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#adventuregames

23 posts10 participants0 posts today
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vga256

back in the mid-90s just prior to sierra's downfall into fmv and poorly funded titles (their sale to CUC international), the company started looking for low-risk low-profit income avenues.

in the post-doom FPS feeding frenzy, the bloom was off adventure games. they were expensive to produce, and their audience was shrinking fast.

one solution was recycling old software, and honestly, it was great for a 13 year old kid like me, because it meant that i could buy a "sierra game" for $10 instead of the $60-$80 i would normally have to pay for a flagship title

Crazy Nick's Software Picks were collections of mini-games taken from sierra adventures. there were several of them - LSL, King's Quest - I happened to find this Conquest of the Longbow pack at a pharmacy.

the games were *great* - Archery and Nine Men's Morris kept me absolutely occupied for weeks. I had no idea at the time that they were culled from a full sierra adventure, until I discovered it by accident in my twenties.

today i found my copy of the game, buried in another game box. it still has the greasy kid fingerprint from me eating a bag of Old Dutch (regular) chips while i played

A copy of Crazy Nick's Software Picks: Robin Hood's Games of Skill & Chance. It shows a screenshot of an archery game on the cover. A 3.5-inch diskette with the same label sits beside it.
#sierra#retroGaming#adventureGames
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vga256

it took me 10 separate failed attempts over a 25 year period, but i finally finished Gabriel Knight 1 tonight. 9 of those attempts were getting stuck/bored in the first hour of the game. this week i forced myself past day 2, and the story opened up quickly and became more interesting.

i won't comment on the game itself as that's purely a taste thing. but i am kind of fascinated that many AGS developers implicitly/explicitly chose this game as their model and prototype for adventure design, as opposed to many, many other games in the sierra catalogue.

i can totally understand the appeal of GK-style adventures - the formula is easy to follow along with, and provides bite-sized plots over a longer arc.

yet, i think we could have been led towards much more interactive/reactive designs if adventure designers had stopped lusting after pop movies and television. i guess i was always more excited about the literary genres that early text adventures experimented with. maybe some day we'll see (commercial) adventure game developers build games from a different foundation.

#adventureGames#gamedesign
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