LucasArts (1986-2000)

In 1987 a programmer named Ron Gilbert working for the company Lucasfilm Games—which has since become LucasArts—created the script-writing system SCUMM which used a point-and-click interface similar to ICOM Simulations' MacVenture games first introduced in 1985. Instead of having to type a command to the syntax analyzer, this system was controlled by means of text icons. To interact with his environment, the player clicked on an order, on an icon representing an object in his inventory, or on a part of the image. This approach was first used by LucasArts for the game Maniac Mansion to great effect.
LucasArts would come to differentiate itself from its main competitor, the giant Sierra, by rethinking certain adventure game concepts to improve playability. Gone was the possibility to die during the course of the game and everything was done to ensure that the player was never completely stuck. Finally, LucasArts abandoned the system of points indicating the player's progress in the adventure. Many adventure games from other companies followed LucasArt's lead in these changes.
Gilbert's attempts, Maniac Mansion and Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders, however, remained in 16 colors (though the FM Towns version of Zak was 256 color), and the point-and-click engine still had vestiges of text parsing, since the player would still have to construct sentences using clickable keywords combined with objects in the game. It was The Secret Of Monkey Island that was finally a complete work, with 256 colors, a more modern point-and-click engine, a dialogue system with optional responses, puzzles solved with items, original graphics, atmosphere music, and a characteristic sense of humor. Above all, the script was written as for a film (which could be done in-house) and the dialogue and inventory served the needs of the script. The 1993 release of Day of the Tentacle, a remarkable success, began a line of cartoon-style games, including the very influential Sam & Max Hit the Road as well as the acclaimed Full Throttle, which also heralded the beginning of the end of the Golden Age of adventure games.
Steven Spielberg collaborated with LucasArts in the creation of The Dig—a science fiction adventure game that the director had envisioned turning into a film.
Taking advantage of advances in action games and integrating an engine similar to those of first-person shooters, the company took a new turn in 1998 with the game Grim Fandango, where it abandoned the cartoon style and its SCUMM scripting environment for a new 3D game system named GrimE.
Following the 2000 release of Escape From Monkey Island, LucasArts would not publish another adventure game for more than eight years, canceling sequels of Full Throttle (Full Throttle: Hell on Wheels) and Sam & Max (Sam & Max: Freelance Police) that were already in development.

Cyan Worlds (1987-present)

Cyan, later Cyan Worlds, were among the first developers to take advantage of the CD-ROM. Their first game, a simple children's adventure game called The Manhole, became the first computer game to use the medium in 1989. In 1993, Cyan released Myst, a first-person adventure that used the extra storage capacity of the CD-ROM to include pre-rendered three-dimensional graphics, video, and audio. Despite being one of the first games to be published solely on CD-ROM, thereby requiring a CD-ROM drive,^[69][70] the game would go on to become highly successful.^[71]
Myst was an atypical game for the time, with no clear goals, little personal or object interaction, and a greater emphasis on exploration, and on scientific and mechanical puzzles. Part of the game's success was because it did not appear to be aimed at an adolescent male audience, but instead a mainstream adult audience. Myst held the record for computer game sales for seven years—it sold over nine million copies on all platforms—a feat not surpassed until the release of The Sims in 2000.^[71]

