Point and Click

The typed parser gave the adventure game its depth and its frustrations: a game could understand anything, so long as you guessed the words. The point-and-click adventure replaced guessing with choosing. The player pointed at a thing on screen, picked what to do with it from a menu, and the game composed the sentence. It arrived on the Macintosh in 1985 and reached the machines most people owned over the following three years, and the three interfaces it produced — ICOM’s windows, Lucasfilm’s verb menu and Sierra’s icon bar — are the ones the genre has argued about since.

Fast facts

• First: ICOM Simulations’ Deja Vu, published by Mindscape for the Macintosh in 1985 — “a mouse driven adventure” by the Chicago CES report of that summer.
• Lucasfilm: Maniac Mansion (1987) put every verb on screen under the animation window; the player picked a verb, then an object, and the game wrote the sentence.
• Sierra: King’s Quest V (1990) dropped the parser for an icon bar of “LOOK, TALK, and USE-type options”.
• Cost: with only the objects the artist drew to click on, finding them became the puzzle — “pixel-hunting” was a named complaint by 1996.

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 made it different was that the picture was no longer illustration. Guide to Computer Living, reporting the Amiga release in late 1986, put it directly: “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’s system, reused for Uninvited and Shadowgate, was built from Macintosh windows. The 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 described the grammar: “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 compound actions chained clicks: “Unlocking a door requires the adventurer to click on the key, then on ‘operate,’ and finally on the door.” Arnie Katz called point-and-click “the cornerstone of Deja Vu” in the same issue.

The verb list was short on purpose. ACE noted in 1989 that ICOM’s approach was “to use 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 Mac games were ported to the Amiga in 1986–88 and, Mindscape told Family Computing, to the IBM PC after that.

Lucasfilm: the verb menu

Lucasfilm Games’ first adventure, Labyrinth (1986), had “a gimmicky thing called a ‘wheel’” for a parser, in Shay Addams’ words. Its second, Maniac Mansion, offered “a very convenient interface” instead. On the Commodore 64 that interface was joystick-driven rather than mouse-driven, but the principle was the same: “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 pressed the button to cycle through verbs, the chosen verb 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 summed it up: “The program composes a sentence from these elements.” Family Computing found the joystick version’s weak spot: “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.”

The company then tried removing the verbs altogether. Loom (1990) was advertised with “Typing is banished from this kingdom… Simple point n’ click”, and reviewers noticed 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”. Actions were spells played on a distaff “divided into eight segments, each relating to a musical note”. Amiga Action thought it “even simpler” than the earlier point-and-click games.

The Secret of Monkey Island (1990) went back to the verb menu 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, every command had a single-key equivalent, and “you very rarely need to select a specific verb for a specific object”. Amiga Computing described the command line as “this single text line” that displays the sentence as it is built. The adverts promised “a point ‘n’ click no-typing interface”.

By Sam & Max Hit the Road (1993) the menu itself had 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 icon-based commands.

Sierra: the icon bar

Sierra kept the typed parser through the 1980s. King’s Quest V (1990) was where it went. ACE: “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 was hidden by default and summoned with a keypress, 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” — the interface only offered actions the game could answer.

The same reviewer, in 1989, had already spotted the trade-off between the two schools: ICOM’s approach “allows you — unlike the Sierra games — to ‘opt out’ of any animated sequences”.

The cost: pixel hunting

A parser game hid its solutions behind vocabulary. A point-and-click game hid them in the picture, and when an object was small or drawn into the background, the player’s job became sweeping the cursor across the screen until something responded. Computer Gaming World’s 1996 review of Druid: Daemons of the Mind listed among its cons “Painful pixel-hunting required to find many of the game’s objects”, and the word was in the genre’s vocabulary from then on. The genre carried on regardless: Beneath a Steel Sky was sold on its “point-‘n’-click world” in 1994, and PC Zone in 1998 called The Curse of Monkey Island “the new benchmark for point-and-click adventure games”.

See also

• SCUMM — Lucasfilm’s engine behind the verb menu
• SCI engine — Sierra’s engine, which gained the icon bar
• AGI engine — Sierra’s parser-era engine
• Maniac Mansion
• Monkey Island
• King’s Quest
• LucasArts
• Sierra
• Mindscape