Early development

The first adventure games to appear were text adventures (later called interactive fiction), which typically use a verb-noun parser to interact with the user. These evolved from early mainframe titles like Hunt the Wumpus (Gregory Yob) and Adventure (Crowther and Woods) into commercial games which were playable on personal computers, such as Infocom's widely popular Zork series. Some companies that were important in bringing out text adventure games were Adventure International, Infocom, Level 9 Computing, Magnetic Scrolls and Melbourne House, with Infocom being the most well known.
Most text adventures tell the story as if the player himself inhabited the game world. The games did not specify any details about the protagonist, allowing the player to imagine him- or herself as the avatar.

Adventure (1975-1977)

Teletype output of Will Crowther's original version of Adventure.

In the mid 1970s, programmer, caver, and role-player William Crowther developed a program called Adventure. Crowther, an employee at Bolt, Beranek and Newman^[35] (a Boston company involved with ARPANET routers) used the company's PDP-10 to create the game, which required 300 kilobytes of memory.^[35][36][37]
The game used a text interface to create an interactive adventure through an underground cave system, based on part of the Mammoth Cave system in Kentucky.^[35] Crowther's work was later modified and expanded by programmer Don Woods using the SAIL computer at Stanford,^[35] and the game became wildly popular among early computer enthusiasts, spreading across the nascent ARPANET in the late 1970s.
The combination of realistic cave descriptions and fantastical elements proved immensely appealing, and defined the adventure game genre for decades to come. Swords, magic words, puzzles involving objects, and vast underground realms would all become staples of the text adventure genre.
The "Armchair adventure" soon spread beyond college campuses as the microcomputing movement gained steam. Numerous variations of Adventure appeared throughout the late 1970s and early 1980s, with some of these later versions being re-christened Colossal Adventure or Colossal Caves.^[36][38][39]

Adventure International (1978-1985)

One of the many fans of the Colossal Cave was programmer Scott Adams. Upon his first introduction to Adventure, Adams spent almost ten days traversing the game before he achieved Adventurer Grandmaster status,^[37][40] the title bestowed on those who scored a perfect 350 in Crowther and Woods' version.^[41]
Once he had completed the game, Adams began to wonder how a game like Adventure could be developed on a home computer like his TRS-80.^[42] The main obstacle was that home computers such as the TRS-80 did not actually have sufficient memory to run a large game like Adventure.^[42] Adams worked around this limitation by developing a high-level language and an interpreter written in BASIC, an approach that would also allow code to be reused to develop further adventure games.^[37][42]
In 1978, Adams founded Adventure International with his wife Alexis in order to sell his games. His first game, Adventureland, was a version of Adventure for the TRS-80 that would become the first commercially sold adventure game.^[43] His second game, Pirate Adventure, was an original game in a similar style to Adventure—its source code, written in BASIC, was published in the December 1980 issue of Byte magazine.^[40][43] It wasn't until his third game, Mission Impossible, that Adams began programming in assembly language to improve the speed of his software.
Adventure International went on to produce a total of twelve adventure games before a downturn in the industry led to the company's bankruptcy in 1985.^[44]
In 1982, David Peugh discovered a print out of the original source code for the Adventure game on ARPANET while visiting the Stanford computer lab. At the time, he was working at the computer retailer Computerland in Tacoma, Washington. As an added value to prospective customers David Peugh modified the original program content to work on all of the computers that Computerland company sold. He offered each customer a special back door magical word to jump to different locations in the game. The password was "XYZZY" The Adventure game continued to be a free program passed on till he inserted in to the commercial retail realm, giving it away free to customers who bought computers from him. Adventure was one of the first games ever to be played on many of these systems. In the following months Microsoft Adventure was released at a price of $49.95 in a plastic folder shrink wrapped on 8 or 5 1/4 inch floppies. Interestingly, inside the Microsoft Adventure program code were the magic words XYZZY.

Infocom (1979-1989)

