One of the first games I remember playing, on the ZX Spectrum of course, was The Hobbit. I even played it before I read the book, and it was the inspiration for doing so. The Hobbit, and other text adventures like it, were games that demanded a certain level of literacy from the player, and rewarded development of language skills. Lesser titles of the same genre often demanded not so much literacy as a semi-psychic ability to guess what the programmer had been thinking at the time of writing the game, which was a frustration. I remember spending ages stuck on a rainy street in the game 221B Baker Street before finally working out that I needed to, “Hail Hansom Cab.”
The adventure genre eventually grew up of course, and through one-wrong-decision-and-you’re-deadfests like Gold Rush graphics were added and the narratives became more complex and original. This is a genre that has always demanded that the player reads and takes note of the story as it evolves, even when the text was replaced by speech in titles released around the supposed death of the genre, no pun intended, such as my personal favourite, Grim Fandango. Now here was a title that offered so much intrigue for the player, and references such disparate elements as the Mexican Day of the Dead, and the film noir genre. There’s a great deal of inspiration for wider cultural learning just wrapped in that game alone.
More recently the genre has been given something of a resurrection in the form of Professor Layton and the Curious Village for the Nintendo DS. Sadly not available on these shores yet, Prof Layton takes the player through an intriguing story that demands a lot of reading, although maybe not as much as the average JRPG, and a great deal of puzzle solving to boot.
I’ll close by pointing you towards a few tools that enable you to create your own adventure games:
http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/ - “Adventure Game Studio (AGS for short) allows you to create your own point-and-click adventure games, similar to the early 90’s Sierra and Lucasarts adventures. It consists of an easy-to-use development environment, and run-time engine.”
http://www.allitis.com/agast/index.html - “If you’ve ever wanted to create graphic adventures, like The Secret of Monkey Island from LucasFilm Games, King’s Quest from Sierra On-line, or Myst from Cyan, there’s never been a better time than now to get started!”
http://www.hungrysoftware.com/ - “SLUDGE has always been great. But now, it’s also a programming language. SLUDGE (standing for Scripting Language for Unhindered Development of a Gaming Environment) is a system by which anyone (within reason) can make an adventure game.”
http://www.visionaire2d.net/index.php?newlang=english - “Visionaire is software that enables you to create your own adventure game without even having experience in a programming language! The only thing it takes is creativity.”
http://dead-code.org/home/ - “Wintermute Engine Development Kit is a set of tools for creating and running graphical “point&click” adventure games, both traditional 2D ones and modern 2.5D games (3D characters on 2D backgrounds).”
