Adventure (video game)

Adventure (video game)
You will have an adventure in this game once you play it.
Genre(s): Action-adventure Platform(s): Atari 2600 Release Date: July 1980 Developer(s): Atari Publisher(s): Atari Country: United States

Adventure is an adventure video game designed by Warren Robinett and developed and published by Atari for the Atari 2600 console in July 1980. It has since been ported to and re-released on many platforms and it is going to be included in the 8th edition of Atari Flashback, which will be released on September 2017.

Gameplay

In the game, the gamer plays as a knight on a quest to retrieve a golden chalice that has been stolen from the Gold Castle and hidden away by an evil wizard somewhere in the kingdom. To succeed in your quest, you can pick up and use several clever items like a sword, a bridge to pass through walls, a magnet and others, by pressing the red button. You can carry an item at a time.

File:Adventure First Screen.png

The start screen of Adventure.

Depending on the difficulty, two or three dragons will try and stop the player from achieving success by eating him, a bat will be there to steal items from the player, the game itself will be bigger and the items will be in different places every time you start a new game.

When the player returns the golden chalice to the Gold Castle, the game ends.

Why It Rocks

1. It is possibly the very first action-adventure wide open sandbox game ever made.
2. It is the very first game on Atari 2600 that favoured exploration instead of going for high score. In fact there is no score system at all in the video game.
3. One of the first Atari 2600 games that actually ends, instead of automatically restarting on a higher difficulty level every time you beat it.
4. It supports full use of the left and right difficulty switches that, combined with the three available difficulty settings, gives the player a fair number of possible combinations to experience. For example, on the first level of difficult, the kingdom will be much smaller and you will only fight two dragons; with the right difficulty switch set to B the dragons will run away from you, if you have the sword, and so on.
5. The AI of the dragons is of a great level, considering the time the game was released.
6. It features one of the earliest successful use of the "fog of war" effect, in the white catacombs area as well as other areas.
7. It contains one of the earliest attempts on Anti-Frustration Features. If a dragon swallows you, you can simply reset the game and you will reappear in the Gold Castle with your progress intact, but the dragons you may have previously slayed will have respawned as well. This is widely considered the first "continue" feature in the history of video games.
8. Warren Robinett, the designer, thought of everything and put a magnet in the game to attract objects that may accidentally get stuck in walls.
9. The manual even acknowledges instances you could get stuck and gives you advice on how to overcome them, even by using Atari 2600's notorious flickering to pass through a dead dragon blocking your way, effectively changing an issue to a way to help you out of an unfair unwinnable situation.
10. It features the first most famous Easter Eggs in video game history (though not the very first one), a text reading, "Created by Warren Robinett". This was actually a way Robinett thought to put his name in the game, as Atari did not allow designers' names in its products, at the time.

Bad Qualities

1. Some players are not comfortable with the nearly complete lack of sound of the game. As a matter of fact, the game has only five sound effects: one when you pick up an item, one when you drop it, one when you slay a dragon, one when a dragon is about to eat you and one when you finish the game.
2. The graphics do not hold up very well, today, and were criticized at the time of its release as well. The knight you impersonate is a square and some players argue that the dragons look like giant ducks. For the same reason some people found them to be cute, though.
3. On the third difficulty setting, you could get stuck in an unwinnable situation and you will have no options but to reset. This is due to the items spawning in random locations. For example, the gold key could spawn inside the Gold Castle, locking you out with nearly no possibilities to retrieve it.

Reception

At the time of its release, Adventure received generally positive reviews, but was criticized for its sound and graphics.

Many years after its release, gamers still enjoy Adventure, which has a 3.84 rating on GameFAQs.com, The Video Game Critic rated it "A", stating that "[its] rich gameplay trascends its primitive sound and graphics, creating an experience brimming with strategy, action and suspense."

Trivia

1. Apparently, Adventure was originally intended to be a port of Colossal Cave for the Atari 2600.
2. Superman, another golden age video game for the Atari 2600, was developed using the prototype code of Adventure, but ended up being released before it.
3. A sequel to Adventure started being developed in 1982, but later evolved in the first episode of the series Swordquest. Unfortunately, the series were eventually cancelled due to the North American Video Game Crash of 1983.
4. Many fan made sequels and homages to Adventure have been released, though, like Adventure II for the Atari 5200 and Adventure Plus by AtariAge, Epic Adventure by Red Knight Games and another game entitled Adventure II included in several editions of Atari Flashback. There are also an expansion for MS-DOS entitled Indenture and a homebrew entitled Duck Attack!
5. The game can be completed without killing any dragons.

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