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Adventure Gaming: the dead genre

Started by names_are_useless, September 27, 2007, 01:16:02 PM

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names_are_useless

Hello everyone, my first post here I guess ;D

Well anyways, this thread basically deals with my sadness towards the genre, especially of my generation.  I go to Radford University in southern VA, and just recently a Video Game Club (which has been dubbed Umbrella Organization).  Its not just a game making club, but there is also a gaming appreciation portion to it as well.

According to Facebook, the group has grown to 81 Members, a good size considering it was only started last week.  Seeing as one of my favorite genres is Adventure, I took a chance at starting an Adventure Appreciation Division.  Here is basically what I typed on Facebook:

Quote from: Adventure DivisionIf you were at today's meeting, we talked about interest genre divisions. Of course we'll have our FPS, RTS, RPG, etc. Divisions, but what about an Adventure one? I'd really like to start up a division in the Adventure genre.

Did anyone here grow up with this genre? I remember my very first game when I was 5 yrs old, back in '92: King's Quest 5. You played the role of King Graham, who (in the fifth game) has to track down the evil wizard that shrunk your castle and kidnapped your family. You really had to use your wits: find everyday objects and use them in sometimes unexpected ways to progress in your quest, treck through a neverending desert that you could die from thirst, and learn magic to combat the wizard Mordack.

Of course, Adventure games were born way before '92. According to wikipedia, they can even be tracked back to the early '70s, being one of the earliest genres in gaming. Back then, they were simply Text Adventures. From there, they would evolve into Text Parsers (basically graphic adventures where the user would input what he wanted to do), and eventually Point-and-Click (which took out the need for the user to type anything at all).

However, the genre basically died in the late 90s, as FPSs and RPGs started to take over.

Here is a list of some famous ones:
Sierra:
- King's Quest 1-8
- Space Quest 1-6
- Police Quest 1-4
- The Myst series
- Maniac Mansion
- Monkey Island 1-4
- Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis
- Sam & Max: Hit the Road
- Full Throttle

In case anyone is curious of this long-forgotten genre, here are a number of sites with some Adventure games:

AGDI Interactive: http://www.agdinteractive.com/
This devoted group of Sierra fans have recreated King's Quest 1-2 and are currently recreating Quest for Glory 2. These games are completely free!

Telltale Games: http://www.telltalegames.com/
Once a part of the Lucas Arts Adventure Dept, they left the company after the unfortunate cancellation of the sequel to Sam & Max. They went and bought the rights for the copyright and became Telltale.

The Silver Linning: http://www.tsl-game.com/
A group of King's Quest fans are in development of the fan sequel KQ9. Vivendi Universal (who bought Sierra) thought that it was so good, they have granted permission to the developers of this fan sequel to continue their work. For a fan-game, that is an amazing accomplishment.


If anyone is interested in this game division for the Umbrella Organization, post your interest here!
Only one person has posted to it, and only to tell me that it'd need enough support before this division could be started.

Was that story really just too long, or is it simply that the genre is that unknown to my generation (18-22)?  You'd think that there would have to be at least 1 more out of that 81 that would have played one of those games.  I really fear that our club will be nothing but Action and FPSs (hopefully at least an RPG, another genre I am fond of).

I really want to spread the word to gamers of an older time of gaming, but bring it into the light that it deserves.  Do any of you Adventure gamers have any ideas on how I could do that? ???

Yonkey

Age is actually a pretty strong factor.  Most of the people on our team are between 23-30.  It's possible that people 18 or younger have heard of King's Quest, but in general, it's more like a historical game to them than something from childhood (sort of like how the original Pong and Pacman were a bit before my time :P).

As for spreading the word, there are a couple really big Adventure Game sites: Adventure Gamers, Just Adventure and Quandary come to mind, although there are plenty others as well. :)
"A wish changes nothing. A decision changes everything."

Say

You need someone who is proficient in Marketing, most likely brand management. When people read "Marketing" they assume money or commercial gain, even non-profit organizations need marketing in order to survive or self invest to be able to produce. And for this kind of project it's not even just marketing, it's e-marketing, the resources you work with are entirely different.

You need someone who knows how to gather a study of the niche you are approaching. As Neil said, you need to know that younger people might not be your large % of the whole, since KQ is not a game that was born in the 90's. You'd have to aim (at least) for 20 to 30 most likely, but don't be surprised that you get a whole different small demographic into 40 to 60 (we do in TSL community). You need to know who you want to aim in order to work to attract that people for whatever purpose you want. You need to define that and work towards that. Once you know who you are working for it's a lot easier to break it down in tasks to achieve what you want.

Example: You want discussions, then you need to have at least a forum of sorts and have open discussions for everyone to participate in. You want to create some sort of buzz into the adventure world, then you will have to step it up further than just conversations in a forum. Like events, and any kind of interactivity that will help you bring people together. But just to even know what you could be talking with all those you already have, you need to study them and understand them, just to be able to reach them and have them be part of your project. 

You are not looking to promote a production but instead a community, so the best way to do so is working with "word of mouth" which is thriving into fan's participation in order for you to have anyone attentive and participating in the community.

