In the summer of 1980 a small company in California advertised a new kind of adventure for the 48K Apple II. “Through the use of over a hundred Hi-Res pictures you play and see your adventure!” promised the advertisement for Mystery House. You still typed your commands, and the game understood “over 300 words”, but every room of its “spooky, old house” appeared on the screen as a drawing. That is the graphic adventure at its simplest: an adventure game that shows you where you are. Over the next ten years the picture grew, the typing shrank, and by the early 1990s the leading adventures could be played from start to finish without touching the keyboard.
Fast facts
- First example: Mystery House (1980), by Roberta and Ken Williams, for the Apple II.
- Input: a typed parser, then verbs on the screen, then a mouse pointer and icons.
- Failure: early games could kill the player or leave them stuck for good; Lucasfilm Games set out to remove both.
- Key games: Mystery House, The Hobbit, King’s Quest, Deja Vu, Maniac Mansion, The Secret of Monkey Island, Beneath a Steel Sky.
- Period term: “graphic adventure” was in use by 1981, in advertisements and later in the name of Incentive’s Graphic Adventure Creator (1985).
Mystery House, and who was first
Mystery House grew out of Roberta Williams’s enthusiasm for the text adventure Colossal Cave. She designed a murder mystery in which “your friends are being murdered one-by-one”, Ken programmed it, and the couple published it themselves as On-Line Systems, the company that became Sierra On-Line. It came out in May 1980. Ten years later Ken Williams called it “the first adventure game with graphics”, and later writers agreed; the Roberta Williams entry tells how the pictures were drawn. Its successor, The Wizard and the Princess, was advertised in November 1980 with “Hundreds of Hi-Res pictures” in colour.
The claim to be first was a popular one. In 1981 the Californian publisher Crystal Computer advertised in BYTE that it had made “the first indoor-outdoor graphic adventure” and “the first multi-disk graphic adventure”, and declared that “the era of the text adventure and games which are simple combinations of static graphics and text is rapidly drawing to a close”. In 1983 a game called Grave Robbers was sold as “the first GRAPHIC ADVENTURE ever available for the VIC-20 or COMMODORE 64”. And Edge, writing about Melbourne House’s history in 1997, called The Hobbit “arguably the world’s first graphic adventure”. Each claim was true of something narrower than the whole genre, and Mystery House, two years ahead of The Hobbit, has the earliest date.
Pictures in British adventures
In Britain the pictures arrived with The Hobbit (1982), which drew many of its locations on screen as the player arrived. CRASH argued in 1987 that the pictures themselves were not revolutionary but that putting them into a quality adventure was: “In 1983 most adventures were text-only”. After The Hobbit, it said, “the big chain stores insisted that any game they stocked had graphics”.
Pictures cost memory, and British programmers on 48K machines had to find it. The BBC Micro version of The Hobbit lost its pictures altogether, because the text alone needed all the memory available. Level 9 built its pictures from reusable parts, rocks and trees, so that some took as little as 40 bytes each, and Return to Eden (1984) was its first game with a picture for every location on machines with more than 32K. Magnetic Scrolls put painted pictures beside a sentence parser in The Pawn, and when it reached the Commodore 64 in December 1986 ZZAP! 64 gave it a Sizzler as “an adventure with both visual and imaginative clarity”.
By 1985 British players could write their own. Incentive’s Graphic Adventure Creator combined a picture editor, a sentence parser and a text compressor in one program, and Sinclair User called it “the equivalent of Gilsoft’s Quill, Patch and Illustrator combined”.
Walking into the picture
In most early graphic adventures the picture was an illustration: the player read it, then typed. Sierra’s King’s Quest (1984), written for IBM’s PCjr, put the player inside it. You steered a small knight, Sir Graham, around the kingdom of Daventry with a joystick or the cursor keys, and he could pass behind a tree or a rock. K-Power called it “an amazing breakthrough in computer adventures because of its 3-D effects”. Commands were still typed, into a line at the bottom of the screen. Sierra’s King’s Quest, Space Quest, Police Quest and Leisure Suit Larry games all worked this way for the rest of the 1980s.
