page_title: Adventure game
section_title: Graphical development (1980–1990)
hierarchical_section_title: Adventure game / History of Western adventure games / Graphical development (1980–1990)
caption_attribution_description: Screenshot of the game Mystery House running on Apple II. The color white was represented by combining green and purple, which produced white in the middle, but bleeding of the other two colors on the edges.
context_page_description: An adventure game is a video game in which the player assumes the role of a protagonist in an interactive story driven by exploration and puzzle-solving. The genre's focus on story allows it to draw heavily from other narrative-based media, literature and film, encompassing a wide variety of literary genres. Many adventure games are designed for a single player, since this emphasis on story and character makes multiplayer design difficult. Colossal Cave Adventure is identified as the first such adventure game, first released in 1976, while other notable adventure game series include Zork, King's Quest, The Secret of Monkey Island, and Myst.
  Initial adventure games developed in the 1970s and early 1980s were text-based, using text parsers to translate the player's input into commands. As personal computers became more powerful with better graphics, the graphic adventure-game format became popular, initially by augmenting player's text commands with graphics, but soon moving towards point-and-click interfaces.
context_section_description: The first known graphical adventure game was Mystery House (1980), by Sierra On-Line, then at the time known as On-Line Systems. Designed by the company's co-founder Roberta Williams, the game featured static vector graphics atop a simple command line interface, building on the text adventure model. Sierra continued to produce similar games under the title Hi-Res Adventure. Vector graphics gave way to bitmap graphics which also enabled for simple animations to show the player-character moving in response to typed commands. Here, Sierra's King's Quest (1984), though not the first game of its type, is recognized as a commercially successful graphical adventure game, enabling Sierra to expand on more titles. Other examples of early games include Koei's Danchi Tsuma no Yuwaku (1982), Sherwood Forest (1982), Yuji Horii's Portopia Serial Murder Case (1983), The Return of Heracles (which faithfully portrayed Greek mythology) by Stuart Smith (1983), Dale Johnson's Masquerade (1983), Antonio Antiochia's Transylvania (1982, re-released in 1984), and Adventure Construction Set (1985), one of the early hits of Electronic Arts.
  As computers gained the ability to use pointing devices and point-and-click interfaces, graphical adventure games moved away from including the text interface and simply provided appropriate commands the player could interact with on-screen. The first known game with such an interface was Enchanted Scepters (1984) from Silicon Beach Software, which used drop-down menus for the player to select actions from while using a text window to describe results of those actions. In 1985, ICOM Simulations released Déjà Vu, the first of its MacVenture series, utilized a more complete point-and-click interface, including the ability to drag objects around on the current scene, and was a commercial success. LucasArts' Maniac Mansion, released in 1987, used a novel "verb-object" interface, showing all possible commands the player could use to interact with the game along with the player's inventory, which became a staple of LucasArts' own adventure games and in the genre overall. The point-and-click system also worked well for game consoles, with games like Chunsoft's Portopia Serial Murder Case (1985) and Square's Suishō no Dragon (1986), both on the Nintendo Entertainment System using the controller input instead of text-based actions.
  Graphical adventure games were considered to have spurred the gaming market for personal computers from 1985 through the next decade, as they were able to offer narratives and storytelling that could not readily be told by the state of graphical hardware at the time.
caption: Mystery House for the Apple II was the first adventure game to use graphics in the early home computer era.
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