Dave Lebling and Marc Blank were students at MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science when they discovered Crowther and Woods' Adventure.^[45] Together with Tim Anderson and Bruce Daniels they began to develop a similar game, Zork, which also started life on a PDP-10 minicomputer and was distributed across the ARPANET. On graduation the students, together with their group leader Albert Vezza, decided to form a company to market Zork for home computers,^[45] and on 22 June 1979 Tim Anderson, Joel Berez, Marc Blank, Mike Broos, Scott Cutler, Stu Galley, Dave Lebling, J. C. R. Licklider, Chris Reeve, and Albert Vezza incorporated Infocom.^[46]
The developers faced the same difficulties as Scott Adams in porting Zork to microcomputers: The PDP-10 version, which would reach a megabyte in size, was enormous for the time, and the Apple II and the TRS-80, the potential targets, each had only 16 kb of RAM. They solved this problem by breaking up the game into three episodes, and developing ZIL (Zork Implementation Language), which could function on any computer by using Infocom's Z-machine, the first virtual machine used in a commercial product,^[47] as an intermediary.
In November 1980 the new Zork I: The Great Underground Empire was made available for the PDP-11; One month later, it was released for the TRS-80, with more than 1,500 copies sold between that date and September 1981. That same year, Bruce Daniels finalized the Apple II version and more than 6,000 additional copies were sold. Zork I would go on to sell over a million copies.
The company continued developing text adventure games even as it opened a department for the development of professional software, a department which would never be profitable. High-quality games, with massive, intelligent plots, unequaled syntax analyzers, and meticulous documentation as integral parts of the game, succeeded in all genres.
The writer Douglas Adams produced two games with Infocom, the first based on his popular Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series and a lesser known adventure game called Bureaucracy, inspired by the difficulties he encountered in moving houses.
With the power of microcomputers increasing and the demand for graphics (which it refused to include in its games until 1987), Infocom saw sales decline and in 1989, having been swallowed up by Activision in 1986, the Infocom division had shrunk to a mere ten employees, compared to 100 at its peak. Although later titles were marketed under the Infocom brand, the Infocom division was shut down, and games developed after 1989 would have no link with the original team.
The demise of Infocom signalled the end of the commercial age of Interactive Fiction, and text parsers were rarely seen in games after 1989. Despite this, the low barrier to entry has ensured that a vibrant and creative community of IF authors continues to thrive on the Internet, using languages such as Inform, which generates files that can be read by Infocom's own Z-machine.

Graphical development

Graphics were introduced in 1980 by a new company called On-Line Systems, which later changed its name to Sierra On-Line. Early graphic adventures, such as Sierra's Mystery House (1980), employed basic vector graphics, but these soon gave way to bitmap graphics drawn by professional artists. Examples include Koei's Night Life and Danchi Tsuma no Yuwaku (1982), Sherwood Forest (1982), Yuji Horii's Portopia Serial Murder Case (1983), The Return of Heracles (which faithfully portrayed Greek mythology) by Stuart Smith (1983), Dale Johnson's Masquerade (1983), Antonio Antiochia's Transylvania (1982, re-released in 1984), Sierra's King's Quest (1984), and Adventure Construction Set (1985), one of the early hits of Electronic Arts.
A number of games were released on 8-bit home computer formats in the 1980s that advanced on the text adventure style originated with games like Colossal Cave Adventure and, in a similar manner to Sierra, added moveable (often directly-controllable) characters to a parser or input-system similar to traditional adventures. Examples of this are Gargoyle Games's Heavy on the Magick (1986) which has a text-input system with an animated display screen, and the later Magic Knight games such as Spellbound (1985) which uses a window-menu system to allow for text-adventure style input.
From 1984, a new kind of graphic adventure emerged, following the launch of the Apple Macintosh with its point-and-click interface. The first adventure game to take advantage of the Mac's point-and-click interface was the innovative but relatively unknown Enchanted Scepters released the same year, followed in 1985 with the ICOM Simulations game Deja Vu that completely banished the text parser for a point-and-click interface. That same year, the NES version of Chunsoft's Portopia Serial Murder Case worked around the NES's lack of keyboard by taking advantage of its D-pad to replace the text parser of the original 1983 PC-6001 version with a cursor interface for the NES version.^[48] The following year, Square's Suishō no Dragon on the NES took it a step further with its introduction of visual icons and animated scenes.^[49][50] In 1987, ICOM's well-known second follow-up Shadowgate was released, and LucasArts also entered the field with Maniac Mansion, a point-and-click adventure that gained a strong following. A prime example of LucasArts' work is the Monkey Island series.
The introduction of such high-quality bitmap graphics required more substantial storage capacity with many adventure games requiring several diskettes for installation, which would be the case until the CD-ROM made its appearance.

