Adventure

Baf's Guide

The original. What more can be said? This was the first adventure game; the whole genre is named after it. Without it, Infocom would have been just another maker of business software, Sierra On-line would be primarily known for adaptations of coin-op videogames, and Volker Blasius would have a life. A detailed description of this game's history and significance can be found in Graham Nelson's "The Craft of Adventure".

Ignoring the profound historical significance for a moment, it's a treasure hunt in a cave, like most of the early adventures (including Zork). It has a verb-noun parser, minimal detail, two big annoying mazes, magic words, nonsense puzzles, and occasional death without warning. None of this matters. Download it anyway. You cannot consider yourself a true adventurer until you've played this game.

There are many different versions of this game, some of which include additions by later authors. The original gave a total of 350 points. Later additions usually award a higher final score.

-- Carl Muckenhoupt

SPAG
[...] All in all, one might conclude from this that Adventure is the greatest Adventure game ever written, but this is not quite the case. It's continued popularity stems from a) its hauntingly compelling atmosphere, b) its colourful imagery, c) the fact that for many it was their first adventure game, and d) the fact that many people first played it 70's style. [...] (Graeme Cree)

[...] Overall, this is a great game. I recommend it to everyone who is interested in adventure games. [...] (Alex Freeman)

Just Adventure

Every so often an invention or an event comes along which changes our perception of the world forever.
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Gaming Enthusiast
It’s worth checking out if you feel nostalgic and despite the fact that it’s dated in so many ways, the playability didn’t suffer one bit.
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50 Years of Text Games, by Aaron A. Reed
Adventure begins without much explanation with a description of a forest, written in second person as if you are the one there seeing it. Rather than choose from a set of numbered options, as with nearly every previous game, the player is invited to type freeform one- or two-word English commands. “I WILL BE YOUR EYES AND HANDS,” the game’s instructions read: “DIRECT ME.” [...] It’s hard to appreciate today what a radical notion this was at the time.
[...]
The game’s text feels convincing because it was drawn from life. Will Crowther and his wife Patricia had been avid cavers [...]
[...]
Like many other computer users of the time, [Crowther] began to idly wonder if you could make something like D&D on the computer. In the fall of 1975, he decided to try.
[...]
[...] before [Crowther] logged out of his BBN account for the last time, he did something typical for hackers used to a culture of freely sharing programs [...] He put the unfinished Adventure in a public folder, where anyone browsing the ARPANET could find it.
One year later. 22-year-old Stanford grad student Don Woods stumbles across Crowther’s program and becomes intrigued.
[...]
While Crowther’s game was a clever hack, Woods made it closer to a working engine: a consistent simulation of a fictional space that could sensibly respond to a player exploring it.
[...]
Adventure was a clever program, but also the right program at the right time. It arrived just as regional clusters of hackers were merging into a single online community, and the tantalizing possibility of home computers was becoming a reality, along with the need for compelling software to run on them. [...] arguably its key innovation was to demonstrate one of the most powerful illusions a computer can create: transporting its user to another reality.
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5 star: (14) 4 star: (26) 3 star: (43) 2 star: (9) 1 star: (1)

Average Rating: Number of Reviews: 8 Write a review

Most Helpful Member Reviews

Yes, yes, I get it. Adventure was the game that started it all.

And there are SO MANY different versions of it, that it hardly seems possible to review or score it, considering you probably played the sub-optimal version.

I've played the two-word paser version, and the inform update.

The inform update is full of bugs. You can carry any number of things in the wicker cage, allowing you to bypass puzzles that might not let you carry certain items up certain areas by putting them in the cage. The scoring is off too, because if you carry a treasure in the cage to the "base" you get penalized when you TAKE the item out of the cage, then get the points BACK when you drop the item, stopping you from geting proper points.

Anyway, version aside, the game has its plusses and minuses.

The game is a cave crawl puzzle fest, except that everything is totally random and the answers to the puzzles are totally arbitrary. Everything is under-implemented. I had trouble catching a particular bird, and then, i just caught it. I imagine it was turned away by something that was in my inventory then and not now, or vice versa, but regardless, I was able to catch it at one point and not at another point. And your use for the bird is rediculous and there's no reason to believe the bird can be used for its indended purpose.

It keeps going. You have your mazes of passages, rooms with exists not clearly defined, multiple paths going to the same place, and the reverse direction doesn't always take you back where you started. Random enemies show up and attack you, for what appears to be no reason, and never seem to hit you, making their presence appear useless and annoying.

Much like Zork, you are dropped in the middle of nowehere with no clue as to what's going on. Had I never played Zork, i never would have assumed you need to put the treasures in the house. But since I played zork, I tried it. Yep, it works. And it's relevant.

I can only imagine the nightmare of beating this game with a limited parser, considering how frustrated I've become with even newer versions (which allowed you to bypass inventory limits with a wicker cage!).

Okay, okay. Adventure gave us PLUGH and XYZZY. But Infocom gave us BLORB and FROTZ. Adventure gave us Sierra Online (as the creators made games because they coldn't find more games like adventure), but I guess this is one of those games where "you just had to be there". As it is, I am finding myself having little patience with limited inventory, drop items in the maze and map it, and perform any random action you can think of to see if THAT works. Yes it was the first IF game EVER, and for that, it deserves to be played and deserves to be respected. The site wouldn't be here without adventure.

But you need to be a die-hard IF fan AND IF history buff if you're going to get a lot out of this game today. The same can probably be said for the Zork series.

I gave this game 3 stars. Compared to current standards, it really is terrible. But back when it was written, it was the best there was (the only there was). It gave us so many IF conventions we take for granted today (such as the dark room, and using compass directions to move!, inventory and LOOK commands), and people really need to play it if they want to see IF roots- just be ready to take a while, and have hints on hand!

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Adventure was the very first text adventure of all time. It inspired the genre and its name.

The point of the game is to gather a variety of treasures and bring them back to a small building. The game is pretty accurately based on the Mammoth Caves, which explains the mazes and the fact that exits and entrances sometimes don't match up exactly (i.e. going west and then east may not leave you where you started).

For me, the most enjoyable way to play this game was to keep it at a slow pace, going back to it time and again while playing other games. I kept a numbered list of every room with all of its exits to other rooms. This made the game much easier. After several weeks, I got to a point where I couldn't get any further for several days. I finally looked up a walkthrough for the last three or four puzzles.

Once you get all the treasures, there is an endgame that is surprisingly good; it seems more like a modern deconstruction of the game than the very first game of all.

I played the 350 point version, and I found the game incredibly enjoyable. I admit that I used the wicker cage bug (as mentioned in another review), where you can carry everything in the wicker cage. To get full points, you must remove the items from the cage outside of the building before placing them in there.

Every Interactive Fiction player should play this game because so many other games reference it heavily.

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I know some people who play and read these types of game today aren't a fan of this type of game. But really, this one did start it all. I played, learned, and liked the original two-word parser.

Really, even if you've read and played a lot of other types of IF, you really should find a way to play this one. Sure, it's a simple parser, but the adventure is fantastic. No, there's no huge storyline. But finding your way around and learning your way through this massive cave just can't be beat. Try it. Really.

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