Point and Click | Code Like It's 198x

Ron Gilbert had a name for the game inside every text adventure: “second guess the parser”. You could see the thing on the screen you wanted to use, he told Retro Gamer, “but you just couldn’t guess what the programmer called it so you just kept guessing all these names”. Ken Williams, who ran Sierra, came to the same view. “Such simple tasks as examining a box lying on the floor required us to recognize: examine, look, identify, search, look, box, trunk, chest, thing, object, etc.,” he wrote in 1991. “And still, someone would find a way to type in something we couldn’t understand. Isn’t it simpler to select an eyeball from a menu and point at it?”

The point-and-click adventure was the answer. The player points at something on the screen, picks what to do with it, and the game builds the command. It arrived on the Macintosh in 1985 and reached the Amiga, the Commodore 64 and the PC over the next few years. By 1991, as ACE pointed out, both Sierra and Lucasfilm Games had stopped asking players to type. Three designs set the pattern: ICOM Simulations’ windows, Lucasfilm Games’ verb list and Sierra’s icon bar. After that the story is of designers taking verbs away.

Fast facts

First established example: ICOM Simulations’ Deja Vu, published by Mindscape for the Macintosh in 1985, “a mouse driven adventure” to the British press at that summer’s Chicago CES.
Lucasfilm: Maniac Mansion (1987) put every verb on screen under the picture; the player picked a verb, then an object, and the game wrote the sentence. The SCUMM system built for it ran every LucasArts adventure for ten years.
Sierra: King’s Quest V (1990) dropped the parser for an icon bar of “pretty basic LOOK, TALK, and USE-type options”.
Fewer verbs: Full Throttle (1995) and The Curse of Monkey Island (1997) shrank the menu to a pop-up of three or four symbols.
The cost: a solution could hide anywhere in the picture. By the mid-1990s reviewers called the search “pixel-hunting”.

Before Deja Vu

The Macintosh’s mouse and menus invited the idea from the start. Silicon Beach Software’s Enchanted Scepters, a fantasy adventure for the Mac copyrighted 1984 and 1985, was made with Bill Appleton’s World Builder, which COMPUTE! described in 1989 as “the only construction set that’s been used to develop a commercially sold game (Enchanted Scepters)”. World Builder games still revolved around text commands, the magazine explained, but the most common ones, “such as Look, Examine, and Take”, could be chosen from pull-down menus. Some modern accounts, Wireframe among them, call Enchanted Scepters the first point-and-click adventure; the period descriptions show a halfway house between typing and pointing. Shay Addams, listing it for Family Computing in 1987, singled out its digitised sound effects and called it “a simple game that’s for novices only”.

ICOM: click the object, click the verb

Deja Vu was Mindscape’s first product for the Macintosh, a “graphics/text adventure in the style of an old 1940s Hollywood mystery movie” at $49.95. What set it apart was that the picture did the work. Guide to Computer Living, reporting the Amiga version in December 1986: “No more were pictures just a cosmetic embellishment to an adventure. In Deja Vu, you could click on a visible object and the program would describe it. ‘Grab’ it with the mouse and tuck it away in an inventory window.”

ICOM reused the system for Uninvited and Shadowgate, and built it from the Macintosh’s own furniture. A graphics window showed the room; a command window held eight verbs, Examine, Open, Close, Speak, Operate, Go, Hit and Consume; an exits window and an inventory window sat alongside. Ahoy!’s AmigaUser called it “a mouse-maven’s dream. The user simply points the cursor to any onscreen object and clicks. A second click, this time on the command window, initiates the desired action.” Objects were dragged into the inventory, and harder actions took more clicks: “Unlocking a door requires the adventurer to click on the key, then on ‘operate,’ and finally on the door.” In the same issue Arnie Katz called point-and-click “the cornerstone of Deja Vu”.

The short verb list was a choice. ACE explained in 1989 that ICOM used “a single command USE (ICOM use OPERATE) to unlock all sorts of puzzles. Thus you don’t need to DRAW MAP, you can simply USE CRAYON ON PAPER and get the same result. In practise, this approach isn’t nearly as limiting as you might think.” The games won awards on the Mac — Mindscape’s advertising quoted Deja Vu as Family Computing’s Graphic Game of the Year for 1986 — and Mindscape told Family Computing that autumn that PC versions of “its hit Mac game Déja Vu and the sequel, The Uninvited” were in hand.

