A few weeks
ago, Gamecenter ran an article in
which they declared that adventure gaming was "dead and buried". The
Gamecenter employees who write the titles for articles apparently don't coordinate their
efforts with the people who write the subtitles for articles because even before the
banner graphic was completely over, someone in the subtitle department had upgraded the
condition of adventure games to merely "vanishing". Still, no matter which
part of the logo you choose to look at, adventure games are in trouble.
Gamecenter blames Myst for killing adventure games. Or at least the
Gamecenter employees who write the first paragraph of Gamecenter articles do. Again,
this department may not be in direct contact with the team responsible for paragraph four,
in which it is clearly stated that:
Now it seems people want more action than adventure.
They would rather run around in short shorts raiding tombs than experience real stories.
As far as I can tell, the Gamecenter "death of adventure"
timeline goes something like this:
The action-packed Myst introduces casual gamers to the pleasures of Tomb
Genius adventure gamers come to the painful realization that the
same equipment they use to explore the complex fantasy world of Leisure Suit
Larry can also be utilized by stupid people to run Quake. Thanks to their
television-atrophied attention spans, these casual gamers are mentally incapable of
spending six hours trying to randomly guess at the absurd dream logic Roberta Williams has
applied to the problem of getting the dungeon key out of the bluebird's nest.
Horrified by the knowledge that somewhere someone is playing a game that
is not an adventure, genius adventure gamers abandon the hobby in droves and resort to
their backup source of entertainment: various combinations of Babylon 5 novels and
Gamecenter mentions Jane Jensen's Gabriel Knight 3 as the last title of
note in the genre. I'd like to use Gabriel Knight 3 to illustrate my alternate
theory of who killed adventure gaming.