Hardcoregaming101.net Presents: The Guide to Classic Graphic Adventures

by Kurt Kalata, John Cameron (Contributor), Ryan Woodward (Contributor)

In 1984, Roberta Williams of Sierra On-Line designed King's Quest, the world's first graphic adventure. A huge step beyond the text-oriented games that preceded it, the genre took the world by storm, and proved immensely popular with computers over the next decade. A combination of storytelling and puzzle solving, they provided the ability to explore a world and experience a narrative without the need for twitchy reflexes demanded of arcade games. This nearly comprehensive book includes reviews for over 250 games from the golden age of the graphic adventure genre, running from 1984 to roughly 2000, focusing on promiminent publishers such -LucasArts (Maniac Mansion, Monkey Island, Sam & Max, Grim Fandango) -Sierra On-Line (King's Quest, Space Quest, Leisure Suit Larry, Gabriel Knight) -Legend (Spellcasting, Eric the Unready, Callahan's Crosstime Saloon) -And several other popular and not-so-popular series and games (Zork, Myst, Broken Sword, The Longest Journey, Simon the Sorcerer, The Last Express, and dozens of others) -Also includes interviews with several adventure game developers, including Al Lowe (creator of Leisure Suit Larry), Corey Cole (creator of Quest for Glory), Bob Bates (founder of Legend Entertainment) and Josh Mandel (writer and designer for Sierra).

Genres: Video Games, Nonfiction, Gaming, Reference, Games, Game Design, History

772 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2011

About the author

Kurt Kalata has been writing about video games for twenty years. In addition to founding retro game website Hardcore Gaming 101 in 2003, he previously started fan sites The Castlevania Dungeon and The Contra HQ. He has also contributed to several other websites, including 1up, Gamasutra, and Siliconera. He has edited and published over fifteen books through the Hardcore Gaming 101 website, including The Guide to Classic Graphic Adventures and The 200 Best Video Games of All Time, and has contributed to several other retro themed books, including The Untold History of Japanese Game Developers, Unseen64’s Video Games You’ll Never Play, and The Overstreet Guide to Collecting Video Games. He lives in New Jersey, USA, with his wife, daughter, and two cats.

Reviews

[Thom · Rating 3 out of 5]

An encyclopedic collection of computer adventure games, with content derived from the hardcoregaming101 website.

Purchased a bundle containing this ebook, and have read that it is the preferred format to read this in - the printed version has grey scale pictures and isn't easily searchable ;). This large tome contains reviews of a TON of graphic adventure games and series. Sections are sorted by company, with a huge end section of single titles. These sections also contain a bit about the company or series in question, and there are a few choice interviews as well.

The reviews are written by individuals, and vary widely. While this is useful to get a feel for a game, it is not at all useful to compare between games played by different reviewers. My understanding is that this is collected from material on the website. While not as useful or complete as wikipedia, it was nice to have it in one volume to read through. And yes, I've spent months reading through this, entry by entry, and at times it was like reading an encyclopedia. That said, I encountered plenty of games I have never heard of.

For Zork and Spellbreaker, they included the text adventures that launched the series. It wouldn't have been many more pages to include all of Infocom's work, and it may have been more relevant than including a few RPGmaker games towards the end. Minor quibble - I will visit their website next to see if those games (particular favorites of mine) are there.

[Kalin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hugely informative and often amusing, this compendium helped fill a hole in my game lore.

I was surprised to see: a) how many of the titles included I did actually know (long live Youtube longplays ;); b) how fine the writing, and especially the plots, of a number of these games are. So good game writing is possible--as long as developers put their money where their heart is.

Unfortunately, I didn't really like the unfamiliar titles the guide prompted me to try. Still, I feel tempted to give a shot to a few Visual Novels: 999: Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors and the Higurashi series.

If anyone can recommend a similar guide to Visual Novels, I'll be much obliged.

[Mike · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was an unbelievably page-turner for me. I cut my teeth on many on the games that this book gets into, and I felt like this author was completely on my wave-length. He had a ton of interesting insights about games I've played, and lots of material about games that I definitely want to play after reading this book.

[Heiki Eesmaa · Rating 5 out of 5]

An extremely niche book, but excellent at what it does.

