Adventure is a video game for the Atari 2600 video game console, released in 1980. In the game, the player controls a square avatar whose quest is to hunt an open world environment for a magical chalice, returning it to the golden castle. The game world is populated by roaming enemies: dragons, which can eat the avatar; and a bat, which randomly steals and hides items around the game world. Adventure was designed and programmed by Atari employee Warren Robinett, and published by Atari, Inc. At the time, Atari programmers were generally given full control on the creative direction and development cycle for their games, and this required them to plan for their next game as they neared completion of their current one to stay productive. Robinett submitted the source code for Adventure to Atari management in June 1979 and soon left Atari. Atari released the game in early 1980.
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This review contains spoilers
It's very hard to quantify a 42 year old game with a score. But, what's important with a game this old is that it's still fun! The very simple premise of getting into a castle, stealing their chalice, and running it back to your own castle still holds up. The game's of course very simple though perhaps best experienced blind. Not everyone's gonna be able to really get into it, but you may be surprised at how the intended emotions the game wants to give off, are still effective to this day. So as funny as it sounds, spoiler warning. All you really gotta know going in is that pressing select on the screen with a number cycles between 3 different quests, intended to be played in order.
I like how you hold the items differently depending on how you run into them, adding a small wrinkle to combat / item management / tools. The first level is the smallest one. It serves to teach you what all the items do, and allows you to learn the goal of the game on a smaller map with less obstacles. The second doubles the size of the map with more mazes and another castle. I like that the second level makes the bridge a mandatory item. Kinda cool to be able to walk through any wall as long as you place the bridge on top of it.
The biggest addition though to quest 2, is bats. They fly around and will sometimes swoop in and steal the item you're holding. If they're already holding an item they'll swap it, basically trading you. These can be a bit obnoxious, but if you've got the patience for a bat stealing your key mere steps away from opening the final castle, they do add some much needed depth to the game. I like to see it as non-scripted story telling. Items begin being taken all over the map and shuffled around, who knows what the bats are doing off screen. Seems like they sometimes drop the items off at a designated spot (I think, if they just happen to cross into that room, not sure they're actually coded to GO there on purpose)
The antics that can happen with the bats is pretty wild. For example the bats can actually carry the dragons. Scary stuff. Had an interaction where a bat used a dragon to eat me while I was holding an important key. I didn't want the bat to drop the dragon and steal the key so I grabbed the bat, while in the dragon's stomach. This gave me some movement. Allowing me to grab the key, (which dropped the bat, making it fly me around, still in the dragon) I dropped the key in a good spot and once the bat was far enough away I pressed the respawn button. Walked back and the key was right where I left it.
Absolutely wild interactions like this feel like they really capture the imagination in a way many modern adventure games struggle to do imo.
The dragons are great and also the only way to die. Something fairly unique is that you don't actually die when eaten. You can twitch around in their belly. This is what allowed the freedom to play with the bat that way.
I also appreciate that there's no lives or game overs. It would be much harder to appreciate this game if it reset entirely after being eaten, as especially in level 3, they can be very oppressive. But at the press of a button you'll be taken back to your castle ready to try and squeeze past them again. Really keeps the pace up and lets you get immersed in a single playthrough since it only truly ends when you either win or give up. The dragon's piercing bitcrushed roar paired with the sudden screen transitions may actually shock you a bit at times. The way they chase you once you grab the chalice out from under them can easily feel very tense. I like that they don't just kill you with touch damage either. They actually trap you in their mouth for a moment and you have a split second to get yourself out before you're swallowed.
Level 3 is interestingly, a randomizer. Super cool to see an item randomizer built into what was among the first of its kind, as that's only really blowing up in the modern age with fan made mods for the most part. Older Resident Evil games played around with the idea but for the most part it's not something you see a whole lot even today. I hear it's technically possible to get an item layout that makes the game impossible to complete. Which isn't ideal but the game's VERY short, so it's not too big a deal imo.
There's is actually a hidden 4th level in a way. You may have heard about this game being the first example of an Easter egg. Well, fed up with Atari's policies on not crediting their programmers, the developer hid his name in the game under their noses. There's a very specific, VERY cryptic set of events you can do to access a hidden room. Involving a 1 pixel item hidden in a dark room behind a wall you need the bridge to cross and taking it to a very specific place with like 3 other items to open a wall. I love this stuff.