Lucasfilm: the verb list

Lucasfilm Games’ first adventure, Labyrinth (1986), had what Shay Addams called “a gimmicky thing called a ‘wheel’” in place of a parser. Gilbert, who had played the King’s Quest games while planning his own, wanted rid of typing altogether: “the thing that always bothered me was the parser because I didn’t like to type.” His Maniac Mansion offered, in Addams’ words, “a very convenient interface”.

On the Commodore 64 it was driven by joystick, not mouse, but the principle was the same. Commodore Magazine explained that “not once do you have to touch the keyboard for typing in any of these commands… All possible commands are displayed in an on-screen menu below the animation window.” The player cycled through the verbs, the chosen one appeared on a sentence line “with any necessary connecting words”, and the command was finished “by clicking on a noun in your inventory or an object in the animation window”. Ahoy!’s caption put it in a line: “The program composes a sentence from these elements.” Family Computing found the weak spot of doing this with a joystick: “it can be all too easy to choose the wrong command in a tight situation if you press the joystick button at the wrong place.”

Behind the verbs sat SCUMM, the scripting system Gilbert built for the game. It went on to run Zak McKracken and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, and then Lucasfilm tried taking the verbs away. Loom (1990) was advertised with “Typing is banished from this kingdom… Simple point n’ click”, and Amazing Computing noticed that there was no menu either: “The only thing present on the screen is the main window, in which all the action and animation takes place. There are no pull down menus”. The hero acted by playing tunes on a distaff “divided into eight segments, each relating to a musical note”.

The Secret of Monkey Island (1990) went back to the verb list and refined it. ACE drew the contrast with Sierra: “While Sierra have abandoned typing altogether with their point and click interface, Lucasfilm have retained an on-screen verb menu but polished up the execution”. Both mouse buttons were used and every command had a single-key equivalent. As the pointer passed over the screen, object names dropped onto the command line with a choice of two likely verbs, so “you very rarely need to select a specific verb for a specific object”. Amiga Computing described the command line as “this single text line” showing the sentence as it was built.

Sierra: the icon bar

Sierra kept the parser through the 1980s, even after its games moved to the new SCI system. King’s Quest V (1990) was where it went. ACE’s reviewer was glad: “In previous KQ’s, this graphic presentation has been marred by the — ugh — necessity to actually type in a few words of English… but KQV has finally done away with that and replaced the typing with an icon bar across the top of the screen.” The bar stayed hidden until summoned, and its icons were “pretty basic LOOK, TALK, and USE-type options”. One consequence the reviewer noted: “the program doesn’t allow you to use objects in inappropriate circumstances”.

Ken Williams braced for complaints. “Those of you who purchased King’s Quest V, and most of you did, received a surprise; it didn’t require typing!” he wrote in Sierra News Magazine in the spring of 1991. The company had expected “the enormous barrage” of letters, but “most people prefer the new interface, especially if they have a mouse!” By then the same interface was in Space Quest IV too.

Fewer and fewer verbs

LucasArts’ games moved the same way. By Sam & Max Hit the Road (1993) the verb list was gone. Computer Gaming World reported that “LucasArts had to change their philosophy about interfaces in order to make this game work”: the game had “the largest characters placed on-screen in a LucasArts graphic adventure” and “a pop-up interface so that the entire screen is used for animation”, with commands chosen by icon.

Tim Schafer’s Full Throttle (1995), a biker adventure, took it further. PC Zone‘s preview described a single pop-up shaped like a biker’s tattoo, “a rather crude skull with a fist, boot and mouth”: click on something, then on the fist to pick it up or use it, the boot to kick it, the mouth to talk. The game answered silly combinations in character. Click the mouth on a door and the hero, Ben, drawls “I ain’t puttin’ my lips on that!”