You will also need others to help you organize efforts (from simple promotional posts to even perhaps a website or group maintenance) and usually someone who knows how to work with web is not good enough, but instead you will need someone who knows how to work FOR people. Most likely communities or large client field. One person will take time and not to mention that you would have to do absolutely everything on your own. Sometimes having 2 or 3 to discuss options with it's rather healthy.

You could either study your resources and draft a plan to get a community active and going. Or just keep on doing everything yourself and hopefully in a couple years you might have folks participating... or not.

Adventure genre is far from dead, as someone who has worked directly with part of the adventure community I can tell you we have had some large numbers. We thought they didn't even exist, at least for just the KQ franchise.




Say Mistage
Phoenix Online Studios

#IndieSupport <3

names_are_useless

Quote from: Say on September 27, 2007, 05:05:21 PM
You need someone who is proficient in Marketing, most likely brand management. When people read "Marketing" they assume money or commercial gain, even non-profit organizations need marketing in order to survive or self invest to be able to produce. And for this kind of project it's not even just marketing, it's e-marketing, the resources you work with are entirely different.

You need someone who knows how to gather a study of the niche you are approaching. As Neil said, you need to know that younger people might not be your large % of the whole, since KQ is not a game that was born in the 90's. You'd have to aim (at least) for 20 to 30 most likely, but don't be surprised that you get a whole different small demographic into 40 to 60 (we do in TSL community). You need to know who you want to aim in order to work to attract that people for whatever purpose you want. You need to define that and work towards that. Once you know who you are working for it's a lot easier to break it down in tasks to achieve what you want.

Example: You want discussions, then you need to have at least a forum of sorts and have open discussions for everyone to participate in. You want to create some sort of buzz into the adventure world, then you will have to step it up further than just conversations in a forum. Like events, and any kind of interactivity that will help you bring people together. But just to even know what you could be talking with all those you already have, you need to study them and understand them, just to be able to reach them and have them be part of your project. 

You are not looking to promote a production but instead a community, so the best way to do so is working with "word of mouth" which is thriving into fan's participation in order for you to have anyone attentive and participating in the community.

You will also need others to help you organize efforts (from simple promotional posts to even perhaps a website or group maintenance) and usually someone who knows how to work with web is not good enough, but instead you will need someone who knows how to work FOR people. Most likely communities or large client field. One person will take time and not to mention that you would have to do absolutely everything on your own. Sometimes having 2 or 3 to discuss options with it's rather healthy.

You could either study your resources and draft a plan to get a community active and going. Or just keep on doing everything yourself and hopefully in a couple years you might have folks participating... or not.

Adventure genre is far from dead, as someone who has worked directly with part of the adventure community I can tell you we have had some large numbers. We thought they didn't even exist, at least for just the KQ franchise.



Well, I'm not trying to create an Adventure game, I just want to start an Adventure Interest group.  Like you said, just a community.  Word of mouth will probably do, but I still highly doubt I'll get enough interest (this college isn't one of the bigger ones)

Yes, our group will be creating games, but just low key free stuff, we ain't marketing anything.  Right now their idea is for a game with Samuel L. Jackson riding on a bear with a couple uzis ... yeah ... I really hope we can actually make something that the university would take seriously!

When I said the genre was dead, I mean that more in the mainstream sense, I know its not dead.  If I could get at least 1 or 2 others who are interested, I believe we may be able to gain interest.

Seriously, this club just started, so I'll probably be taking my time.  As for websites: Were only planning one website for the entire club, no genre division sites.  The ideas are great and all Say, but simply too big for right now.

Thanks for the advice though ;D

Say

I *never* said it was about game development, I spoke as if it were a community. But even for just a community it's required to take care of it no matter how small it is. I believe you misunderstood the information I provided you, when I said "marketing" it's because marketing provides you research and SWOT analysis which is clearly necessary for anyone to start up anything.

Not to commercialize or whatever else you understood from it. I wasn't even talking about game development. I never even mentioned a website development, what I said is whatever you do just think about it before hand so you are efficient about your efforts.

The comments were not about big plans, were about simply being organized.

Everything takes time, but the longer you take to build it the longer it will be to achieve any results. That's why I said work is best if it's not just yourself.


Anyhow, I hope it's clear now.


Say Mistage
Phoenix Online Studios

#IndieSupport <3

names_are_useless

My bad, I think I should of read your post over again.  Yeah its clear what you meant.

I guess when I was talking about the website thing, I automatically thought "website w/ forums" when I thought organized and building up interest.

I'll wait for the next meeting and bring it up, afterall not everyone in the group check on the Facebook discussion ;)

dew7

Thanks for replying to my message and finally posting and not just lurking around the group.

;)

I think adventure games have lots of life but my disappointment with games recently is that the more modern games have great special effects and stuff but some are lacking a good story line.  The same seems to be true of some modern movies as well and may sadly reflect the dumbing down of America by big media companies but this is just a guess.  Anyway, I still enjoy watching the old time Christmas classic "It's a Wonderful Life" and it really is because life is what you make of it.
Carpe Diem  Trying to help all of us including myself understand the merry-go-round of life.