Designing Classic Adventure Games - King's Quest, Myst, Monkey Island and More

There's maybe no genre with a more interesting history than the adventure game. Today we'll talk about the design of classic adventure games. From their start as text adventures. Through Sierra, Ken and Roberta Williams and King's Quest. Modernized with LucasArts, Ron Gilbert, Monkey Island, Maniac Mansion, and Grim Fandango. Then brought to the masses with Cyan and Myst, and a whole lot of copycats. Let's see what made adventure games so popular in the 80s and 90s and what made the genre fade away to almost nothing.

#adventuregame #monkeyisland #myst

[DesignDoc]

List of games featured (in order of first appearance)

0:08 Phoenix Wright: Justice for All
0:12 Street Fighter 2
0:15 King of Fighters 96
0:16 Tekken 3
0:17 Fatal Fury Wild Ambition
0:18 Street Fighter EX 3
0:21 Streets of Rage 2
0:23 Pilotwings
0:25 Starcraft
0:28 DOTA 2
0:32 A Hat in Time
0:37 Full Throttle
0:41 Zork
0:44 Kings Quest
0:48 Monkey Island 2
0:50 Escape from Monkey Island
0:51 Telltale's The Walking Dead Season 1
0:53 Space Quest
0:56 Grim Fandango
0:59 Day of the Tentacle
1:02 King's Quest 3
1:55 Pong
1:57 Breakout
2:01 Space Race
2:04 Computer Space
2:07 Colossal Cave Adventure
2:47 Space Invaders
2:48 Pitfall
2:59 Planetfall
3:01 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
3:10 The Hobbit
3:34 Mystery House
5:53 Police quest
5:55 Mixed-Up Mother Goose
6:01 Black Cauldron
6:04 Space Quest 3
6:45 Legends of Star Arthur: Planet Mephius
7:01 Nightshade
7:13 Labyrinth
7:28 Maniac Mansion
8:12 Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis
8:17 Putt-Putt Joins the Parade
8:20 Pajama Sam: No Need To Hide When It's Dark Outside
9:05 King's Quest 5
9:18 Monkey Island 1
9:34 King's Quest 6
10:24 Sam & Max Hit the Road
10:32 King's Quest 4
10:46 Monkey Island 3
10:49 King's Quest 1 (1990 Remake)
11:12 Sonic CD
11:20 Myst
12:42 Tex Murphy: Under a Killing Moon
12:49 Tex Murphy: Overseer
12:55 Toonstruck
13:10 Gabriel Knight
13:16 Phantasmagoria
13:27 Pyst
14:05 Zelda: Ocarina of Time
14:11 Diablo
14:14 Metal Gear Solid
14:27 Space Quest 4
16:21 Broken Age
16:27 Machinarium

[Ozziw]

I've been gaming all my life. I've played most of all the classics throughout the last 3 decades. I consume everything from shooters, RPGs, walking simulators, Metroidvanias, platformers, strategy, roguelikes, collect-a-thons, extreme sports, horror, all with no particular preference in console.
But adventure games have always had a special place in my heart. Blade Runner was the first ever PC game I bought with my own money. Myst and it's sequel Riven took me the better half of a decade to finally finish. The Dig has transported me countless times to another world I can get utterly immersed in. And Grim Fandango still remains my favourite game (and story) of all time.
I learned to read english by playing these games. They helped me through rough times, they've helped me relax. They challenge me in ways almost no other games have managed to. And what I absolutely love, is that the genre keeps on evolving, while at the same time staying true to its roots. I adore adventure games. They will never die.

[REXanadu]

Mysterious Island
Mysterious
Myst


*Dead*


Edit: Also, seems like Adventure Games' death can be explained in the same way most saturated things in consumer products can: they made too much of the same thing too quickly in order to capitalize on a thing they could made but couldn't manage properly.

[RoninXDarknight]

Sam & Max, Day of the Tentacle, The Dig, Full Throttle, Indiana Jones, Monkey Island...those games were amazing. Younger me didn't care one bit that they were all pretty much the same formula; the different enough stories, characters and coats of paint were more than enough to hook me.

[steamcrazies]

Monkey Island soundtrack is godlike. Such a pleasure to watch any video where it plays as a background.

[KittyKatty]

"Those who forget history, are *doomed to repeat it".*
Telltale games should have remembered history...

[EvilCoffeeInc]

I absolutely love the Myst series, and I think even to this day it features something a lot of other adventure games lack. I loved how the puzzle-solving in Myst was always hinged on the player trying to make sense of some alien control mechanism or some understanding some piece of obscure machinery through experimentation. The designs, especially in Exile, relied on combining well-understood design affordances like levers and cranks and scales with unexpected dynamic effects, and I thought that was awesome.

[Lugmillord]

Man, these Hi-Res games have phenomenal, real-life graphics.