[Bpatchett · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a validating book for adventure-heads! It's actually a (very thick!) compilation of reviews from hardcoregaming101.net. It was great to read about games I played, and games whose contents I merely speculated upon.

Reading the whole thing (or even a random chunk of it,) you get a good idea of the general outlines of adventure gaming history, but the book is organized by company and series -- not purely historically / chronologically. There are some sloppy details -- for example, it looks like someone did a find-and-replace for the phrase "late '90s," swapping it out for "late '80s" -- for the whole book.

That said, I highly recommend this book. It's a joy to have and to refer to. You will recognize all the boxes and artifacts on the front cover (a chicken-with-a-pulley-in-the-middle), and the back cover is even better: a LITERAL SHRINE to Roberta Williams, candles and all.

[RavenWorks · Rating 2 out of 5]

Great book, but the paper edition is so big it's cumbersome, and the black+white screenshots are often difficult to make out. Buy the ebook instead (the screenshots in the ebook are in color).

[Johnny · Rating 4 out of 5]

For my thirteenth birthday, my mother drove me from to a computer shop in the nearest city. There I was allowed to choose a new game. A new world opened up for me. Not only that of Guybrush Threepwood's character in "The Secret of Monkey Island", but also that of the graphic adventure games.

Everyone is talking about online escape rooms these days. Few people realize that this genre has actually been around for decades. In the past, they always came in large, shoebox-like packages containing floppies, diskettes and CDs, with a paper manual and some decoding disk as password protection, a kind of first puzzle to be able to start the game effectively.

In addition to that birthday present, I remember an unexpected Christmas present at the age of fifteen: "Sins of the Fathers," the first game in the series starring Gabriel Knight, and my first game aimed at a more mature audience, about a horror writer in New Orleans who teams up with a befriended police detective to solve a string of voodoo murders.

On June 4, 2020, I started reading "The Guide to Classic Graphic Adventures" compiled and edited by Kurt Kalata. It is a 770-page compendium of most of the adventure games released since the 1980s, by developers such as Lucasfilm and Sierra classics, up to around the year 2011, with the most recent games being "Gray Matter" and "Gemini Rue" . A collection of reviews as I have written them for my blog since then. It was nice to read the articles about old favorites, but also to discover new games that I immediately looked up online.

Some of the discussions I found too harsh on games that I really liked to play and replay. Other discussions sparked the fire to start playing again; a more active form of relaxation in addition to reading many books and watching movies or tv shows. After all, for these games you have to use your brain, follow storylines, solve puzzles. It's the story-rich games that intrigue me the most. I like fiction, in all forms. Interactive fiction takes that love a step further. Letting the story unfold yourself, in addition to making up your own stories, will always have a special place in my heart.

I finished the book on May 10, eleven months after I started it. I read the articles in between other books. But now I really long for a sequel to this book, with reviews of games released in the last decade. The genre experienced a revival because many independent developers used open source software to create their own games and offer them for sale through various online stores.

[Quique RS · Rating 3 out of 5]

Qué lastima, me ha gustado menos de lo esperado y se me ha hecho muy pesado. Tal vez sea masoca por haber leído las 700 pgs de este mamotreto del tirón, pero me apetecía.

El principal problema que tiene este libro es que es un tocho grande, y además esas 700 pgs son casi tamaño folio. Es verdad que incluye una cantidad de juegos muy grandes, pero también es verdad que hay muchísimas páginas que sobran, por lo que el tamaña hubiera sido menor y se hubiera agradecido.

Porque además de aventuras gráficas se meten pequeños análisis de juegos que no tienen nada que ver con las AG pero que han sido derivados de algunas sagas de aventuras conocidas, y a veces se les da más peso que el que deberían (simplemente habiendolos mencionado de pasada hubiera sido bastante).

Y otro tema es la elección de los juegos incluidos. Es lógico que no van a estar los que esperas, que el autor tendrá otros favoritos, pero es que en este caso se han incluido títulos que el mismo autor considera morralla, y no solo eso, sino que a veces les da 6 páginas. Me viene a la cabeza una saga super indie y cutre de AG inglesa de los 90 que no conoce ni el tato y que el propio autor reconoce que son malos juegos. ¿Para qué ponerlos entonces? Además incluso incluye una reseña a un FPS derivado de esta saga...

