In Arthurian legend it’s written that King Arthur created a giant round table so that his knights could come around to the castle and chill out, drink mead, and shoot the breeze. Being round in shape meant that there was no official head; everyone who chose to sit down had an equal voice. And without having to worry about order or stature or hierarchy, he would famously say, “Dudes, it’s just Arthur here. Or Art. Even Arty will do. Actually, no. Don’t call me Arty.”

Anyone who was anyone in Camelot would come and enjoy the freewheeling conversations that took place at the Round Table – as it was cleverly known, and it was here that everything from sedimentary sword extraction to how to properly groom a horse were discussed openly. Except for Merlin, who by this point had heard the Sword in the Stone story a few too many times and took to protest by staying in his tower working on new potions.In computer gaming legend the adventure genre is one that began when computers were first made available for recreational use. Starting with simple pieces of text on a screen and a flashing prompt waiting for input, over the years and decades this would evolve, incorporating graphics, animation, sound, music, and live action video. And throughout it all, a focus on narrative would be central.This may be the reason the adventure genre is such a malleable one, and that even though it’s been around for decades – and has seen a huge amount of change – still has seemingly limitless potential.After spending more than 12 months rediscovering classic adventure games of yesteryear , I wanted to hear more from the people who helped shape this most noble of genres, and what better way than with our very own virtual Round Table - a roundtable, if you will, one where various adventure game

developers

The Knights of the IGN Adventure Game Roundtable

THE ROUNDTABLE

IGN: What was the first experience you had playing an adventure game? What were some of your thoughts on how it stood out from other games at the time?

Let's set the scene.

Get the t-shirt!

This guy... is no hero.

“ Myst... was an amazing experience that made me want to create my own game. The sense of discovery, the atmosphere, the sights and sounds, they all captivated me...

Colossal Cave in action.

Unicorn dog can happen!

IGN: As you began a career in game development what drew you to the adventure genre, and were there any specific goals you had when you began work on your first game (where you had some form of creative control)?

Look away, animal lovers.

Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade still looks great.

“ The main thing that led me to being creative in general has always been the desire to tell great stories. And whatever form the setting or story may take, what matters to me most is the emotion at its core.

A classic Larry gag preempting what players might do.

“ My goal initially just was to work for Sierra in some capacity. But by the time I was able to propose my own adventure game at Sierra, my goal was to write a game that was more mature, dark, and a bit scary – something with a more serious story.

Under a Killing Moon introduced players to future gumshoe Tex Murphy.

Day of the Tentacle's art direction is superb and bursting with personality.

Ben There, Dan That.

