Atari Graphical Action ADVENTURE vs. Early Interactive Fiction

In the early eighties, just after the Pac Man arcade game had chomped its way into the pizza place around the corner from my house, my next door neighbor’s parents got her an Atari 2600 console.

Pac Man.  In the home.  Yes!  For a ten-year-old, this—was progress.

I.  Loved.  Atari.  But my parents wouldn’t let me watch TV, much less play video games.  So, I played Pac Man and Space Invaders in my neighbor’s basement whenever I could.  My favorite of all those little fat black Atari cartridges was Adventure.

Adventure was the very first graphical action-adventure video game.  It was published in 1979, a few years before I got my hands on it in ’82.  The graphics in Adventure were pretty hilarious, but in the early eighties, I was dazzled by them.  For hours, dragons shaped like ducks made of big, boxy pixels floated relentlessly after me: a small square (see fig. 1).

Fig. 1 – Want to see Adventure in action? Take a gander at this vid of gameplay (difficulty level 1).

Not too long after my introduction to Atari, my early-adopting neighbor got an Apple II.  And it was on that computer that I played my first text-driven interactive fiction game.  It was Roberta and Ken Williams’s Mystery House (Sierra On-line, 1980).

An interactive fiction game is story-driven, rather than action-driven.  The earliest interactive fiction games, like Colossal Cave Adventure and Zork , were text-only games.  A player typed moves into a command-line interface and received the results in the form of textual description (see fig. 2).

Fig. 2 – Zork screenshot: text-based interactive fiction at the command line.

Sierra On-line’s Mystery House was the first interactive fiction game with graphics (see fig. 3).  Now, let me clarify that by “graphics” I mean there were stick dead people that you knew were dead because they had Xs in their eyes.  In spite of Mystery House’s (coff) visual accompaniment, I thought this text-driven game was a massive step up from Atari’s action games.

Fig. 3. Mystery House screenshot. Check out those x’s!

Honestly, I didn’t care how bad Williams’s corpse illustrations were.  (It’s not like she had Adobe CS4 on hand.)  As a pint-sized game player, all I was interested in was exploring the environment—an interactive story!—and piecing together the plot with hints (and bodies) dropped by the author as I went.

Instead of the game running me through a maze like an adrenaline-crazed rat, Mystery House adapted to my internally directed behavior.  Instead of forcing me to do the will of the machine, it was human-centered.  Instead of using technology to drive the players’ experiences, Roberta and Ken Williams let players’ behaviors drive their experiences.  Arguably, Roberta and Ken Williams were one of the first user-centered, immersive, interactive experience design teams.