Sierra (1979-1999)

After playing through Adventure on a Teletype terminal, and unable to find many other examples of the fledgling genre,^[51] Roberta Williams conceived her own, a detective story inspired by Agatha Christie's novel And Then There Were None and the non-linear gameplay of the board game Clue.^[51] After working on the design for a month,^[51] she was able to convince her husband, Ken Williams, to stop work on the FORTRAN compiler he was developing in order to work on the game on his Apple II computer.^[51]
Originally known as Hi-Res Adventure,^[51][52] Mystery House was the first graphical adventure game,^[51][52] and featured vector graphics of each environment alongside an unexceptional two-word parser.^[52] Mystery House sold well and although Ken believed that the gaming market would be less of a growth market than the professional software market,^{[citation needed]} he and Roberta persevered with games. Thus, in 1980 the Williamses founded On-Line Systems,^[52] which would later become Sierra On-Line.
Sierra soon took things further. Until this point adventure games were in the first person; images presented the décor as seen through the eyes of the player. Williams's company would introduce a new feature in the King's Quest series: a game in the third person. Taking advantage of the techniques developed in action games which had progressed in parallel, Ken introduced an animated character who represented the player in the game and whom the player controlled. With the 3D Animated Adventures, a new standard was born, and nearly all the industry latched onto it. The commands were still entered on the keyboard and analyzed by a syntax interpreter, as with text adventure games.
Soon after, Sierra had multiple successful series of adventure games running, including King's Quest, Police Quest, Space Quest, Leisure Suit Larry, and Hero's Quest (Quest for Glory), with each containing numerous games. A few years after these series had started, the classic graphics above the command cursor was fully replaced with "point and click" game-play and VGA graphics. Other notable series include Phantasmagoria and Shivers; Sierra's last and most critically acclaimed series was the Gabriel Knight series, which began in 1993 and ended with Sierra's last adventure game in 1999.
Sierra would develop new games and push the boundaries of adventure gaming until its purchase by Cendant in 1998. Then in 1998, Cendant sold off their entire interactive software branch for $1 billion to Havas Interactive, a subsidiary of Vivendi Universal.
Sierra pursued technologies for their games (such as hand-drawn backgrounds, rotoscoped animation, and in-game video) that were more advanced than most other genres at the time. However, the release of the PlayStation marked the end of the adventure game era; as 3D became the dominant graphics format, the mostly 2D adventure market began to shrink.
Through its almost 20 year involvement with the adventure game business, Sierra employed several notable game designers, including Roberta Williams, Jane Jensen, Al Lowe, Scott Murphy, Jeff Tunnell, and Lori Ann and Corey Cole.

Japanese adventures (1982-present)