knights could come and talk about their adventure gaming memories and the genre’s past, present, and future.(In alphabetical order)– Joining LucasArts at the peak of its classic adventure game output, Larry Ahern is an artist that contributed to a number of the studio’s classics including Monkey Island 2, Day of the Tentacle , and Sam & Max Hit the Road . With a keen eye for quality animation Larry would join Tim Schafer’s Full Throttle as lead animator and then later become the co-designer on the third Monkey Island game, The Curse of Monkey Island (1997).– A veteran UK developer who played a role in the region’s gaming boom in the early ‘80s with a string of text adventures for the ZX Spectrum. As the founder of Revolution Software Charles Cecil was also instrumental in the cinematic development of the genre in the ‘90s with titles like Beneath a Steel Sky (1994) and Broken Sword: The Shadow of the Templars (1996). Founded in 1990, Revolution Software has survived and thrived throughout the many changes within the industry and recently released the latest entry in the Broken Sword series, The Serpent’s Curse.– A veteran designer who worked on a number of titles at Lucasfilm Games, including the adventure classic Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989) alongside David Fox and Ron Gilbert. At LucasArts Noah Falstein got to work on another property envisioned by Steven Spielberg, as he led development on the first version of what would ultimately become The Dig (1995). Currently Noah is the Chief Game Designer at a little known internet company called Google.– Creator of Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders (1988), David Fox joined Lucasfilm Games as the studio’s third employee in 1982 . David was also the project leader on the very first LucasArts adventure game, Labyrinth: The Computer Game (1986). Based on the David Bowie-starring Jim Henson fantasy film, much like other adventure titles from the studio it would shy away from utilising a text-parser. As the company grew David also served as the Director of Operations at LucasArts, overseeing all development.– A designer and one of the pioneers of the independent adventure game resurgence, Dave Gilbert began his career making freeware titles using the Adventure Game Studio software package. In 2006 he founded Wadjet Eye Games, and released two critically acclaimed adventure games The Shivah and Blackwell Legacy. The latter would become the first title in the Blackwell series with the most recent game, Blackwell Epiphany, released in 2014.– Co-creator of the adventure classic Maniac Mansion (1987), Ron Gilbert is also known for helping create the term point-and-click with the creation of SCUMM (or the Scripting Utility for Maniac Mansion ). As the engine that drove all LucasArts adventures for a number of years, Ron Gilbert’s legacy was all but assured. But it would be The Secret of Monkey Island (1990), created and designed by Ron, that would remain his most well-known and beloved game. After leaving LucasArts he co-founded Humongous Entertainment where he worked on a number of successful adventure games aimed at a younger audience.– After joining LucasArts it wasn’t long before Dave Grossman was put to work as a writer and programmer on The Secret of Monkey Island (1990). Working alongside Tim Schafer and designer Ron Gilbert this would start a long career of collaboration and adventure gaming, with titles like Day of the Tentacle at LucasArts and Sam & Max: Season One at Telltale Games. In November 2014 Dave Grossman joined Reactive Studios as their Chief Creative Officer overseeing the development of voice-controlled interactive experiences.– Creator of the Gabriel Knight series, Jane Jensen joined Sierra in the early ‘90s as a writer where she got to cut her teeth writing dialogue and story for titles like Police Quest III and EcoQuest. Her first efforts as a designer would come alongside Roberta Williams with the critically acclaimed King’s Quest VI: Heir Today, Gone Tomorrow (1992). Since departing Sierra Jane has continued to create story-driven adventure games, as seen with Gray Matter (2010) and more recently, Moebius: Empire Rising (2014).– A game designer who has also earned the titles of actor and filmmaker. Chris Jones is not only the co-creator and designer of the Tex Murphy series of adventure games, but he is Tex Murphy. Under a Killing Moon (1994) not only served as one of the finer attempts at creating an interactive movie, but it helped push the genre into new and exciting areas. As the down on his luck 21st century gumshoe, Chris Jones recently donned the iconic fedora one more time for Tesla Effect: A Tex Murphy Adventure (2014).– A former high school music teacher turned computing enthusiast, Al Lowe joined Sierra in the early ‘80s as a programmer where he worked on everything from King’s Quest to a line of educational titles starring popular Disney characters. But it would be Leisure Suit Larry in The Land of the Lounge Lizards (1987), Sierra’s adults-only sex-themed comedy adventure series that saw six titles released over the course of a decade that would define his career. Retiring after the fall of Sierra in the late ‘90s, Al Lowe recently contributed to the remake of the first Larry game, Leisure Suit Larry: Reloaded (2014). I had a lengthy chat with him about the series quite recently – Beginning his career as a stand-up comedian, Josh Mandel would join Sierra with the goal to create comedies. Over the years he would get the chance to work alongside Sierra veterans and design some classic comedies, including Freddy Pharkas: Frontier Pharmacist (1993) with Al Lowe, and Space Quest 6: Roger Wilco in The Spinal Frontier (1995) with Scott Murphy. Josh would also lend his voice to the King’s Quest series as it moved into the realm of multimedia, playing the role of King Graham in both King’s Quest V and King’s Quest VI.– Independent developer behind Ben There, Dan That (2008) and Time, Gentlemen Please! (2009), Dan Marshall’s first forays into the genre earned him critical acclaim. As both titles blended comedy, story, and puzzles in a fashion that had been all but forgotten about, they served as great modern renditions of a seemingly bygone style. Dan currently heads up the studio he founded in 2008, Size Five Games, where he’s hard at work developing what’s most likely to be the world’s first steampunk cybercrime caper, The Swindle.