Getting rid of the keyboard
The Apple Macintosh showed another way. Deja Vu, written by ICOM Simulations and announced by COMPUTE! in September 1985 as Mindscape’s “first product developed specifically for the Macintosh”, was “a graphics/text adventure in the style of an old 1940s Hollywood mystery movie”. When it reached Britain, Computer Gamer explained in February 1987 that it “does away with the keyboard almost entirely”: objects on the screen were icons that could be picked up with the mouse, dropped into an inventory window and opened with a double click. To fire a gun you pointed at the gun, then at the command “operate”, then at the target. The point-and-click entry follows the interface from there.
Lucasfilm Games took a different route to the same end. Ron Gilbert was, in his words, “sick and tired of text parsers”, and Maniac Mansion (1987) printed its verbs on the screen beneath the picture. ZZAP! 64 explained how it worked: move the joystick cursor to a verb such as “unlock”, then to the door in the picture, then to the key in the inventory, until the message line read “unlock door with key”. The scripting system Gilbert built to make it, SCUMM, ran every Lucasfilm adventure for the next ten years. In France, Delphine Software’s Future Wars (1989) did the same with its Cinématique system, in which every action came from a menu and a mouse click.
Sierra followed with King’s Quest V (1990), in which a pointer and icons replaced the typed parser. By the time Revolution Software released Lure of the Temptress in 1992, its advertisement could ask whether players were “sick and tired of playing the same old, sterile, graphic adventure”, and promise a world in which each character went “about his or her own affairs independently of your actions”. Revolution’s next game, Beneath a Steel Sky (1994), had its scenes designed by the comic artist Dave Gibbons, who drew some 75 of them.
Dying, dead ends and pixel hunting
The American leaders disagreed about whether a player should be able to lose. Sierra’s games could kill you, sometimes for a single wrong step. Gilbert thought that unfair, and Lucasfilm’s games moved away from it: Loom (1990) “was designed to be non-frustrating, to have no dead ends”, in Computer Gaming World‘s words, and in The Secret of Monkey Island (1990) the hero could die in only one place. In 1991 Gilbert argued at the Computer Game Developers’ Conference that “Death is Bad Drama”, against Sierra’s Lori Cole, who said that without the risk of death “the game becomes mere amusement”. The adventure game deaths entry follows the argument.
Pointing brought its own problem. When every object was a few pixels on a painted screen, finding the one you needed could mean sweeping the pointer over the whole picture. By the mid-1990s reviewers had a name for it: Computer Gaming World listed “painful pixel-hunting” among the faults of Druid: Daemons of the Mind in 1996.
Decline and revival
The CD-ROM gave the genre its biggest seller: Myst (1993), a first-person adventure with no inventory puzzles to speak of, which Computer Gaming World counted as the best-selling PC game until The Sims overtook it in 2002. By the end of the 1990s the traditional 2D adventure was in trouble. In a PC Zone feature at Christmas 1998, Revolution’s Charles Cecil said that “the point-and-click adventure evolved to best exploit the technology that existed at the time”, that other genres had since advanced faster, and that adventure fans, though “fiercely loyal”, were “declining in numbers and this has made publishers nervous about commissioning this type of game”. Four years later, announcing Broken Sword: The Sleeping Dragon, he put it more briefly: “The point-and-click adventure game is dead, long live the adventure game!” His new game replaced the pointer with direct control of the characters in 3D.
The old form came back in the following decade. Telltale, founded by former LucasArts staff, sold adventures in episodes, among them Tales of Monkey Island (2009). In 2012 Tim Schafer’s Double Fine asked players on Kickstarter for $400,000 to make a new point-and-click adventure; 87,142 backers pledged $3,336,371. Edge wrote that the campaign had “created a world where Sierra’s all-stars”, Al Lowe, Jane Jensen and the Two Guys from Andromeda among them, could “fund classically styled new graphic adventures” through their fans. Ron Gilbert and Gary Winnick, who had designed Maniac Mansion, followed with Thimbleweed Park (2017), made to look and play like their game of 1987.