Some of Japan's earliest adventure games were erotic bishoujo games developed by Koei.^[53] In 1982, they released Night Life, the first commercial erotic computer game.^[54] It was a graphic adventure,^[55] with sexually explicit images.^[54] That same year, they released another erotic title, Danchi Tsuma no Yuwaku (Seduction of the Condominium Wife), which was an early adventure game with colour graphics, owing to the eight-color palette of the NEC PC-8001 computer. It became a hit, helping Koei become a major software company.^[53] Other now-famous companies such as Enix, Square and Nihon Falcom also produced similar erotic games in the early 1980s before they became famous for their role-playing video games. In some of their early erotic games, the erotic content is meaningfully integrated into a thoughtful and mature storyline, though others often used it as a flimsy excuse for pornography.^[54]
The most famous early Japanese adventure game, however, was the 1983 murder mystery game Portopia Serial Murder Case, developed by Yūji Horii (of Dragon Quest fame) and published by Enix. The game was viewed in a first-person perspective, followed a first-person narrative, and featured colour graphics. Originally released for the PC-6001, the player interacts with the game using a verb-noun parser which requires typing precise commands with the keyboard; finding the exact words to type is considered part of the riddles that must be solved.^[48] The game was well-received in Japan for allowing multiple ways to achieve objectives, its well-told storyline, and its surprising twist ending.^[54] Hideo Kojima also praised the game for its mystery, drama, humor, 3D dungeons, for providing a proper background and explanation behind the murderer's motives, and expanding the potential of video games.^[56] The game has also been compared to the later-released Shadowgate where the player must examine and collect objects, and find their true purpose later on.^[57] According to Square Enix, Portopia was "the first real detective adventure" game, and was ported to the NES in 1985.^[58] With no keyboard, the NES version, developed by Chunsoft, replaced the verb-noun parser with a menu list of fourteen set commands selectable with the gamepad and introduced a cursor that can be moved on the screen using the D-pad to look for clues and hotspots, similar to a point-and-click interface.^[48]
In 1986, Square released the science fiction adventure game Suishō no Dragon for the NES console. The game featured several innovations, including the use of animation in many of the scenes rather than still images,^[49] and an interface resembling that of a point-and-click interface for a console, like Portopia, but making use of visual icons rather than text-based ones to represent various actions. Like the NES version of Portopia, it featured a cursor that could be moved around the screen using the D-pad to examine the scenery, though the cursor in Suishō no Dragon was also used to click on the action icons.^[49][50] Sega's Anmitsu Hime: From Amakara Castle, released in 1987,^[59] was an adventure game with some platform game segments. The adventure game segments were puzzle-oriented and played in a side-scrolling view where the player has direct control over the character. Originally based on the Anmitsu Hime anime, an edited version based on Alex Kidd was later released in 1989 as Alex Kidd in High-Tech World.^[60] The Goonies II, also released in 1987, was a first-person adventure game with some side-scrolling action game segments. The game featured a non-linear open world environment similar to Metroid.^[61]
A distinct form of Japanese adventure game that eventually emerged is the visual novel, which uses many conventions that are less popular in the West. They are almost universally first-person, and driven primarily by dialog. They also tend to use menu-based interactions and navigation, with point and click implementations that are quite different from Western adventure games. Inventory-based puzzles of the sort that form the basis of classic Western adventures, are quite rare. Logic puzzles like those found in Myst are likewise unusual. Because of this, Japanese visual novels tend to be streamlined, and often quite easy, relying more on storytelling than challenge to keep players interested.^[62]
Hideo Kojima (of Metal Gear fame) was inspired by Portopia to enter the video game industry,^[56] and produce his own adventure games. After completing the stealth game Metal Gear, his first graphic adventure was released by Konami the following year: Snatcher (1988), an ambitious cyberpunk detective novel graphic adventure that was highly regarded at the time for pushing the boundaries of video game storytelling, cinematic cut scenes, and mature content.^[63] It also featured a post-apocalyptic science fiction setting, an amnesiac protagonist, and some light gun shooter segments. It was praised for its graphics, soundtrack, high quality writing comparable to a novel, voice acting comparable to a film or radio drama, and in-game computer database with optional documents that flesh out the game world. The Sega CD version of Snatcher was for a long time the only major visual novel game to be released in America, where it, despite a Mature rating limiting its accessibility,^[62] gained a cult following.^[64]
Following Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake, Kojima produced his next graphic adventure, Policenauts (1994), a point-and-click adventure notable for being an early example of extensive voice recording in video games.^[65] It also featured a hard science fiction setting, a theme revolving around space exploration, a plot inspired by the ancient Japanese tale of Urashima Taro, and some occasional full-motion video cut scenes. The gameplay was largely similar to Snatcher, but with the addition of a point-and-click interface and some first-person shooter segments. Policenauts also introduced summary screens, which act to refresh the player's memory of the plot upon reloading a save, an element Kojima would later use in Metal Gear Solid. The PlayStation version of Policenauts could also read the memory card and give some easter egg dialogues if a save file of Konami's dating sim Tokimeki Memorial is present, a technique Kojima would also later use in Metal Gear Solid.^[64] From 1997 to 1999, Kojima developed the three Tokimeki Memorial Drama Series titles, which were adaptations of Tokimeki Memorial in a visual novel adventure game format.^[66]
In 1995, Human Entertainment's Clock Tower: The First Fear was a hybrid between a point-and-click graphic adventure and a survival horror game, revolving around survival against a deadly stalker known as Scissorman that chased players throughout the game. The success of Resident Evil in 1996 was followed by the release of the survival horror graphic adventures Clock Tower and Clock Tower II: The Struggle Within for the PlayStation. The Clock Tower games proved to be hits, capitalizing on the success of Resident Evil, though both games stayed true to the graphic-adventure gameplay of the original Clock Tower rather than following the lead of Resident Evil.^[67]
From the early 1990s, Chunsoft, the developer for the NES version of Portopia, began producing a series of acclaimed visual novels known as the Sound Novels series, which include Kamaitachi no Yoru (1994), Machi (1998), 428: Fūsa Sareta Shibuya de (2008), and 999: Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors (2010). From the late 1990s, a number of Japanese adventure games began using a 3D third-person direct control format, particularly on consoles like the Dreamcast and PlayStation 2. Examples include Sega's Shenmue series (beginning in 1999), Konami's Shadow of Memories (2001), and Cing's Glass Rose (2003).
In recent years, Japanese visual novel games have been released in the West more frequently, particularly on the Nintendo DS handheld following the success of mystery-solving titles such as Capcom's Ace Attorney series (which began on the Game Boy Advance in 2001), Cing's Hotel Dusk series (beginning in 2006),^[62] and Level-5's Professor Layton series (beginning in 2007).^[68] English fan translations of visual novels such as Square's Radical Dreamers (a 1996 side story to the Chrono series of role-playing video games) and Key's Clannad (2005) have also been made available in recent years.