 80s and early 90s but also tended to be much more educated. So, games that are essentially puzzles with stories would have much more appeal to that group of people.
- Ekaros 2y ago
  I think also culture was much more ready to put "mindful" and engaged deep thought time on content. As lot of games due still end up burning lot of time, but I feel they often are more mindless or more in the moment gaming. Kinda tetris like deepflow. Our attention spans have shortened a lot and there is lot more distractions available.