How to write... an Adventure game

Death of a Genre

The Adventure genre is, it has long been proclaimed, a dead genre. Nobody plays them. Nobody wants them. Nobody good makes them. So go the melodramatic criers who want to get a lot of traffic on their websites by appearing controversial and ‘in-your-face’.

It’s true that the adventure game genre has died off a bit and the world is no longer filled with point and click adventures like Beneath a Steel Sky, Broken Sword or the computer game adaptation of my second favourite story ever, I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream.

Still, just because we don’t have many ‘point and click’ adventure games anymore doesn’t mean that we don’t still have adventure games as a major genre. Both Fahrenheit and Sam and Max are proof of that - thought it's impossible to deny that consumer interest in adventure games has declined a lot in recent years.

In a world where we have photo-realistic gameplay, physics simulations and lots of really impressive explosions, why would anybody want to play a story-driven adventure game? I put the question to David Cage first.

“Adventure games died off because they failed to evolve. They failed to find new answers, a new language different from the traditional ‘Point and Click’, which led them to totally miss the console market. Because console games use a controller and not a mouse, because they are fast paced and targeting a younger audience, they made adventure games look out of place.”


Without meaning to pin the blame on consoles, I think this view is pretty close to the truth. Looking back at how computer games are designed we can draw a straight line through how inputs were managed in adventure games and chart how things developed.

We started with typing in commands for games like the Zork series before moving on to the slightly more immersive keyboard controls in games like Leisure Suit Larry and Kings Quest. Then games like The Secret of Monkey Island came out, harnessing a mouse driven point and click interface which was far easier.

Unfortunately, it’s here that our straight line gets a little bumpy and the world of adventure games starts to get filled with block-pushing puzzles or shoddy FMV sequences. Games like Gabriel Knight 2: The Beast Within and Broken Sword: The Angel of Death were an early hint at how the adventure game genre would end up, (despite how later titles in the GK series turned out to be quite good).

Somehow though, David Cage remains ever hopeful about the future of the genre;

“The success of Fahrenheit shows that there is a market for games with strong narrative if they dare to explore new forms and not limit themselves to puzzle solving and inventory management. Most games target a teenage audience, and they could not find content appropriate for them anymore. This industry will have to offer content for an adult audience in order to expand its market, get these former gamers back and convince new ones.”

Having worked on a series of children’s adventure games as well as his more well-known titles, Dave Grossman also thought that the adventure game genre was best suited to adult gamers and was keen to point out that the sales figures supported this theory.


“It may also have to do with what we're accustomed to doing with the various platforms. You're used to approaching your computer in a primarily thinky way, which is perhaps not the case with your console,” Dave Grossman chimed in, eager to point out the difference between PC and console gamers. It’s yet another thing for any budding game designer or fan to bear in mind.

You scored 10 out of 140 points

And so our little exploration comes, once again, to a close. We’ve been lucky enough to have a guided tour of the process of writing and designing an adventure game from two of the most prolific and established designers in the field. We’ve had a look at matters of dialogue, interface, humour and content and we’ve heard a lot of largely conflicting, but still useful views.

For me the core issue which we’ve discussed has been the fall and possible death of the adventure game genre. As someone who grew up playing adventure games every evening and who has ported versions of Monkey Island 2 on his DS, phone and PDA, I’d hate to see adventure games truly go extinct.

It’s a good thing then that this isn’t very likely and I don’t have to struggle to give this feature an upbeat ending – there’s already one to be had. One need only look out at all the fan websites for even the oldest of adventure games to see how much the genre is still loved by many. Even if the worst happened and the genre did die out, then our featured developers can still move on to pastures new and be content in the knowledge that they have entertained a generation of geeks when nobody else could.

That’s not going to happen though – not with both of them already hard at work on their new games; Sam and Max: Season Two for Dave Grossman and Heavy Rain for David Cage. In fact, with quality titles like those to look forward to, the genre seems to be very alive after all.

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Thanks for reading. In the next part of this on-going series we’ll be moving on from adventure games and shooters to tackle a wildly different type of game; strategy. How are strategy games designed and written? Is story something even needed in an RTS or can it be dispensed with entirely? If you think there’s a specific title we should look at or if you want to see a specific issue or question raised in the next feature then just drop into the bit-tech community and let us know.