– Alongside his brother Robyn, Rand Miller is the co-creator of the computer game sensation Myst . Through its fantasy setting, first-person viewpoint, and cutting edge graphics, Myst quickly became a major component of the multimedia and home computing boom following its release in 1993. As co-founder and CEO of Cyan Worlds, Rand has overseen development on a number of Myst sequels over the years and has most recently been working on Obduction, a spiritual successor due for release in the second half of 2015. Check out our Google Hangout with Rand from mid last year – Belgian comic artist Benoit Sokal was best known for creating the smoking anthropomorphic duck detective Inspector Carnado in the late ‘70s before joining developer Microids to work on adventure games. As a veteran comic artist and storyteller, Benoit designed the critically acclaimed Syberia (2002) and its sequel. Although delayed due to a lack of funding, the third game in the Syberia series, overseen by Benoit, is due for release in 2015.– Gary joined LucasArts (then known as the Lucasfilm Games Division) in 1984 as its first artist and animator. Working alongside Ron Gilbert he would co-create Maniac Mansion and help kick start the company’s focus on rich story-driven adventure games. As a veteran artist he would oversee the art department at LucasArts for a number of years as the studio released a string of classic adventures. Gary also designed Defenders of Dynatron City at LucasArts which was adapted into a TV special and comic book series. Currently, Gary is working alongside Ron Gilbert on Thimbleweed Park It was either Colossal Cave Adventure or Zork. My memory blurs between the two, but the feeling they provided was my first sense of actually exploring a virtual space on a computer, as opposed to simply moving through nondescript grids. I remember thinking that it was interesting to have an experience with a computer that would become the basis of a rather bizarre story that I would relate to co-workers the next day. “Last night? Well, I stumbled on a small cabin in the woods, and found a secret trapdoor underneath a rug that lead down to an underground kingdom.”The first adventure game I played was on my Apple II computer which I bought “on line.” And by that I mean that it was from an ad in a magazine and I placed a mail-order over a phone line. Before I received it I thought that I should get a couple of games to play, so my son and I had something to do together. So I got an arcade game and I also got Cranston Manor, an adventure game. That was a Sierra game and it was one of their classic games set in a building with a lot of hallways and a lot of rooms. We got hooked, my son was around five years old at the time and it was a game that he and I could play together. I would sit there doing a lot of the typing and he would do a lot of the thinking. And his ideas were just as valid as mine. It was a way for us to experience a game together, and we played adventure games from then on.The first adventure game that I ever played right through was King’s Quest IV in 1988. I had played text adventures before on mainframes, but I’d never seen a graphic adventure game before. I was immediately drawn into the story and into the idea of visually exploring the world. I loved it, so I went out and bought everything else in Sierra’s catalogue.My first adventure game was Crowther and Woods's Colossal Cave Adventure, also known as just plain Adventure. It's the text adventure the genre is named after. I was in my early teens. I played it at home using a dial-up terminal that was like a fifty-pound typewriter with suction cups on the back that you stuck your phone into. It didn't have a screen, it printed everything out on rolls of expensive thermal paper. I was totally hooked on the game, and my friends and I used up a lot of that paper.That would be the original Adventure in the Colossal Caves. I played it on a terminal in college, probably sometime around 1979. I wasn't very impressed though, the approach was interesting but I found it boring. A year or two later I was working at Milton Bradley and we had a VAX computer that had Zork on it. Now that was fun, the world was interesting and I loved the storytelling in what became the Infocom games. In particular I remember Starcross and Planetfall as grabbing my attention and keeping me engaged. I never really did like parser-based games though, it was mostly the depth of story that made me try a bunch of text adventures.The first time I ever played an adventure game was the week after I started at LucasArts. They demoed The Secret of Monkey Island during my interview, and I was eager to try it out. I had no idea anyone made funny story games like that! I’d played a lot of arcade games, but never transitioned to the PC. I’d played an RPG in college that had me battling a “dragon” (which was technically an ampersand) but that failed to convince me of the platform’s entertainment potential. But there I was, a few years later, looking at fully animated characters, in colour, with story, dialog, and a rubber chicken with a pulley in the middle! Instantly I realised, “This is the kind of work I should be doing!” Of course that statement probably also applied to flipping burgers, given the state of my bank account. Thankfully I got the chance to work on games instead of asking, “Do you want fries with that?”Oh man, I’m not sure. I remember playing Monkey Island on a - get this - black and white laptop. Not sure I got very far, it was pretty difficult to make out what the shapes were, and the display was so crappy. The first point and click I remember playing though, and being utterly in love with, was Sam and Max Hit the Road. It was amazing.It wasn’t my first encounter with an adventure game, but the one that definitely stood out to me was Myst. It was an amazing experience that made me want to create my own game. The sense of discovery, the atmosphere, the sights and sounds, they all captivated me and pushed me forward to experience the entire story. Its mechanics, which were based on things like observation, deduction, and reflection, showed me that the adventure game opened up the very idea of gaming to a different audience, one eager for story rather than obtaining high scores. It was also perfectly in tune with what I loved, bringing in comics, incorporating simple and accessible