También hay un error que se repite mucho: en ocasionesse habla de algun juego de los 80, cuando se está hablando claramente de un título de los 90. Necesitaría hacer una revisión para limpiar un poco errores de este tipo.

Los pantallazos que aparecen están en B/N en la edición de papel por lo que no se distinguen bien, dicen que en la version pdf no hay este problema

6

[Josh Fritz · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nerding out!

So, I (quite literally) grew up with King's Quest, Quest for Glory, and a good chunk of the games in here. There were also a multitude that I had (somehow) forgotten. It was a nice trip down memory lane and covered a lot of games where only a handful of people actually played.

The author tends to take a rather snarky and negative view of most of these games. While I will agree that they probably have not aged well, there is definitely a sense of nostalgia that goes along with them and reliving the memory of playing them.

If you're able to simply appreciate the fact that someone gathered all of these titles in one tome and ignore the constant negativity, it's a rather enjoyable venture through the golden age of gaming.

[C.E.]

On the one hand, this was a very, almost ridiculously in-depth book of graphic adventures, both famous and obscure, some incredibly so, and I definitely have some new games to look into.
On the other hand, the printed book is nearly 800 pages printed in 6-point font with 1cm/2cm margins (yes, I took out my ruler), nearly all of them reviewing a game (the index was only 2 pages) -- I know you are excited about this book, hardcoregaming101, but maybe invest in an editor.

[Tommie Haag · Rating 3 out of 5]

Comprehensive, huge, and a really nice trip down memory lane. However, I wished that the printed version of the book would have had coloured pictures instead of black and white ones. They are really hard to make out at times. The amount of effort put on describing each game is also uneven, but somehow in line with the popularity of the corresponding game.

I liked it, but it lacks the lush quality of e.g. Bitmap Books. With that said I'm really impressed by the effort put into this work.

[I.D. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Exhaustive and comprehensive, covering pretty much everything made up to 2010. If you played it, it’s probably in here. Sure it would have been nice to have more (and in colour) screenshots but I get why that would be challenging. I’d love to see a volume 2 or an update !

[Darío Anzalone · Rating 5 out of 5]

Si te interesa el tema, es un must. Los articulos son sinceros, amenos y certeros. Repasa inumerables aventuras, llegando hasta el 2010. Me encantaría que hubiera otra edición con lo que ha salido desde entonces, que es mucho y bueno...

[Brian · Rating 3 out of 5]

The people of Hardcoregaming101 are doing a fantastic, vital task in documenting basically every game ever. They've got games on there like the Thor's Hammer Trilogy, which I'm not sure that anyone I talk to on a regular basis has ever heard of (though it doesn't look like they have the Test Drive games, strangely). I bought this book because I've read a ton of HG101's articles over the years and thought that having them all in book form to read offline would be pretty nice, and it is, but it's not that nice.

The actual content of the articles is pretty good. It's from Hardcoregaming101, after all. But at the same time, that's the problem--it's the exact same content from the website, just placed into a book and with a few of the pictures changed. This means that the articles about the different games were written by different authors, and there's no editorial consistency at all. An article that mentions a game might talk about an aggravating aspect, only to have another article that mentions it praise that same aspect, and then the actual game article doesn't cover it at all. The classics like Monkey Island or King's Quest VI tend to be universally regarded, but there were other games where I'm not sure what the consensus opinion on them is because the answer is that "there isn't one."

There are a few additions (see below), but all the well-known games have their articles reproduced exactly.

Furthermore, and this is a minor complaint based entirely on my method of reading, but there weren't any internal links. I read the kindle version of the book and I was hoping that there'd be some kind of ebook functionality, like links when a game was mentioned to the article about that game, in much the same way that the actual website has such links. But it's basically just copying and pasting the text and pictures into a book. This wouldn't have bothered me if I had bought the physical copy as a coffee-table...but I didn't.

I was happy to see the articles with some of the more famous adventure game designers, like the one with Cori Cole, one of the main designers of the Quest for Glory series, my favorite bunch of adventure games. As that link points out, that's also content that's available on HG101's website, but I had never seen it before (through no fault of the site--it's linked in the article), so I appreciate the book for pointing it out. I liked the interview mostly for this quote:

We originally wanted to allow the player to be male or female, and have a choice of character race (including as a Centaur). We were quickly disabused of the notion –the art and animation costs, not to mention the amount of disk space needed for the artwork, would have gone through the roof.