[nielymoon]

I feel like it's always a misstep to talk about the point and click adventure genre without talking about the Nancy Drew games. Those game have been coming out pretty consistently for the past 20 years, bar the delays the most recent game has faced. Like yeah, adventure games fell out of the mainstream, but the genre didn't really "die"; it just became more niche, and the games that were being made weren't aimed towards capital g Gamers

[DokuDoki]

I always heard the "adventure games" being referred to specifically as "point and click adventure" instead. This is actually the first time I see it being referred to as adventure games.

[AkuTenshiiZero]

No mention of the _Quest for Glory_ series? I really, really do wish that series would get more attention, they combined the classic point-and-click gameplay with RPG mechanics and a class system so your approach to puzzles varied based on your character build. A thief could pick a lock, but a magic user would cast an Open spell, or a fighter would just smash the lock with brute strength. Every puzzle could be approached in different ways so that each of the three archetypes could solve them differently. There's a spiritual successor on Steam called _Heroine's Quest, _ I highly recommend it. There's also a phenomenal free fan remake of _Quest for Glory 2, _ and all the official games are on GoG. Seriously, these games were amazing and deserve more of a following.

[Camkitsune]

I feel like Adventure Game Puzzle Logic could (and should) be an episode all on its own; the Adventure Genre had a lot of brilliant examples of badly designed puzzles, and not just because they borked your save without warning.
Some common offenses:
-having to die to work out what to do next (King's Quest V)
-doing things no sane/decent person ever would (Mystery of the Druids),
-using gamey logic: your character doesn't have a clearly defined objective so you just wander around solving puzzles (happened a lot in King's Quest VI)
-using moon logic (The infamous cat-hair moustache disguise from Gabriel Knight 4),
-being incredibly tedious (The sliding block puzzles that just about everyone thought were a good idea).

[kgoblin]

Few notes from someone who lived thru both the classic adventure game heyday and the eventual decline:


Text vs. Point-&-Click: so, while obviously point-&-click is much, much more accessible, and recognizing that the old text based implementations were hella limited; the thing is point-&-click directly led to the pixel hunting trope, and the negative stereotype of randomly combining everything in your inventory as a means of brute-forcing your way thru insensible & illogical puzzles. You couldn't really pixel hunt with the old text interfaces... you had to actually observe the game environment, and make guesses about what could be interacted with/acquired and how. Perhaps if developers hadn't been quite so quick to move en-mass to the point-&-click style the classic genre might have had a bit more legs.


It's also notable that data storage was one hell of a massive technical problem back in the day... it negatively impacted a lot of western JRPG releases, where lots of dialog/narrative had to be cut from localized releases b/c they simply couldn't store all the raw translated text in a non-iconographic script... and it is safe to say it probably had an effect on narrative design for the story-heavy adventure genre too. A hypothetical modern-day remake of the AGI-engine style games would be more than capable of avoiding the limits of the original genre entries.. with the primary limit really being paying the folks writing the material.


Competing genres: One aspect to emphasize in particular is that the RPG genre... both CRPGs & JRPGs, was largely contemporary with the classic adventure game heyday... and to put it simply by the time the 90s rolled around RPG games were delivering an equivalent quality experience in terms of narrative but paired with more interesting and complex gameplay as well as graphics. In the video you showed titles like Metal Gear Solid and Ocarina of Time.. which were all late 90s/early 00s... but the thing is that the killer combination of tactical gameplay + deep narrative had already been achieved way back in 1991/92 with titles ala Final Fantasy 4 & Paladin's Quest... FF4 especially as that game already had optional side quests, which have never really been a thing with the very linear narrative of classic adventure games.


It didn't decline everywhere: The classic iterations of the genre survived significantly longer in Europe, something which in turn actually led into the indie revival. A lot of the adventure-game focused indie studios are German & French... and there is a reason for that.

[qwerty]

Adventure games are a dead genre?
OBJECTION!

[hrgrhrhhr]

"For the time, Colossal Cave Adventure was amazing"
Still is honestly

[andrew_ray]

Glad Loom (1990) at least got a mention. Brian Moriarty (who was my academic advisor at college) really did a great job with it. It's a game in which most of the traditional point-and-click puzzles are replaced with a musical distaff that you played various tunes on to produce different magical effects. I remember him saying (I think only half in jest) that Ocarina of Time had stolen this mechanic from him.

[michalgrochu]

I really hope to see Syberia in the following episode!

[Inlelendri]

Think I've been waiting and hoping for such an episode for ages - and now I get a two-parter! Brilliant! Thank you!

[WeissnichtsVomLeben]

Very enjoyable video, thanks.

I wonder if you'll talk about daedalic in the next video. They somehow managed to become a decently sized publisher by making classic adventure games in the 2010s.

[jasonblalock]

5:20 Not to nitpick, but it was Infocom who developed the first easily-portable universal game engine for their text adventures, and became huge thanks to it. They were the real innovators there, before Sierra followed in their footsteps and eventually overtook them. For that matter, everything you said about Sierra and LucasArts cranking out huge numbers of very samey games in the 90s also totally applies to Infocom in the 80s. History really repeated itself with those companies.