This has always been one of my favorite Atari games, first played on one of those plug and play consoles in the 2000's. It feels kind of weird to score it so high for some reason, but I really don't see a reason to arbitrarily score it lower for its age. I think it succeeds very well in what it set out to do, in ways that still feel ahead of current year. I'm just impressed by how not-aged it feels. Of course, coming from someone who really appreciates the less structured nature of classic niche adventure games. It's not something that's going to hold your attention for weeks or anything but what it accomplished so long ago is more than I can ask for. Rad game :)
I like how you hold the items differently depending on how you run into them, adding a small wrinkle to combat / item management / tools. The first level is the smallest one. It serves to teach you what all the items do, and allows you to learn the goal of the game on a smaller map with less obstacles. The second doubles the size of the map with more mazes and another castle. I like that the second level makes the bridge a mandatory item. Kinda cool to be able to walk through any wall as long as you place the bridge on top of it.
The biggest addition though to quest 2, is bats. They fly around and will sometimes swoop in and steal the item you're holding. If they're already holding an item they'll swap it, basically trading you. These can be a bit obnoxious, but if you've got the patience for a bat stealing your key mere steps away from opening the final castle, they do add some much needed depth to the game. I like to see it as non-scripted story telling. Items begin being taken all over the map and shuffled around, who knows what the bats are doing off screen. Seems like they sometimes drop the items off at a designated spot (I think, if they just happen to cross into that room, not sure they're actually coded to GO there on purpose)
The antics that can happen with the bats is pretty wild. For example the bats can actually carry the dragons. Scary stuff. Had an interaction where a bat used a dragon to eat me while I was holding an important key. I didn't want the bat to drop the dragon and steal the key so I grabbed the bat, while in the dragon's stomach. This gave me some movement. Allowing me to grab the key, (which dropped the bat, making it fly me around, still in the dragon) I dropped the key in a good spot and once the bat was far enough away I pressed the respawn button. Walked back and the key was right where I left it.
Absolutely wild interactions like this feel like they really capture the imagination in a way many modern adventure games struggle to do imo.
The dragons are great and also the only way to die. Something fairly unique is that you don't actually die when eaten. You can twitch around in their belly. This is what allowed the freedom to play with the bat that way.
I also appreciate that there's no lives or game overs. It would be much harder to appreciate this game if it reset entirely after being eaten, as especially in level 3, they can be very oppressive. But at the press of a button you'll be taken back to your castle ready to try and squeeze past them again. Really keeps the pace up and lets you get immersed in a single playthrough since it only truly ends when you either win or give up. The dragon's piercing bitcrushed roar paired with the sudden screen transitions may actually shock you a bit at times. The way they chase you once you grab the chalice out from under them can easily feel very tense. I like that they don't just kill you with touch damage either. They actually trap you in their mouth for a moment and you have a split second to get yourself out before you're swallowed.
Level 3 is interestingly, a randomizer. Super cool to see an item randomizer built into what was among the first of its kind, as that's only really blowing up in the modern age with fan made mods for the most part. Older Resident Evil games played around with the idea but for the most part it's not something you see a whole lot even today. I hear it's technically possible to get an item layout that makes the game impossible to complete. Which isn't ideal but the game's VERY short, so it's not too big a deal imo.
There's is actually a hidden 4th level in a way. You may have heard about this game being the first example of an Easter egg. Well, fed up with Atari's policies on not crediting their programmers, the developer hid his name in the game under their noses. There's a very specific, VERY cryptic set of events you can do to access a hidden room. Involving a 1 pixel item hidden in a dark room behind a wall you need the bridge to cross and taking it to a very specific place with like 3 other items to open a wall. I love this stuff.
This has always been one of my favorite Atari games, first played on one of those plug and play consoles in the 2000's. It feels kind of weird to score it so high for some reason, but I really don't see a reason to arbitrarily score it lower for its age. I think it succeeds very well in what it set out to do, in ways that still feel ahead of current year. I'm just impressed by how not-aged it feels. Of course, coming from someone who really appreciates the less structured nature of classic niche adventure games. It's not something that's going to hold your attention for weeks or anything but what it accomplished so long ago is more than I can ask for. Rad game :)
I will forever be the #1 adventure hater ET BETTER
Jogo que fez minha infância feliz, apesar de nunca ter chegado ao fim rsrs
this game makes me happy thats all
The most ambitious game of its time, but that does not make it the best.
