A Look Back: Point-and-Click Adventures
If you find yourself reading this for a second time, I apologise. Some weird picture/HMTL errors were happening in the first version I posted earlier this week, and editing didn't seem to solve the issue. :(
Many people still have great fondness for point-and-click adventure games. They were once the mainstay of PC gaming, until the first person shooter and role-playing genres took the helm and steered us out into the darker and more sinister waters. But still, the point-and-click has not died the death that many feared it might. In fact, recent years have seen a significant revival in what was once thought to be an unfashionable, out-of-date and essentially limited way of playing games. With titles such as Zack & Wiki: Quest for Barbados Treasure on the Wii, the extended re-release of Broken Sword: The Shadow of the Templars on the DS and Wii, Ceville on the PC, and new iterations of the irrepressible Monkey Island just released (and re-released) on multiple platforms, it is clear that the genre is far from dead. But what did point-and-clicks have that so many games have missed? The answer is somewhat uncertain. What is clear is that no matter how their subject matters differed, they were always quirky, imaginative and fun, never really taking themselves too seriously, even whilst battling evil zombie pirates or solving fiendish puzzles devised by ancient civilisations. If you were to group a selection of modern first person shooters into a room together, you wouldn't equal even a quarter of the life and character which just one cIassic point-and-click manages to deliver.
Zork I: One of the most famous game beginnings, ever.
Point-and-clicks slowly emerged out of the pictureless void of solely text-based adventures. A coloured screen (ok, usually just black and white), and some interesting lines of text were all there were to propel your imagination. There were many great text adventures for the taking; 1976's Colossal Cave Adventure (or simply Adventure) was the first truly interactive fiction game, established the adventure game genre, and required a whole 300k of memory in order to run. It immortalised the command "xyzzy", and quickly spread across the ARPANET (predecessor to our beloved Internet). However, it was the Zork franchise which really started the whole ball rolling (beware of those Grues!); which was a product of Infocom. In fact, much of the success of interactive fiction can be laid at the feet of Infocom, who took the genre to new heights with such titles as The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy game, Bureaucracy (also written by Hitchhiker author Douglas Adams), Planetfall, Enchanter and the fascinating A Mind Forever Voyaging from 1985. AMFV featured remarkably few of the typical puzzles and comedic elements which are normally associated with adventure fiction and was much more story driven, being one of the few wholly serious text adventures, which addressed many political and social issues. Visual graphics began around the release of Mystery House in 1980, and colour graphics with Wizard and the Princess the same year, both from Sierra On-Line (which would eventually become Sierra Entertainment, now very sadly eaten by Activision-Blizzard). Of course, these being extremely early graphics, it was basically a series of 2D lines shaped vaguely like something, all of it static, and the 'colour graphics' were just lines in different colours. Controls in both of these early types of game were entirely text parser; a series of typed inputs such as "get" or "go west", et cetera. However, Sierra would go on to see more success with greater picture quality displayed in titles such as the memorable King's Quest, starting in 1984; the first 3D-animated game. The key to the invention of graphics was that it eliminated the need to "look". Instead of reading what the player was seeing, the player could see it clearly for themselves.
Maniac Mansion: I wish I knew what was going on here...
The Apple Macintosh can be credited for inventing the point-and-click interface in the first place, using images instead of text to perform many actions. When it launched in 1984, it didn't take long for the system's innovative styIe of control to be used in games. That same year, Enchanted Scepters invited the player to search for the elemental sceptres of Fire, Earth, Air and Water, and return them to the appropriate forgetful Wizard who had mislaid them. The pictures were all static and the gameplay was still heavily text-based, but when the text called for player interaction, you needed to click on areas of the picture in order to proceed. The text would say whether an item could be picked up, and then clicking on the picture of the image would do so. It might seem extremely simple, but it was a giant leap forward for games design. In 1985, Déjà Vu was a mystery-based Mac game which completely eliminated any text parser in favour of point-and-click, and started a series of long-running MacVentures. LucasArts entered the foray in 1987 with Maniac Mansion, stunningly rendered in full 16 colours; a game which still has a solid and dedicated following to this day. It also established the SCUMM (Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion) engine and programming language which LucasArts continued to use in many later adventure games. The next year Sierra also began making point-and-clicks, starting with the sinister Manhunter: New York, a game set in the then futuristic 2004 where Earth has been enslaved by terrifying alien Orbs. It was an important turning point for Sierra, who until that point had made normally very family-friendly games.
Myst: Incredibly complicated environmental puzzles await you.