interactivity.I consider Dungeons & Dragons on Intellivision as the first adventure game I played. It was different than an arcade game because it set up a world for you, and it was incredibly atmospheric. As simple as it was, it built atmosphere and tension.My first adventure game was Will Crowther’s Colossal Cave. Up until that point, the only computer games I’d ever played were Eliza (which was more of a toy, not a game) and the BASIC game that became known as ‘Star Trek’ and then, later, Star Fleet. To me, the adventure game was the one that immediately made me think of all the different possibilities, all the genres of fiction that could be turned into interactive adventures. And although I found it incredibly frustrating, I couldn’t wait to play it again and have an opportunity to map it all out and solve the puzzles. Unfortunately, it was well over a decade before I had the opportunity to do that.I remember playing King’s Quest and Space Quest, mainly because Ron showed them to me when we were first developing Maniac Mansion. I was very intrigued by the presentation because at that time it felt a bit like I was playing an interactive cartoon. I could definitely see the possibilities, particularly when Ron outlined the concept of ‘point and click.’I played Adventure on the college mainframe computer when I was in junior high school. It was my introduction to adventure games. I remember me and three other classmates huddled around the screen trying to solve puzzles and drawing large maps. It was the first time I’d played a game like that and it was mesmerizing.My mother made the mistake of buying me a copy of Wishbringer when I was in the fifth grade or so. It's very easy to romanticize the past, but I remember being incredibly drawn in. It was wonderfully written, and I loved exploring the little island that it took place on. I would dream about the puzzles in that game. Quite literally. I dreamed up the solution to one of the puzzles in that game and I couldn't believe it when it worked. Also, around the same time I borrowed a friend's copy of King’s Quest. Like Wishbringer, I enjoyed walking around the world, but what stuck out the most was when I arbitrarily typed in “jump”, Graham actually jumped! That blew my little mind!My first experience was playing the original text adventure game Colossal Cave on a printer terminal in 1976, sitting on my bed at home. I loved how immersive it felt, even though the descriptions were short, and the only pictures were in my head. I loved it! Soon after, when my wife, Annie, and I opened our public access microcomputer centre, we had the complete series of adventure games from Scott Adams’ Adventure International, and I ended up converting them from TRS-80 to Apple II and CPM systems for him.The first adventure game that I ever played was a Scott Adams text adventure on the TRS80 in about 1980. The TRS80 had a whopping 4K of memory, compared to the ZX80 and then ZX81 with just 1K, so it was able to display much more impressive graphics than its British counterpart. As this was at the birth of the computer games era, we were hugely excited to see what others were doing, things were developing so fast.I love the sense of exploration and problem solving (rather than shooting or fighting) in an adventure game. They also let me play in a complete world, apart from our own, and try things I could or would never try in real life. The first adventure game I designed (with the help of some amazing people, including Douglas Adams), was Labyrinth. But the scope and story were somewhat restricted by the film it was based on. I did have a lot of creative control in choosing what to use, but it still had to be based on Labyrinth. Next, I came on as the SCUMM scripter for Ron Gilbert and Gary Winnick’s Maniac Mansion. This was even more fun since I had more control over what happened in the game via SCUMM. But it was Ron and Gary’s story, so there were some limitations. But I was still able to come up with ideas, the hamster in microwave being one.It wasn't until I was at Lucasfilm Games that I began to pay attention, Ron Gilbert and David Fox were the first two project leaders to delve into it (although we were all interested in games as storytelling experiences) and we all worked together to one extent or another on Labyrinth, Maniac Mansion, and Zak McCracken, before finally co-leading and co-designing Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade together. That was the first game where I was a major contributor as it was my project alone before David and Ron came on board so we could finish it in time for the theatrical release of the film. I very much wanted to capture the feeling of the movie but offer an experience that wasn't just an action game playing out scenes from the movie. We worked together to figure out how to fit the gameplay "between" the scenes of the movie so it would feel as if you were playing the role of Indiana Jones and getting to see what was left out. We had the original script and many of the game scenes that were not in the movie were from that. It was fun being a semi-insider, although we didn't really get to work much with the filmmakers.Our first game (The Manhole) was started as more of an interactive book. But I think that my brother Robyn and I were both so intrigued by the idea of exploring virtual places that it just evolved naturally into a first person visual adventure. That first game had little in the way of story or goals, but it set the stage for us to move to more sophisticated games and, ultimately, to Myst and Riven. Our goals remained the same for all of our projects. That is, to build immersive worlds to be explored.The main thing that led me to being creative in general has always been the desire to tell great stories. And whatever form the setting or story may take, what matters to me most is the emotion at its core. If we can create and convey that level of emotion with a medium like videogames, then we’re already halfway there. The rest feels secondary, even if things like gameplay, controls, and graphics, are important and can make the difference between a merely functional game and an exceptional one. With my own games I envision transporting players and giving them a sort of virtual trip. I draw inspiration from real places and facts, but always try to give them a sort of fantastical twist. This reinvention of the world is one I prefer