For much of the 1980s, adventure games were one of the most popular types of computer games produced. However, their US market share drastically declined in the mid-1990s; action games took a greater share of the US market, particularly first person shooters such as Doom and Half-Life which progressively began featuring strong, story-structured solo games. This slump in popularity led many publishers and developers to see adventure games as financially unfeasible in comparison. Text adventures met the same fate much earlier, but their simplicity has allowed them to thrive as non-commercially developed interactive fiction.
Few recent commercial adventure games have been hits in the US but they are still very popular in Europe (95% of all adventures released in US are in fact translated European products). It has been suggested that this is because the "average" gamer today was weaned on console video games and first person shooters rather than the "traditional" computer games cherished by the original crop of adventure gaming enthusiasts. Another explanation offered states that MMORPGs, which offer a persistent multiplayer world, have at least partially supplanted the genre.
Still another possible cause of the genre's downturn may lie with the nature of 3D graphics themselves, which for much of the 90's and early 2000s tended to be more oriented toward fast movement than graphical detail. Conversely, however, if a game were to implement more detailed but static imagery, this could be perceived as technologically regressive. Some question therefore exists of the adventure game making a comeback with recent advances in technology.
Adventure games have ceased to be the flagship titles they once were, and high profile publishers like Sierra Entertainment and LucasArts have either disappeared or shifted towards publishing titles developed by other companies. However, adventure games continue to be made in the 2000s, primarily outside North America where the genre is still popular. Games such as The Longest Journey by Funcom as well as Amerzone and Syberia, both conceived by Benoît Sokal and developed by Microïds, with rich classical elements of the genre still garnered high critical acclaims. The Myst series came to a close in September 2005 with the release of Myst V: End of Ages by its original developer, Cyan Worlds. (A possible exception to this is Cyan's Myst Online.) Adventure games based on the Nancy Drew books continue to be published by Her Interactive, comprising a series of twenty titles produced since 1998.
Similar to the fate of interactive fiction, conventional graphical adventure games have continued to thrive in the amateur scene. This has been most prolific with the tool Adventure Game Studio. Some notable AGS games include those by Ben Croshaw (namely the Chzo Mythos), Ben Jordan: Paranormal Investigator, Time Gentlemen, Please! and Soviet Unterzoegersdorf. Adobe Flash is also a popular tool, known for adventures such as MOTAS and the escape the room genre entries.

New directions

Although traditional adventure games are rare today in the US market, action-adventure games that combine elements of adventure games with action games are quite common. There are also similarities between adventure and role-playing games, particularly those in a more modern, story- and character-based mold. Console role-playing games have generally been quite focused on plot and story, thanks in part to the success of the Final Fantasy series (1987–present), while computer role-playing games in this vein have also been published more frequently since the success of Baldur's Gate in 1998.
Sega's ambitious Shenmue (1999) attempted to redefine the genre with its realistic 3D graphics, third-person perspective, direct character control interface, sandbox open-world gameplay, quick time events, and fighting game elements. Its creator Yu Suzuki originally touted it as a new kind of adventure game, "FREE" ("Full Reactive Eyes Entertainment"), offering an unparalleled level of player freedom, giving them full reign to explore expansive interactive city environments with its own day-night cycles and changing weather, and interact with fully-voiced non-player characters going about their daily routines. Despite being a commercial failure, the game was critically acclaimed and has remained influential.^{[72][73][74][75]}

Indigo Prophecy, released in 2005, was noted for its innovative gameplay.