Sources
- SoftSide issue 11, August 1980, p. 13: Mystery House mail-order advertisement (“Hi-Res Adventure”, “over a hundred Hi-Res pictures”, “over 300 words”, 48K Apple II, $24.95).
- SoftSide vol. III no. 2, November 1980, p. 56: On-Line Systems advertisement for Mystery House and The Wizard and the Princess (“your friends are being murdered”, “Hundreds of Hi-Res pictures”).
- Sierra News Magazine (InterAction) vol. 3 no. 2, Summer 1990: Ken Williams, “President’s Corner” (Mystery House in May 1980, “the first adventure game with graphics”).
- Crystal Computer advertisement, BYTE vol. 6 no. 6, June 1981, p. 47: “the first indoor-outdoor graphic adventure” and “the era of the text adventure … is rapidly drawing to a close”.
- Grave Robbers advertisement, COMPUTE! issue 43, December 1983, p. 231: “the first GRAPHIC ADVENTURE ever available for the VIC-20 or COMMODORE 64”.
- Edge issue 46, June 1997, p. 44: Beam Software profile (The Hobbit “arguably the world’s first graphic adventure”).
- Personal Computer Games issue 3, February 1984: the BBC Micro version of The Hobbit without pictures.
- CRASH issue 48, Christmas 1987, p. 38: “In 1983 most adventures were text-only”; the chain stores and graphics.
- ZZAP! 64 issue 20, December 1986: The Pawn (Rainbird/Magnetic Scrolls), a Sizzler.
- “The Next Level”, Retro Gamer issue 6, 2004, p. 56: Level 9’s pictures from component parts, “as little as 40 bytes per picture”, on every format with more than 32K.
- Sinclair User issue 52, July 1986, p. 67: review of the Graphic Adventure Creator (“Gilsoft’s Quill, Patch and Illustrator combined”).
- K-Power vol. 1 no. 3, April 1984, p. 43: King’s Quest at the Consumer Electronics Show.
- COMPUTE! issue 64, September 1985: Deja Vu, Mindscape’s first Macintosh product, $49.95.
- Computer Gamer issue 23, February 1987, pp. 17–18: Deja Vu and Uninvited on the Macintosh (“does away with the keyboard almost entirely”).
- Jack Yarwood, “Once upon a time: the epic history of King’s Quest”, Wireframe issue 46, December 2020, pp. 28–33: the switch from the parser to a cursor from King’s Quest V.
- ZZAP! 64 issue 32, December 1987, pp. 12–13: Maniac Mansion review and its controls.
- Edge issue 151, July 2005, “The making of… Maniac Mansion”: Gilbert on text parsers.
- The One issue 13, October 1989: Future Wars and Delphine’s Cinématique system.
- Amiga Power issue 15, July 1992, p. 9: Lure of the Temptress advertisement (“sterile, graphic adventure”; the Virtual Theatre system).
- Edge issue 2, November 1993, p. 31: Dave Gibbons and Beneath a Steel Sky.
- Computer Gaming World issue 73, July 1990, p. 63: Loom and “no dead ends”; issue 83, June 1991, pp. 44–45: the Computer Game Developers’ Conference debate between Ron Gilbert and Lori Cole.
- Computer Gaming World issue 140, March 1996, p. 120: review of Druid: Daemons of the Mind (“painful pixel-hunting”).
- PC Zone issue 71, Christmas 1998, p. 33: Charles Cecil on the decline of the 2D adventure.
- PC Gamer (UK) issue 115, November 2002, p. 8: Charles Cecil on Broken Sword: The Sleeping Dragon (“The point-and-click adventure game is dead”).
- Retro Gamer issue 103, 2012, p. 8: the Double Fine Adventure Kickstarter ($400,000 goal, 87,142 backers, $3,336,371).
- Computer Gaming World issue 215, June 2002, p. 48: “The Sims Hits No. 1”, ending Myst’s reign.
- Wikipedia, “Tales of Monkey Island” and “Thimbleweed Park” (accessed September 2026) (web, secondary): release dates. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tales_of_Monkey_Island https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thimbleweed_Park
- Edge issue 243, August 2012, p. 83: “the current resurgence of graphic adventure games” and Sierra’s designers on Kickstarter.