Wednesday, October 12, 2022

Retrospective: Adventure

Like a lot of kids who grew up in the 1970s and '80s, I was simultaneously obsessed with and frustrated by the emerging technology of videogames – obsessed because, even in those benighted days, their potential was obvious; frustrated precisely because they were still a very long way from fulfilling that potential. Nevertheless, many of the videogames of my youth were truly amazing things, primitive though they must look to 21st century eyes. The best of them were paradigms of one's reach exceeding one's grasp, since technical limitations often prevented even the most talented designers from truly achieving what they set out to do. 

Neophilia is nevertheless a powerful thing. My friends and I enjoyed playing whatever video or computer games we could get our hands on, especially those with fantasy or science fiction themes. One of the earliest of the former that I remember playing was Adventure, released in 1980 for the Atari Video Computer System (rebranded as the Atari 2600 in 1982). The brainchild of Warren Robinett, who'd previously designed Slot Racers for Atari, Adventure is generally considered the world's first graphical fantasy game and it's precisely for that reason that I so loved it in my youth.

Behold! The Chalice
The premise of the game is quite simple: an unnamed Evil Magician has stolen the Enchanted Chalice and hidden it somewhere in the Kingdom. The player, whose "character" is represented by a square, must find the Chalice and return it to the Golden Castle where it belongs. Naturally, this is not as easy as it sounds. The Magician has created three dragons to hinder the player in his quest. These are Yorgle the Yellow Dragon, Grundle the Green Dragon, and Rhindle the Red Dragon. At higher levels of difficulty – there are three levels in all – there is also a Black Bat that carries objects throughout the Kingdom. This makes the player's quest more difficult, because the Bat not only moves important items around, it can also swap an item it's carrying with one you're carrying. This is especially annoying when you're carrying something like the Sword that's needed to slay the dragons – or even the Enchanted Chalice, as you're hurrying toward the Golden Castle to win the game.

Beware! Rhindle
Objectively, Adventure is not a particularly complex game or, at its lowest level of difficulty, a very hard one. Like many early videogames, much of its apparent difficulty comes from the limitations of the software and hardware of those bygone days. However, difficulty levels 2 and 3 genuinely up the ante, by introducing a number of random elements, mostly involving the placement of important items, that change gameplay in significant ways. They also include some features, like invisible mazes, that I absolutely dreaded as a child, because they were pretty much a death trap if a dragon were pursuing you. At the higher levels of difficulty, Adventure was thus more of a challenge.

Of course, it was precisely the challenging nature of the higher difficulty levels that made one feel as if one had accomplished something by succeeding in bringing the Enchanted Chalice back to the Golden Castle. That this often took many, many attempts only reinforced in our imaginations the immensity of what he'd done. That it all took place against the pixelated backdrop of a fantasy setting added further to its appeal. Outside of playing Dungeons & Dragons, which we'd only just discovered in the months prior to Adventure's release, there was no other game like it available at the time. In 1980, simply being the first was enough to hold our attention.

Ultimately, that connection to D&D, however tenuous, is probably what elevates Adventure to the lofty heights of the games most influential over my imagination. Like D&D itself, Adventure was released at just the right time in my own life, when I was at the start of my lifelong love affair with fantasy adventure games and when I'd not yet become a fault-finding snob who hates everything. Back then, I could still find wonder and excitement and even a little fear in a game where your in-game avatar is nothing more than a colored square and fearsome dragons look like ducks. I miss those days sometimes ...
The glory of the Golden Castle!

14 comments:

  1. One aspect of older, more primitive video games that I personally appreciate is the reliance on using the player's imagination. The box illustration suggests what the dragon might look like. The in-game graphic suggests one "imagine" something like he illustration.
    Theater-of-the-mind tabletop play aspires to a similar use of player imagination. I imagine the more one uses an ability, the stronger it becomes.
    Imagination is a skill useful in so many realms of endeavor. And it seems too often in short supply.

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    1. That's something my sons have mentioned. They love the old 'retro' tech of my youth, including Adventure. My youngest, our tech guru, bought me a working Atari set for Christmas (one that adapts to modern tvs), complete with this game. They actually love it. And they point out how much more 'intellectually interactive' it is compared to their favorite games today, which leave nothing to imagination and very little to thinking beyond which buttons to push and when. Sure they look like ducks, but then their minds and imagination kick in and you see the dragons, and the hedge maze, and the castles (all of which are helped by the box's artwork - a vital part of feeding the imagination in the old products from those days).

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  2. I was 11 when this game was released, and I loved it too. I cannot imagine what I would have thought of the sort of games that exist today.

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  3. The synchronicity with D&D was perfect, but there was also that famous secret room/invisible dot/hidden message that Robinett had slipped in under Atari's corporate nose.

    It really lent a subversive 'sneaky DM' vibe to the game, made a lot of us joystick-tuggers realize for the very first time that actual human beings created these things, and (like D&D) was one of those word-of-mouth sensations that you only discovered from friends, or relatives.

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  4. This was a game that I was also the perfect age to play, but never got a chance to play. I was a little sad...and by the time we had an Atari, Activision had raised the bar a little bit, and I never got back to Adventure.

    James notes that wonderful stage of growth when a kid is worldly enough to engage fully with adult things, and still innocent enough to assume that adults know what they are doing--so I would always attempt to make sense of any sort of creative material that engaged me at age 12, whereas I would become more judgmental, demanding, and dismissive within a few years. :(

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  5. Adventure also had the first video game Easter egg, which was a major plot point in Ready Player One.

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  6. I actually played that game a lot as a kid (we owned a 2600), and loved it. (I must have been about 7 or something). But Lord, how I hated that bat. It could not only pick up objects, it could actually pick up *you*, and then drop you off somewhere else entirely in the game; for example, *inside* a wall (perhaps in the maze), and then you would actually be stuck in that wall, unable to get out of it anymore, and you had to restart the game. It's not a bug, it's feature...

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    1. Oh, by the way, I have always been of the opinion (even back then) that the 'dragons' looked more like ducks than actual dragons. Of course, that didn't stop me from loving the game.

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  7. The "dragon" always looked more like a duck to me than anything else.

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  8. This is the reason I enjoy this site so much. You perfectly capture the zeitgeist of some of the fondest memories of my youth. I never owned Adventure but distinctly remember seeing it at Kmart about a year before we eventually got our 2600 (Xmas 81) and being blown away by the possibilities. I would have been about 9 and was already way into Tolkien and Burroughs, so this was like books brought to life for me.

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  9. I loved Adventure! It will always hold a fond place in my memory. I got one of those Atari joysticks several years ago with a couple of classic games on it. Adventure is one of them. I still break it out occasionally and play it.

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  10. Annotated source code for Adventure is available online, and you can play the game in an emulator here: http://www.virtualatari.org/soft.php?soft=Adventure

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