The Curse of Monkey Island (1997) brought the idea to the series that had made the verb list famous. Computer and Video Games explained that it used “a different, simpler interface similar to the one seen in Full Throttle”: hold the mouse button over anything of interest and up comes “the new coin icon which has three parts to it — a hand, an eye and a mouth”, each of which “can mean different things”. PC Zone in 1998 called it “the new benchmark for point-and-click adventure games”.

The cost: pixel-hunting

A parser game hid its answers in vocabulary. A point-and-click game hid them in the picture, and when an object was tiny or painted into the background, the player’s job became sweeping the cursor across the screen until something responded. By the mid-1990s the chore had a name: Computer Gaming World’s 1996 review of Druid: Daemons of the Mind listed among its faults “Painful pixel-hunting required to find many of the game’s objects”. The genre carried on regardless: The One described Beneath a Steel Sky in 1994 as a “point-‘n’-click world”.

Later history

The interface outlived the companies that made it famous. On 8 February 2012 Schafer’s studio, Double Fine, asked players on Kickstarter for $400,000 to make a new point-and-click adventure. After 35 days, Retro Gamer reported, 87,142 backers had pledged $3,336,371, and a wave of other developers followed, among them the Sierra veterans Al Lowe and Jane Jensen. The Double Fine game became Broken Age.

Sources

Retro Gamer issue 110, 2013, pp. 72–79, Mike Bevan, “SCUMM Origins”: Gilbert on the King’s Quest games, typing and “second guess the parser”.
Sierra News Magazine vol. 4 no. 1, Spring 1991, Ken Williams’s column: the parser, the eyeball, King’s Quest V, the reaction to it and Space Quest IV.
Computer Gamer issue 5, August 1985: Deja Vu at the Chicago CES.
COMPUTE! issue 64, September 1985: news of Deja Vu, Mindscape’s first Macintosh product, $49.95.
COMPUTE! issue 106, March 1989: construction-set feature on World Builder and Enchanted Scepters.
Computer Play, April 1989: Bill Appleton as the developer of World Builder.
Family Computing vol. 5 no. 3, March 1987: Shay Addams on Enchanted Scepters (Silicon Beach Software, ©1984, 1985). Vol. 4 no. 10, October 1986: Mindscape’s PC versions of Deja Vu and Uninvited. Vol. 6 no. 2, February 1988: Maniac Mansion review.
Wireframe issue 70: “Killer Feature” on Frankie Goes to Hollywood, describing Enchanted Scepters as the first point-and-click adventure.
Guide to Computer Living vol. 3 no. 8, December 1986: Deja Vu on the Amiga.
Ahoy!’s AmigaUser issue 1 (Ahoy! 53), May 1988: Arnie Katz on Amiga adventure interfaces, pp. 31–32; Shadowgate review, p. 38; Mindscape advertisement (awards).
ACE issue 19, April 1989, p. 96: the ICOM approach. Issue 41, February 1991: King’s Quest V review. Issue 46, July 1991: The Secret of Monkey Island review.
Commodore Magazine vol. 8 no. 12, December 1987: Shay Addams on Labyrinth and Maniac Mansion. Vol. 9 no. 3, March 1988, p. 22: Maniac Mansion review.
Ahoy! issue 51, March 1988, p. 43: Maniac Mansion.
Computer Gaming World issue 72, June 1990: Loom advertisement.
Amazing Computing vol. 5 no. 12, December 1990: Loom review.
CU Amiga, May 1990: Loom and the distaff.
Amiga Computing issue 38, July 1991: The Secret of Monkey Island review.
Computer Gaming World issue 113, December 1993: Sam & Max Hit the Road review.
PC Zone issue 24, March 1995: Full Throttle preview.
Computer and Video Games issue 191, October 1997: The Curse of Monkey Island preview.
PC Zone issue 66, August 1998: buyer’s guide, The Curse of Monkey Island.
Computer Gaming World issue 140, March 1996: Druid: Daemons of the Mind review.
The One issue 65, February 1994: Beneath a Steel Sky.
Retro Gamer issue 103, June 2012, p. 8: Double Fine’s Kickstarter (8 February, $400,000 target, 35 days, 87,142 backers, $3,336,371) and the developers who followed, including Al Lowe and Jane Jensen.