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The adventure begins…

I promise, this isn’t going to be one of those, “Back in my day, we had to walk 30 miles through the snow to get to school,” kind of posts. But it is going to cover some ancient history. I’ll try to keep my geriatric diatribes to a minimum. 🙂

Wikipedia: Adventure Game Cover

The very first video game I ever remember playing was called Adventure, which was published in 1979 and released for the Atari 2600 console. I was a small child in the early 80’s, but I’ll never forget the sense of wonder I felt when roaming (lost) through an 8-bit kingdom filled with mirror-image mazes, and searching for the Enchanted Chalice (which at that age, might as well have been the Holy Grail for all I knew).

Adventure was the first of its kind. Besides having honorarily popped my proverbial video game cherry, it was also the first action-adventure game, for without which the genre might never have been born, and we might never have had series such as King’s Quest, the Legend of Zelda, or Fable. This game also held a secret – the first ever “Easter Egg” known in video game history. In those early days, Atari did not credit the actual programmers for their work, and because of this, the game’s designer, Warren Robinette created a secret “room” in the game that could only be found by sheer luck and an eye for detail. In the secret room, the words, “Created by Warren Robinette” were displayed vertically across the screen. Another first in the history books was the introduction of an inventory system, in which the player could select one item at a time to carry, without the need to type in a myriad of commands.

Introducing the Easter Egg

This wasn’t a game you played because the graphics were so smokin’ hot, or because the story’s plot was bestselling material that inspired you to do great things. This game was about possibilities – you used your imagination to fill in any of the gaps that technology simply couldn’t cover. As a kid, I had a rampant imagination (and still do to some degree), and could clearly picture the single dot that represented my player character as a sword-wielding battle maiden, with flowing golden hair and eyes that shined like sapphires. It didn’t matter that all the TV screen reflected was a monotone blip…I could see it in my mind and that was good enough for my eight year old self.

I’ve watched the world of video games shift and transform over the years into a definitive art form. From graphics that leave you slack-jawed and drooling, to story lines that are continuously engaging…the technology just keeps getting better and better. But I do like to think about the game that started it all, at least for me. And I can’t help but wonder what the youth of today’s generation would think about playing a game that only used 4KB of ROM, 128 bytes of RAM, and a whole lot of grey matter elbow grease to see the kingdom of Adventure in the same light I saw it in 26 years ago.