Fantastic article worth saving and holding on to. Here are some choice quotes.
Richard Cobbett wrote: Adventure games are an often misremembered genre, even to many who both make and play them. In particular, what’s forgotten is that at release, games like Monkey Island were the equivalent of Hollywood blockbusters, games like Gabriel Knight were trailblazers doing things we’d never seen before, and that until 3D came along and spoiled the party, adventures were the genre for trying out new technology and forging new ground. First 15 and 18 rated games? Adventures. When IBM needed a showpiece for its PCjr, it used King’s Quest. King’s Quest V was one of the earliest showcases for VGA. “Talkies” were one of the big selling points of CD in the early days. FMV… well, it didn’t work out so well in the end, but again, adventures were on the vanguard. On top of all that, adventures were routinely ahead of their time in terms of content, like offering female protagonists as more than just a token character choice long before it began annoying the kind of people who need to be annoyed more often.
Richard Cobbett wrote: [There] is an unfortunate misunderstanding of why those games did what they did – that the adventure game mechanics of something like Monkey Island are a template to aspire to, rather than simply the best the designers could do at the time. The big draw of adventures at this time wasn’t and never was the puzzles, but their ability to draw us into another world that actually worked like one – be it a fantasy world, a living story, a futuristic dystopia or whatever else. The verbs were tools to facilitate our interactions, exciting because nothing else came close.
Richard Cobbett wrote: If you’re a modern adventure developer working in the old-school style, you’re basically trying to recreate blockbusters with pocket-money budgets.
Richard Cobbett wrote: In interviews, I can also count on about one finger the number of adventure developers who can name a recent adventure they’ve enjoyed or even played, with the usual response being an awkward “Oh, well, uh, I’ve been very busy…”, in stark contrast to RPG designers who usually can’t stop waxing lyrical about their recent D&D game or are fifty hours into a competitor’s product. Now, that’s anecdotal evidence to be sure, but still… still…)
Richard Cobbett wrote: The result of all this is that while most Kickstarted RPGs are indeed rooted on nostalgia for the games of the 80s and 90s, their focus is on recreating the feel we had when playing those games rather than the specific experiences that don’t hold up. Adventure developers meanwhile go for recreating the games, desperately hoping that it’ll be enough. And it just isn’t, in the same way that it takes more than sitting in front of a TV with a bowl of cereal to recreate the salad days of watching Saturday morning cartoons anything but ironically.
Richard Cobbett wrote: What RPGs can do by polishing up old designs but this time doing them better, adventures have to do by throwing out the rulebook and writing a whole new one – something much riskier, much harder, and above all else, much harder to sell as a dream worth breaking out a credit card to help realise. Especially after so many disappointing attempts so far