It was at around this time, at the end of the 1980's and the beginning of the 90's, that point-and-clicks had their renaissance. In 1990, The Secret of Monkey Island landed. The game is primarily remembered and continually cherished for its witty dialogue, memorable plotline and a host of cIassic characters, many of whom would make appearances in later Monkey Island instalments (Stan and LeChuck, alongside both Guybrush Threepwood and Elaine Marley). The real leap forward at around this time was the adoption of the CD-ROM. Instead of having to cart around a box full to the brim with assorted floppy disks, a CD could store much more information, allowing for a greater variety of bitmap graphics and a longer overall game runtime. 1990's Alice: An Interactive Museum was inspired by Lewis Carroll's cIassic novel, and featured the player wondering around a number of rooms hunting for clues of how to escape from Wonderland. The game made use of pre-rendered, 3-dimensional environments and some live-action video (with the help of a little programme called Macromedia Director), which meant it required a staggering 5mb of disk space. The game which represented a huge leap with 3D-rendered graphics and digital immersion was the original Myst, released by Cyan Worlds in 1993. Myst has been vaulted for several reasons, namely the relatively high quality graphics from a first-person perspective, the immersive atmosphere, and the complex environmental puzzles. It was also at this time that Hideo Kojima jumped onto the adventure games bandwagon, first with Snatcher in 1988, a cyberpunk story, and then the hard science fiction Policenauts in 1994, the latter of which has never been officially released outside Japan.
Bad Mojo: Enjoy pretending to be a cockroach? This is the game for you.
There were still a slew of slightly more typical point-and-clicks during the 90's. The Monkey Island series continued, reaching what is thought to be the pinnacle design with The Curse of Monkey Island. 1996's Broken Sword: The Shadow of the Templars is widely recognised as one of the finest adventure games ever, whilst the game spin off to the film Blade Runner is a master cIass in exactly how to weave a new story into an existing film's structure. The seeds of the Sam & Max game series also took root; even director Stephen Spielberg experimented with the genre in his LucasArts game, The Dig. During this period, the point-and-click nature of gameplay was altered slightly, normally to using the directional keys in order to move about, and then continue to use the mouse to interact with the environment. A game which used control scheme this to fantastic effect was the psychedelic Bad Mojo, featuring a creepy premise and mildly disturbing setting, loosely based upon a novel by Franz Kafka. There were also downright frightening titles, including Sanitarium, where everyman Max Laughton suffers from amnesia and fights to escape from an archaic insane asylum. Another which springs to mind is Sierra's Phantasmagoria, the first adventure game to use a live actor in video.
Tales of Monkey Island: The always intrepid Guybrush consults the Wind Gods.
However, during the mid to late-1990's and into the early 2000's, the adventure games market began to steadily decline, as consumers felt the ripe desire for action with their adventure. Its death was partially brought about by the development of excellent first person shooters such as Doom and later Half-Life, but also the idea that the point-and-click interface, which was typical for adventure games, was old-fashioned, outmoded, and was soon going to be history. The future was online, where players could interact with people internationally and usually kill one another in various ingenious ways. The advent of multiplayer games across the Internet was irrelevant to the most of the adventure games genre, since it was by necessity a wholly single player experience, where you assume the role of the story protagonist. After Escape from Monkey Island in 2000, LucasArts eventually cancelled all other adventure games they had in production. The main reason was probably due to the fact that someone in management had reasoned it was safer to invest in Star Wars-related games, rather than take bigger risks with adventure titles. Most of their adventure games staff were dismissed, and the dream seemed to be over.
Machinarium: Mechanics in a beautifully fantastical world.
But it was not, as some had imagined, the end. Cyan Worlds forged on with Myst sequels, and by about 2005, the adventure market saw a few signs of grassroots renewal. Whilst not a point-and-click, the innovative Fahrenheit re-imagined the adventure game genre, bringing it gradually back into people's imagination. Many developers who had been at LucasArts ended up at Telltale Games, allowing for the rebirth of episodic Sam & Max story arcs, as well of the development of new titles such as the interestingly named Strong Bad's Cool Game for Attractive People. In the last year, LucasArts themselves have expressed an interest in returning to their roots, with the digital sale of some of their back catalogue titles such as Loom through Steam, and rerelease of The Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition, which includes voice acting and a revamped design in tandem with the original game. They have also licensed Telltale to produce a new episodic story in the Monkey Island saga, with Tales of Monkey Island. The Wii and the DS have also opened the door for a new kind of point-and-click, using the either Wiimote or the Stylus in place of your mouse. Zack and Wiki: Quest for Barbados Treasure for example put this control scheme to good use.
So, there seemingly is hope for the future of point-and-click adventure games afterall. Indeed, the Indie developed, traditional point-and-click Machinarium was just released whilst I was drafting this look back. To finish, I somewhat paraphrase The Who by asserting; "The point-and-click is dead they say: Long live the point-and-click!"
