A multi-user dungeon, also known as a multi-user dimension or multi-user domain, is a multiplayer real-time virtual world, usually text-based or storyboarded. MUDs combine elements of role-playing games, hack and slash, player versus player, interactive fiction, and online chat. Players can read or view descriptions of rooms, objects, other players, and non-player characters, and perform actions in the virtual world that are typically also described. Players typically interact with each other and the world by typing commands that resemble a natural language, as well as using a character typically called an avatar.
Zork is a text adventure game first released in 1977 by developers Tim Anderson, Marc Blank, Bruce Daniels, and Dave Lebling for the PDP-10 mainframe computer. The original developers and others, as the company Infocom, expanded and split the game into three titles—Zork I: The Great Underground Empire, Zork II: The Wizard of Frobozz, and Zork III: The Dungeon Master—which were released commercially for a range of personal computers beginning in 1980. In Zork, the player explores the abandoned Great Underground Empire in search of treasure. The player moves between the game's hundreds of locations and interacts with objects by typing commands in natural language that the game interprets. The program acts as a narrator, describing the player's location and the results of the player's commands. It has been described as the most famous piece of interactive fiction.
Bad Mojo is an adventure video game by Pulse Entertainment, released in 1996. The player is cast as Roger Samms, an entomologist planning to embezzle money from a research grant to escape his sordid life above an abandoned bar. An accident with his mother's enchanted locket unleashes a curse — the titular bad mojo — that turns him into a cockroach. The storyline in Bad Mojo is loosely based on Franz Kafka's 1915 novella The Metamorphosis; Roger Samms' name is an imperfect anagram of the lead character's in Metamorphosis, and a cat called Franz appears in the game. The gameplay consists of guiding the cockroach through a series of puzzles.
Uninvited is a black-and-white horror-themed point-and-click adventure game. It was originally developed for the Macintosh by ICOM Simulations and released in 1986 by Mindscape as part of the MacVenture series.
King's Quest II: Romancing the Throne is the second installment in the King's Quest series of graphic adventure games by Sierra On-Line. It was originally released in 1985 for PC DOS/PCjr, and later made available for the Apple II/IIGS, Atari ST, and Amiga. It uses the same AGI game engine as King's Quest I: Quest for the Crown and features King Graham as the player character. The title is a spoof of the 1984 film Romancing the Stone.
Silicon Beach Software, Inc., was an early American developer of software products for the Macintosh personal computer. It was founded in San Diego, California, in 1984 by Charlie Jackson and his wife Hallie. Jackson later co-founded FutureWave Software with Jonathan Gay. FutureWave produced the first version of what is now Adobe Flash. Although Silicon Beach Software began as a publisher of game software, it also published what was called "productivity software" at the time.
Shivers is a single-player horror-themed PC adventure game, released on CD-ROM by Sierra On-Line in November 1995. It was developed with Sierra's Creative Interpreter. Being the first Sierra first-person adventure game, Shivers was compared to contemporary Myst and The 7th Guest, gaining praise mostly for its atmosphere. The game takes place in a fictitious haunted museum.
MacVenture is a series of four adventure games with a menu-based point-and-click interface. They were originally developed for the Macintosh by ICOM Simulations:
- Déjà Vu (1985)
- Uninvited (1986)
- Shadowgate (1987)
- Deja Vu II: Lost in Las Vegas (1988)
World Builder is a game creation system for point-and-click text-and-graphics adventure games. It was released for Macintosh in 1986 by Silicon Beach Software and had already been used for creating Enchanted Scepters in 1984. On August 7, 1995, developer William C. Appleton released World Builder as freeware.
An escape room video game, also known as escape the room, room escape, or escape game, is a subgenre of point-and-click adventure game which requires a player to escape from imprisonment by exploiting their surroundings. The room usually consists of a locked door, objects to manipulate, and hidden clues or secret compartments. The player must use the objects to interact with other items in the room to reveal a way to escape. Escape the room games were born out of freeware browser games created in Adobe Flash, but have since become most popular as mobile games for iOS and Android. Some examples include Crimson Room, Viridian Room, MOTAS, and Droom. The popularity of these online games has led to the development of real-life escape rooms all around the world.
Castle of Dr. Brain is an educational video game released in 1991 by Sierra On-Line. It is a puzzle adventure game.
An iPod click wheel game or iPod game is a video game playable on the various versions of the Apple portable media player, the iPod. The original iPod had the game Brick included as an easter egg hidden feature; later firmware versions added it as a menu option. Later revisions of the iPod added three more games in addition to Brick: Parachute, Solitaire, and Music Quiz. Apple later offered iPod games for sale through the iTunes store. These games should not be confused with games for the iPod Touch, which require iOS and are only available on Apple's App Store.
Quarterstaff: The Tomb of Setmoth is an interactive fiction role-playing video game developed by Scott Schmitz and Ken Updike and released by Infocom for Macintosh in 1988. The game features a text parser, graphics, a dynamically updated map, and a graphical interface that incorporates Mac OS hierarchical menus.
Firelord is an action-adventure game written by Stephen Crow and released in 1986 for ZX Spectrum, Amstrad CPC and Commodore 64 by Hewson Consultants. The game's opening theme was composed by Ben Daglish.
Star Trek: The Rebel Universe is an action-adventure computer game published by Firebird Software in Europe and Simon & Schuster Interactive in America. It was originally released for the Atari ST in 1987 and was followed the next year with versions for the Commodore 64 and DOS.
An adventure game is a video game genre in which the player assumes the role of a protagonist in an interactive story, driven by exploration and/or puzzle-solving. The genre's focus on story allows it to draw heavily from other narrative-based media, such as literature and film, encompassing a wide variety of genres. Most adventure games are designed for a single player, since the emphasis on story and character makes multiplayer design difficult. Colossal Cave Adventure is identified by Rick Adams as the first such adventure game, first released in 1976, while other notable adventure game series include Zork, King's Quest, Monkey Island, Syberia, and Myst.
William "Bill" Appleton is an American entrepreneur and technologist best known as the programmer of the first rich media authoring tool World Builder, the multimedia programming language SuperCard, a best-selling CD-ROM Titanic: Adventure Out of Time, the DreamFactory REST API platform, and Snapshot Org Management for Salesforce.
Fatty Bear's Birthday Surprise is a 1993 adventure video game developed by Humongous Entertainment. It is the second game by Humongous Entertainment, the first being Putt-Putt Joins the Parade. It is also the first installment of the Fatty Bear point-and-click games, although the character was also used in the mini-game compilations Fatty Bear's Fun Pack and the crossover spin-off Putt-Putt & Fatty Bear's Activity Pack. In July 2013, Tommo bought the Fatty Bear license for the Atari bankruptcy proceedings.
Radical Castle is a point-and-click adventure game released for Macintosh in 1986, developed in World Builder and distributed as shareware by Christopher Kent Wigginton.
Grumpy Gumphrey Supersleuth, often known simply as Super Sleuth, is a computer game for the ZX Spectrum by Gremlin Graphics, a software developer based in Sheffield, United Kingdom. It is an action-adventure game: the player controls Grumpy, a store detective and general dogsbody working in a large department store. The game was developed by Shaun Hollingworth with loading-screen graphics by Marco Duroe.
