Adventure

Today, the day after Christmas, I spent some time setting up the Stella Atari 2600 VCS emulator, adjusting its graphics settings to my liking (I like to emulate old CRT hardware to the extent available when playing old games) and playing some of the classic 1980 release Adventure. This is a game I've played before, and come away from with a pretty positive impression of in the past, and while I certainly still see a lot to like in it upon this revisit, I also do feel that my recent explorations of what came before it have slightly diminished its gleam in my mind's eye.

Adventure is an ambitious game to be sure; not the first game to feature a narratively-focused quest with a definitive ending (I've already talked about the previous year's Akalabeth: World of Doom and I know there were even earlier narrative adventures such as Zork and Colossal Cave Adventure) but certainly an early innovator in the space, flanked on all sides by single-screen score-chasers in both the arcade and home console markets. It also, undeniably, represents a significant milestone in the development of graphical adventure games of varied locales and persistent worlds. Text adventures tended to have large and at least somewhat persistent worlds in comparison to their contemporaries, albeit conveyed solely through textual description, and early RPGs like Akalabeth made bold strides in visually representing their locales, giving the player both top-down map views and first-person dungeon ones, though there was no real persistence to speak of outside of the layouts (which were often procedurally generated at the start of play.) I wouldn't say that Adventure does either of these as well as its predecessors, but the blending of these two features results in a unique ludic alchemy and produces a completely new experience which doesn't compare easily to any of what came before.

The visuals, as is the case with many Atari games of this era, are extremely rudimentary, limited as they are by the storage, processing, and memory limitations of the Atari 2600, but they ably represent castles and labyrinths, and provide the backdrop for a brief quest based largely around a quite impressive system of picking up and moving around various objects. This is the primary mechanic in the game; various items are located around the world, and any of them can be picked up and dropped wherever you want, to remain there unless moved by some other force. Pick up the sword and carry it to the dragon that needs slaying. Pick up a key and stick it in the gate of the appropriate castle to open it up. Pick up the bridge and lay it across a wall to walk right through it. Even winning the game is achieved by picking up the enchanted chalice and carrying it back to the gold castle (where it allegedly belongs, having been stolen and moved to the black one by the evil wizard.) It's a bit of a masterclass in squeezing a lot of interaction out of some extremely simple baseline mechanics. Your inputs in this game are 8-way movement and a button which is exclusively used for putting down held objects (picking them up is done by simply walking into them,) and with this fairly open-ended system you get all kinds of emergent behavior out of collisions and such.

The difficulty curve is also pretty appreciable as you progress through the game's skill levels. On level 1, you start out with immediate access to the gold key just outside the gold castle, inside of which is the sword you can use to slay any dragons you come across. The black key isn't too far off, and you need only find your way through a single blue labyrinth to reach the black castle and retrieve the enchanted chalice. The bridge is located inside the labyrinth, and isn't a necessity to complete the game; You can, however, place it such that it significantly shortens your trips through the labyrinth.

Level 2 substantially beefs up the complexity of the game; the singular room containing the black key has been replaced with a labyrinthine catacomb which you must find your way through despite only being able to see a short distance in front of yourself, and this catacomb contains the gold key, the bridge, and the newly-added white castle. The white key is hidden in the blue labyrinth, and once you enter the white castle you find a mazelike dungeon in which is hidden a secret room, only accessible via the bridge, containing the black key. On top of this, a bat has been added, who will fly around haphazardly and grab your items. You can catch the bat in order to use whatever item it's carrying, but only for a limited time, as it will eventually escape your grasp, and you have no control over where it goes or when it swaps one item for another along its path, introducing a significant amount of unpredictability to the game. Even worse, the bat immediately spawn in the starting room when you begin the game, and grabs the nearby sword, which you'll sorely miss as you find yourself navigating mazes while pursued by dragons who don't have to follow the circuitous paths the way you do. Level 3, by comparison, is a fairly small change of pace as it simply randomizes the location of items, although that in itself can be quite disruptive to one's attempts to complete the quest.

All of this is very impressive and at times shockingly forward-thinking, though I would hasten to add that the game is not without its foibles. First and foremost, there truly is a strikingly limited amount of material in the game; Level 1 can be beaten in the span of about two minutes even with some floundering, and Level 2 is only a bit longer (to some extent padded by the confusion of the darkened catacomb maze.) As I understand it, the game as it stands is straining at the limits of the memory of the Atari 2600 cartridge, and designer Warren Robinette should be lauded for his achievement at fitting even this much into such a limited space. (These laurels were, in fact, denied to him at the time, as Atari maintained a practice of refusing to credit individual designers within the company. Robinette rebelled by putting a credit for himself in a hidden room within the game, often cited as the medium's first easter egg.) The game's heaviest influence, Colossal Cave Adventure, used up hundreds of kilobytes of memory for running its world, while Robinette was limited to only 4, and did what he could with that limited space. This is undoubtedly an impressive work of engineering, but the limitations nonetheless have a pretty severe impact on the game's longevity.

There's also very little that will actually change from one playthrough to another in each of the two play modes. There's a bit of variance afforded by the enemy AI, but for the most part you're running through a linear series of milestones across a small handful of screens. As I've said, the game is somewhat prescient, presenting a structure and method of engagement that we'll later see expanded in titles like those in the Legend of Zelda series, but at this early stage, I think the limitations weigh all the heavier as the number of interactions and size of the world are simply so tiny. The randomizer does what it can to add spontaneity, but there's really only so much here.

This is, I think, a somewhat unavoidable result of this kind of ambition; I respect the hell out of what's being done here, but that same ambition can be a bit of a noose around the game's neck, resulting in a less lasting experience than some of those which are more willing to embrace their constraints. I'm very happy to have played through Adventure a couple times, and I'll probably come back to it now and then, but it ultimately doesn't engage and compel me as much in a half-dozen screens as something like Galaxian does within a single one. It's an interesting game, an impressive one, an ambitious one, and a good one. Is it a great one? I'm not so sure, and that's alright. It takes more than just great art to develop a medium, and Adventure has certainly secured its place in history.