The first great triumph of purely videogame adventure is also one of the first great triumphs of abstraction. The power of Adventure goes beyond the evocative, which is no menial thing, but embraces a wholly abstract language to build a world far more robust and plausible than any other that actively attempts to imitate reality.
It is curious for Colossal Cave Adventure to be one of the main sources of inspiration. It isn’t unexpected that it was taken as a source, as there must not have been many successful examples at the time in the search of adventure, but in how the paths diverged, almost reactionary. Adventure gets rid of words altogether to commit to a total physical world. Consequently, contrary to what abandoning immediate realism may imply, the world of Adventure becomes much more intuitive and believable. There is no longer the conflict of having to puzzle out what kind of commands a word processor is able to understand or not in order to move forward, there is instead the discovery of a system that, while allowing itself to be much simpler, is also much more transparent.
You can grab objects and drop them, birds can also carry (and steal) objects, magnets attract objects contained in the same screen, bridges allow you to cross walls (or whatever they are)... All these rules are not broken at any time and lead to a world that, as Tim Schafer says in the Atari 50 Collection, seems alive, that is able to exist even if the player is not present. Thus, birds can carry away a dragon, a key, a magnet attracting a key, or the player can peek sections of the world while traveling defeated in the belly of a dragon. This contributes in two areas: one of wit from being able to use the available elements in our favor to avoid or tackle obstacles, and another of unpredictability, chaos and life, because given the rules the dislocations of all the elements throughout the map during the game are more than certain. There is always a factor that requires improvisation while continuing the discovery.
It’s difficult to explain how well Adventure applies multiple abstractions to its advantage since many of them have been irremediably absorbed by everything that would come after. As Terry Cavanagh understood in Mr. Platformer, paying homage to similar early titles such as Atari 2600’s Pitfall or Montezuma’s Revenge, these first videogame steps that began to understand abstraction also began to use it as a liberating language. Where entering through a door into a fortress was teleporting into a labyrinth, moving past the edge of the screen was discovering a new piece of the world and doing so repeatedly on the same side discovered a spatially impossible loop.
It's a process of genuine discovery because it doesn’t attempt to clumsily replicate reality, but rather to discover new ways of navigating, interacting and understanding a world. And in the face of all these new, impossible and abstract forms remains a strong, direct and unmistakable sensation: Adventure.
It is curious for Colossal Cave Adventure to be one of the main sources of inspiration. It isn’t unexpected that it was taken as a source, as there must not have been many successful examples at the time in the search of adventure, but in how the paths diverged, almost reactionary. Adventure gets rid of words altogether to commit to a total physical world. Consequently, contrary to what abandoning immediate realism may imply, the world of Adventure becomes much more intuitive and believable. There is no longer the conflict of having to puzzle out what kind of commands a word processor is able to understand or not in order to move forward, there is instead the discovery of a system that, while allowing itself to be much simpler, is also much more transparent.
You can grab objects and drop them, birds can also carry (and steal) objects, magnets attract objects contained in the same screen, bridges allow you to cross walls (or whatever they are)... All these rules are not broken at any time and lead to a world that, as Tim Schafer says in the Atari 50 Collection, seems alive, that is able to exist even if the player is not present. Thus, birds can carry away a dragon, a key, a magnet attracting a key, or the player can peek sections of the world while traveling defeated in the belly of a dragon. This contributes in two areas: one of wit from being able to use the available elements in our favor to avoid or tackle obstacles, and another of unpredictability, chaos and life, because given the rules the dislocations of all the elements throughout the map during the game are more than certain. There is always a factor that requires improvisation while continuing the discovery.
It’s difficult to explain how well Adventure applies multiple abstractions to its advantage since many of them have been irremediably absorbed by everything that would come after. As Terry Cavanagh understood in Mr. Platformer, paying homage to similar early titles such as Atari 2600’s Pitfall or Montezuma’s Revenge, these first videogame steps that began to understand abstraction also began to use it as a liberating language. Where entering through a door into a fortress was teleporting into a labyrinth, moving past the edge of the screen was discovering a new piece of the world and doing so repeatedly on the same side discovered a spatially impossible loop.
It's a process of genuine discovery because it doesn’t attempt to clumsily replicate reality, but rather to discover new ways of navigating, interacting and understanding a world. And in the face of all these new, impossible and abstract forms remains a strong, direct and unmistakable sensation: Adventure.