My only real problem with QFG was the inability to create characters, so I was glad to hear that it was originally planned and cut due to technical limitations.

I'm also happy that they included material on Below the Root, the first adventure game that I ever played, though it was rather short. It turns out that this and the material for some of the other smaller adventure games like the Journeyman Project games or is exclusive to the book, so that is a reason to purchase it if you really want to read a few hundred words on the Chzo Mythos, for example.

I'll give it three stars because of the tension between the content and the format, but don't let my complaints disabuse you of looking up some of the articles on HG101. The words themselves are great.

[Themistocles · Rating 3 out of 5]

This one is a mixed bag. On one hand, there's so much to read and take you back, it's guaranteed to keep you warm and happy for quite a few days. On the other hand, it's got a few glaring issues.

The good: a huge amount of games covered, lots of detail, attention and love. Can't get much better than that.

The bad:

To begin with, the book is 'typeset' in Word or something. It really shows. Now, Word may be a good processor, but a DTP package it is not. This is something I could have printed and bound myself. Also the photos are, disappointingly (but predictably, due to cost issued) in B&W only.

There's a lot (a lot!) of spelling and grammatical mistakes, a sign of the text not having been edited. Sometimes it's obvious the author changed his mind half-sentence, deleted some of it and then rewrote it without making sure it sticks with the beginning of the sentence. Stuff like that.

The interviews are very few, and gathered together towards the beginning of the book.

Coverage is uneven and raises some eyebrows. For instance, the author covers some obscure (and, probably, hated by the kids that played them back then) edutainment titles across several pages and then throws Personal Nightmare and the Elvira titles together in a single (!) page. Then he goes on to cover games up to 2011 (classics??) in his attempt to make an exhaustive guide, but truth be told, he could do with 100-150 pages less, easily. There are definitely tons of non-classic games in there, and you'll find yourself skipping page after page, after a certain point.

What's more, he seems to be nitpicking for most of the time (the Nazi guy in Indiana Jones has an overdone German accent? For god's sake, that was obviously on purpose!) about things that don't really matter when you're engrossed in a real classic and suspension of disbelief is in the works, but that's not a big deal. He also seems to get some facts a bit on the wrong side (Black Dahlia 'totally ignored'? Nah...), but overall he's doing a great job, so maybe I'm the one nitpicking now.

All in all, it's not a perfect book, but (especially since it's the only one out there) it's essential reading. And the price is right, too!

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bravo! This is a best-of-it's-kind book. Was nice to see all the graphic adventure games I had missed (and I was surprised to remember how many I hadn't).

The level of detail/trivia in this book is astounding. I feel a bit like I'm living vicariously through the author's misspent youth. Clearly, this book was more a labor of love than a work of commission.

Took me forever to read through, since it's nearly 800 oversized pages of dense 9ish point font (not kidding). Now my copy is marked up with pencil highlights and notes to myself for games to track down (if merely for the YouTube highlights).

[Krzysztof · Rating 5 out of 5]

As comprehensive as you can hope for, despite missing a few titles here and there - but if you want to read through 30 years of adventure gaming history, this is probably the best choice out there. Has a few quirks, like some borderline sexist remarks and focusing on certain elements of a game while forgetting about others, arguably more important, but it's still a wonder to read. Highly recommended to all video game fans.

[Michael Hannon · Rating 5 out of 5]

A book I'll never finish, though it's not meant for that. A fantastic, in-depth look at one of the most important genres in gaming. Kalata and his writers do a great job digging into the rise, fall, and rebirth of not only the genre but the companies involved. Highly, highly recommended for anyone interested in gaming's history.

[Adam Hepton · Rating 4 out of 5]

A really comprehensive snapshot of graphic adventures in history, which more surprisingly manages to engage throughout. Peppered with interviews with designers, producers and directors, it manages to swerve the trap it could have easily fallen into of being overly dry and factual, and understands that the people who made the stories are as much a part of the stories as the script or settings.

[Rob]

For anyone they grew up playing adventure games, this is the ultimate Bible. There are many great insights and the classic Lucasfilm games including the Secret of Monkey Island and Indiana Jones games.

[Ietrio · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wouldn't call this book a guide. More like an index with a short description. Less than Wikipedia anyway. So it's not worth the money.