There have since been a number of 3D third-person adventure games with direct character control interfaces, such as Sega's Shenmue II (2001), Konami's Shadow of Memories (2001), and several Quantic Dream titles such as Omikron: The Nomad Soul (1999), Fahrenheit (Indigo Prophecy in North America) (2005) and Heavy Rain (2010). In addition, some other adventure games have also attempted to adopt aspects of first-person shooter games in an attempt to modernize the genre, such as with Frictional Games's Penumbra series (2007–2008) and Amnesia: The Dark Descent (2010). On the other hand, other adventure games have moved away from traditional game conventions, and more closely resemble interactive stories,^[1] a major example being the visual novel genre that is popular in Japan.
There is something of a revival of the adventure game online, in both a fairly traditional style, such as the mouse-controlled text games on Rinkworks and Mystery Of Time And Space, and in 3-dimensional games, such as Crimson Room. This had led to the creation of a genre called escape the room or room-escape. Games are usually created with Adobe Flash. A parallel can be drawn with "Behind Closed Doors" by John Wilson of Zenobi Software, a popular 1980s text adventure series for the ZX Spectrum, where the object was only to escape one single location, such as a bathroom. Most of the current room-escape games consist of several locations which together make up one room.
In October 2006, online game company Telltale Games, made up primarily of ex-employees from LucasArts, released their first installment of Sam & Max: Season One. This episodic game series utilized 3D graphics, but was played in the 'point and click' style of older LucasArts titles. It was designed to be exclusively distributed online, and featured characters from the classic game Sam & Max Hit the Road. The series was successful, leading to a retail release of the full season for PC and Wii, and the development of a second series, Sam & Max: Season Two. Telltale was also responsible for a two-game series based on Jeff Smith's Bone comics and a series of five games based on the Homestar Runner flash cartoons.
A further resurgence in adventure games was seen due to recent changes at Lucasarts. On the first day of the 2009 Electronic Entertainment Expo, Lucasarts announced that they would be releasing both a special edition of The Secret of Monkey Island as well as working with Telltale Games to create an episodic series Tales of Monkey Island. In early July 2009, Lucasarts announced that it would supporting digital distribution of its back catalog of titles, including its classic adventure games, through services such as Steam, and has announced it will further consider porting these titles to mobile devices such as iPhones. These efforts were backed by Lucasarts' new president, Darrell Rodriguez, who has been said to be "very big on adventure games".^[76] Lucasarts has stated that digital distribution helps to remove the barrier to reproducing these titles, and hopes that they will attract a new audience to these games.^[77] The move was shortly followed by Activision who offered the King's Quest and Space Quest collections from Sierra also for digital distribution.^[78]
The Nintendo DS, with its unique touch screen and dual-screen features, has sparked a renewed interest in pure adventure game content and a resurgence in the genre's popularity,^[62][79][80] following the 2005 releases of Capcom's courtroom game Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney (originally a 2001 GameBoy Advance game) and Cing's Another Code: Two Memories as well as the 2006 release of Cing's Hotel Dusk: Room 215.^[62][80][81] GameSpot has credited Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney in particular for revitalizing the adventure game genre.^[82] The success of the Ace Attorney series was followed soon after by the even greater success of Level-5's Professor Layton in 2007. Both have since become some of the best selling adventure game franchises, with Ace Attorney selling over 3.9 million units worldwide and Professor Layton selling over 9.5 million units worldwide.^[68] Their success has led to an increase in Japanese adventure games, primarily visual novels, being localized for Western release, including KID's Ever 17: The Out of Infinity (2002), Marvelous Entertainment's Lux-Pain (2008), Cing's Last Window: The Secret of Cape West (2009), Chunsoft's 999: Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors (2010), and Capcom's Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective (2010).
Nintendo's Wii Remote is also regarded as being well-suited for the genre, and could see some ground-breaking releases in that vein for the Wii,^[79] such as Capcom's Zack & Wiki: Quest for Barbaros' Treasure (2007),^[83] Eidos Interactive's So Blonde (2008), and Cing's Another Code: R – A Journey into Lost Memories (2009). The Ace Attorney series was also ported to the Wii in 2009 and 2010. Adventure games are also seen as ideal games for mobile platforms such as the iPhone, where the use of a touch screen to interact with the game provides new directions for such games, much like the Nintendo DS.^[79] The introduction of larger and more powerful touch screen devices like the iPad are also seen as a boon to adventure games, allowing for more detailed graphics and better controls and precision over smaller touchscreen units, and a better sense of immersion and interactivity compared to personal computer or console versions.^[84][85]

Emulation

Many classic adventure games cannot run on modern operating systems. Early adventure games were developed for home computers, most of which are not in use today. There are emulators available for modern computers that allow these old games to be played on the latest operating systems. One Open Source project called ScummVM provides a free engine for the LucasArts adventure games, the SCUMM-derived engine for Humongous Entertainment adventure games, early Sierra titles, Revolution Software 2D adventures, Coktel Vision adventure games and a few more assorted 2D adventures. Another called VDMSound can emulate the old sound-cards which many of the games require.
One of the most popular emulators, DOSBox, is designed to emulate an IBM PC compatible computer running MS-DOS, the native OS of most older adventure games. Many companies, such as Sierra Entertainment, have included DOSBox in their re-releases of older titles.
Text adventure games are more accessible. There are only a small number of standard formats, and nearly all the classics can be played on modern computers. Some modern text adventure games can even be played on very old computer systems. Text adventure games are also suitable for PDAs, because they have very small computer system requirements. Many classic Infocom games are completely playable via web browsers.