to deal with, and the best way for me to tackle various social topics.I was invited to write an adventure game for a fledgling computer games company, Artic Computing (one of the very first European games publishers). The concept of writing a story that could be played interactively was extraordinary. Dungeons & Dragons had come to the UK a few years earlier, but I never had the opportunity to play. My first game, Adventure B (it was the second adventure game to be published by Artic) was very much inspired by the Indiana Jones film Raiders of the Lost Ark, which I still consider to be the best ever adventure movie. During that early period, we really were making up all the rules as we went along.I used to play every genre of computer game. I’d take a real-time trip with a Flight Simulator every Sunday morning, for instance, but adventure games were the only ones that made me want to work on games for a living. My goals were very specific. I had been playing the original Leisure Suit Larry, and some of the Infocom comedies, and I thought, “There are so few good comedies out there, and I bet I can write an adventure at least as funny as these.” I had been a comic for a decade leading up to my first job in game development, so I was thinking in terms of how I would manipulate the displaying of text in order to simulate the way a comedian uses timing, and how we could do a better job of setting up the jokes so that they had more impact, and how to build good running gags, and so on.I learned to program by creating a set of 20 interrelated programs to manage a school music festival, which at the time seemed to me like a real money maker. So that’s one of the reasons we bought a computer but as we were playing adventure games and my son was learning to read, my wife and I (both working in education) thought that we should do a game that was educational. So we created adventure games that looked a lot like Sierra games because that’s what we played. But we simplified them, we only used the spacebar to change between choices and the enter key to choose. So they were more like multiple choice adventure games, where you could move from room to room, talk to people and do simple things. They were simple kids’ games, but they were effective.My goal initially just was to work for Sierra in some capacity. But by the time I was able to propose my own adventure game at Sierra, my goal was to write a game that was more mature, dark, and a bit scary – something with a more serious story.I love the storytelling of adventure games. I love weaving the story in with all the puzzles until they are inseparable. I don’t know that I had a specific goal when Gary and I started Maniac Mansion. To be honest, it didn’t even start out as an adventure game. We didn’t know what it was at first. It was just a collection of characters and odd idea, then I saw King’s Quest for the first time, and everything fell into place.I find the nature of adventure games presenting a character driven story very compelling, I come from a graphic novel and animated film background and the look and feel of adventure gaming, for me, is a close cousin. As far as a goal, I really wanted to be able to tell a story that was both immersive and fun.It was always my goal to incorporate cinema style storytelling, character development, and plot development into games. I was a huge fan of movies and made lots of films in high school and college, so to be able to find a way to merge games and movies was really fun. I wanted the chance to create games where the player felt like a character from a movie.I liked adventure games because they were stories more than other games were stories, and having a job where I spent that much time crafting scenes in a digital puppet theatre and writing interactive dialog was just really fun. But it wasn't a choice I got to make for myself, the opportunity in front of me was one where I'd be making adventure games, and I took it. The only conscious choice for me was to stick with it as time went by. And by, and by, and...Honestly, the adventure genre was pretty much all that LucasArts was doing at the time, so I really didn’t have a choice in the matter. But even if that wasn’t the case, I would have been drawn to the style because of the blending of story, puzzles, and animation. I was never a big gamer, never played D&D or war games or anything like that. But I was always big into comics, cartoons, and animation. The thought of taking those forms of media and letting audiences interact with the characters and stories was very appealing.The first game I really had creative input on was Day of the Tentacle. I remember working as an animator on The Secret of Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge and being frustrated at the inconsistent character designs and lack of a defined style for the animation. I really wanted to create characters that felt like they were all of one world, and then push the boundaries of the animation there. Monkey 2 was a comedy, but it was more subdued, and I wanted to go extreme. I’d never seen a game that tried that. Plus we had a pixel height limit on the characters, and I figured out that by making them cartoony, with larger heads, it meant I got much more expressive faces while still adhering to those restrictions.As the saying goes, you write what you know. And I both knew and loved adventure games. I discovered the Adventure Game Studio engine at the exact time in my life when I had the time and desire to create something. People seemed to like what I made, so I kept making more! Could I have written novels or films or plays? Sure, but I was drawn to the adventure genre and I seemed to be reasonably good at it. As for specific goals, my desire at the beginning was to see if I could somehow earn my living from it! I had no goal beyond "I want to make this work." Somehow, I managed to do that. And I am grateful for that every day.Well, Ben There Dan That was sort of made as a silly joke, a slap-dash little adventure made following the long, harrowing development of my first game. I set it loose and it really clicked with a lot of people, so I wound up writing a sequel. I don’t think it was so much a massive, burning desire to create a point and click as it was the availability and ease of using Adventure Game Studio after finishing up development on something that didn’t really use any third-party tools.