I KNOW OF PLACES, ACTIONS AND THINGS

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He is in a maze of twisty passageways, all alike. No, he really is. In the new issue of Digital Humanities Quarterly (a new peer-review, open access journal clear-headed enough to admit that it doesn't yet know what Digital Humanities actually are), Dennis G. Jerz goes spelunking for the origin of adventure games.

It's over thirty years ago now, that the idea that a game could be an adventure was invented. Before that time, we'd been used to parlour games, combat games, sports games, racing games - tasks that required fast reactions and not much more. Nothing atmospheric, certainly. Nothing that required lateral thinking. And then along came Adventure. Released almost by accident by its original author William Crowther, it soon developed a life of its own, leading directly to the creation of Warren Robinett's 2600 Adventure as well as the Zork games, and establishing a bloodline that today brings us Zeldas and Bioshocks and Fables.

And so Jerz digs deep, going back to the original caves which inspired Crowther, and the original source code which establishes his status as the father of the genre. The whole article is a wonderful read, even if you skim the academic bits, just to remind yourself of a time when an innovative game was something which introduced something as radical as the idea that objects could be picked up and dropped, rather than one which introduces a new kind of gun. But it's the photos that are the real draw. Proponents of the text adventure have always said that words could do more than a thousand polys, and here's the proof, in true, photo-realistic techicolour. If you love games because they make you feel that you've been places, done stuff, and seen things no-one else has, you owe yourself a visit to where it all started.