Adventure Games History!

Wow! I found this outstanding series of five YouTube videos done by "Machinima." These are a really excellent video retrospective on the early history of adventure games, from the very start with the first text game of "Colossal Cave," which morphed into "Adventure," which morphed into the "Zork" series, and thence to graphic adventures.

These videos cover the major publishers, the major games, and get into how adventure games changed everything.

Of course I completely disagree with his premise that the genre "vanished," although he does leave room for its revival in his final video. Certainly the genre is far from the top of the bestseller lists, but it isn't dead by a long shot and never was. Excellent, good, mediocre and lousy adventures found publishers well beyond the '90s and are published today. Adventure games have a rich history after the late 1990s. He misses, for example, the marvelous second and third Gabriel Knight games, the brilliant Obsidian and Pilgrim, The Longest Journey, the Syberia and other B. Sokal games, Keepsake, Scratches, the Dracula games, Mysterious Island, the Journeyman and Rhem series, The Longest Journey, the popular Agatha Christie and Nancy Drew series, and a whole host of others. Independent authors like Jonathan Boakes have continued to produce wonderful point and click adventures to this day such as the outstanding Darkfall series and the Lost Crown, with more on the way. Jane Jensen has returned with the excellent Gray Matter. Michael Nyqvist continues to keep a niche audience happy with his Carol Reed mysteries. Here's a list of the Adventure Gamers website's opinion about the top 100 games, as of a few years ago. A third of them were released after the turn of the millennium.

Nevertheless, this YouTube series is a really outstanding early history of the genre, at least up to the late 1990s.

And the narration is actually good!

Watch and enjoy!

Part One:

Part Two:

Part Three:

Part Four:

Part Five: