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The Golden Era of Adventure Games... Or Was It? 20 Nov, 2002, 19:05 / 6 comments

By DJG


Adventure Gamers has published an interesting article entitled Rose Colored Glasses, which discusses what I like to call the "good ol' days" syndrome. The author explores whether or not the former days of point and click graphic adventures were really all that great. Naturally, you can't look back on the so-called golden era of adventure games without mentioning LucasArts. Here's a quote from the article:
Many of those that have been playing adventure games for any significant amount of time often refer to the ?golden age? of adventure games, when adventure was indeed the most popular and prominent genre; back when Sierra and LucasArts still made (primarily) adventure games and managed to crank them out almost as fast as FPSs are churned out today (as an interesting aside, this was also before LucasArts managed to completely run the Star Wars franchise into the ground).

Although most of us lament the passing of this ?golden age,? in light of my self-realization that perhaps my own memories become positively biased with the passage of time, I?m given to wonder, ?was the golden age really all that golden, or are we all just subject to the same collective sense of nostalgia that colors our memories and makes us think of times past with more fondness than they merit??
This is a very interesting topic, and I would suggest that you give a read and post your thoughts here.
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6 Comments

  • QueZTone on 21 Nov, 2002, 09:30…
    i think he's senile....AND silly

    of all titles he uses King's Quest V? OMG ROFLOLMAO WTF GL HF GG, what is he on? Everyone, re-read that bit and replace KQV with any LEC adventure. I think we'd all start to dislike him then..
    KQ games never were that good; the guy had a wrong taste in adventure games in the first place!

    anyway, 99% of his article is nonsense, sorry just had to clear things up
  • telarium on 21 Nov, 2002, 10:32…
    When people talk about the golden age of graphic adventures, Kings Quest usually comes up. It's an icon in many ways, and it even helped to inspire Ron Gilbert to make Maniac Mansion. But looking back... were they really all that good, or do people just remember them differently? I think that was his point.

    I, for one, remembered the Kings Quest games as being quality classics... but when I played some of them not too long ago, I discovered that maybe they really weren't. It's just funny how we look back on things differently than they really were.
  • Andi Wan on 20 Nov, 2002, 23:12…
    Games like Loom and Indy and the Last Crusade might not hold up so well, but all the Monkey Island games, Full Throttle, Grim Fandango. They'll be gold forever.

    I played Monkey Island 1 first in 1993, and it's still great today.
  • The_last_great_adventurer on 20 Nov, 2002, 20:50…
    Omg! He may be right! My childhood is all a LIE!

    NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!
    KAHN!!!!!!!!

    ok, I'm better now.

    Nostalsha dieses or not I still found all those adventures(ok Lucasarts adventurers) to be exciting the first time I played them.
  • Scummbuddy on 22 Nov, 2002, 20:24…
    my childhood was a lie. I thought I was living in the Carribean as a pirate. Then my mom and dad dragged me home from the carnival. Stupid parents...
  • telarium on 20 Nov, 2002, 19:23…
    In my own experience, I recently replayed some of the old Sierra games. I was particularly a fan of the Space Quest series when I was young... but when I tried to play them more than five years later, they really didn't seem all that good anymore. The humor, the puzzles, the story... it lost all the charm I remembered it having.

    However, I really believe that Monkey Island 2 will forever be my favorite game of all time... not because everything since then hasn't been as good (you could argue that Grim Fandango is more imaginative and refined), but the memories of playing that game with my brother back in 1992 are just untouchable. Replaying MI2 still gives me the same child-like wonder I had back then, and no new game can possibly compete with that.