Conversational adventure
The conversational adventure is a genre of video games, more common on computers than on consoles or arcades, in which the description of the situation in which the player finds himself comes mainly from a text. In turn, the player must type the action to perform. The game interprets the input—usually—in natural language, which causes a new situation, and so on. Sometimes there are graphics in these games, which however are only situational or offer additional help in some cases, in the style of illustrations in a book. The point and click adventure genre emerged as an evolution of video adventures and conversational adventures, leaving the latter out of fashion in the West. In Japan they are still very present in the form of visual novels, a genre that can be considered a successor to conversational adventures, although with its own characteristics.
History of adventures in the Anglo-Saxon world
The official birth of the conversational adventure occurred in 1975, when Will Crowther wrote Adventure, originally ADVENT due to the six-character limitation of the operating system in which Was scheduled. Soon after it was renamed Colossal Cave. Crowther programmed this first conversational adventure for a PDP-10 in FORTRAN language, and Crowther left it on the server. Some time later, in 1977, Don Woods discovered the code left by Crowther, and after asking his permission, he expanded it. Crowther's version was a reproduction of the cave, introducing fantastical elements like dwarves with axes and magical bridges, while Woods' collaboration added more Tolkien-esque characters, such as trolls, elves, and a volcano that many compared to Mount Doom. of Tolkien, although Woods always denied such inspiration. With the game's distribution via ARPAnet, the conversational adventure genre became popular throughout the rest of the 1970s and 1980s, and Colossal Cave became known to the public as Colossal Cave. i>the original adventure. Notable is Adventure International as the first company to create a commercial conversational adventure, Adventureland, in 1978, ultimately the first general adventure game to be commercially available.
In the 1970s and early 1980s, two companies competed in the conversational genre. The first of them, and the one with the most commercial success, was Infocom, whose activity lasted between 1977 and 1986. In 1977 they began to program the first version of Zork, then known as Dungeon, which would end up seeing the light of day in 1980 and would be followed by two continuations. Other important Infocom titles include the Enchanter trilogy and Beyond Zork among many other titles. In 1986, after a financial crisis, it ended up being bought by Activision, disappearing shortly after.
The other strong company in the genre was Sierra On-Line, founded by Ken and Roberta Williams when they stumbled across Colossal Cave and fell in love with the genre. Between 1979 and 1984, when the company was first called On-Line Systems and then Sierraventure, they produced a series of conversational adventures known as Hi-Res Adventure. The first of these titles, developed by Roberta and Ken, was titled Mystery House and was the first conversational adventure ever to include graphics. Other titles from this early era of Sierra included among others a conversational version of the movie Dark Crystal, Softporn adventure, Sierra's only pure text adventure without graphics, which served as a prelude to Leisure Suit Larry; and above all Time Zone, a title that holds the record for being the longest conversational adventure in the history of video games, with a total of six double-sided discs for Apple II, containing around 1500 rooms. Sierra would stop producing conversational adventures in 1984, when he released King's Quest I, starting the point and click adventure genre.
Sierra's adventures were criticized for having a poorly elaborated narrative and puzzles, a consequence of the large consumption of memory required by the graphics, while Infocom excelled in these two fields, since, except in recent years, it renounced use graphics in their titles, which allowed them to tap into all of their memory to craft the story and puzzles in each title. Sierra, curiously, many years later, would follow the same path as its rival Infocom, also being absorbed by Activision.
It must be clarified that in the Anglo-Saxon world only a distinction is made between pure text adventures and graphic adventures, encompassing all adventures with graphics, whatever their nature, such as graphic adventures, while in the Spanish-speaking world, the term & #34;chat adventure" encompasses pure text adventures and adventures with static text and graphics, reserving the term "graphic adventure" only for adventures with animated characters. This means that the Anglo-Saxons do not consider Sierra On-Line as a competitor in the field of pure text adventures, since they only released one title in this format, and they place Infocom as the only winner of the genre.
History of adventures in Spain
Background and beginning (1984-1988)
While in England and the United States the phenomenon began to spread in the late 1970s and early 1980s, in Spain we must wait until 1983 to see the first adventures. A newborn company that would soon become the most important in Spain, Dinamic, launched with Artist, a drawing assistant, and Yenght, the first Spanish conversational adventure, programmed in compiled and assembler BASIC, with short descriptions and several game bugs, it also had several sudden deaths. Even so, she managed to dazzle several adventurers, who enjoyed her a lot. Others think that the true influence was the copies obtained from the mythical Hobbit, referred to by many creators, which would make one think that Yenght was nothing more than an obstacle to its development, since another adventure would not appear until 1986., with the exception of Alice in Wonderland, distributed by a magazine (the legendary MicroHobby) in 1985.
These would be two of the great supporters of the genre in its early days: the software company Dinamic and the magazine publisher Hobby Press through its MicroHobby and Micromanía magazines. Dinamic would create a specific seal (the seal AD, from "Aventuras Dinamic") for its line of conversational games, among which there were games created by small independent companies and those created by Aventuras AD, a group of creators from Valencia. that would soon stand out from the rest. Among the games in the first group there was a variety of plots and styles, from classic adaptations such as Don Quixote de la Mancha to literary The Birds of Bangkok with detective Pepe Carvalho by the writer Manuel Vázquez Montalbán, parodies of Star Wars like Crockery Wars or games set in the future like Megacorp. Dinamic and Aventuras AD were the only companies from the so-called golden age of Spanish soft that released conversationals. The rest of the most important Spanish companies of the moment, Topo Soft, Opera Soft and Zigurat, did not release a single conversational game in their entire existence, although small companies did occasionally launch a title (for example: FromeSoft through Software Center, The Princess, 1985; ACE Soft, The Riddle of Aceps, 1987; SPE via System 4, The Crown, 1988; Odyssey Software via Proein, Abracadabra, 1988; Magic Hand via Dro-Soft, Zipi and Zape, 1989).
AD Adventures and First Golden Age (1988-1992)
The real takeoff came in 1988 with the publication of The Original Adventure, the first release of Aventuras AD, which was a loose adaptation of Adventure that combined puzzles from the Original game with some tweaks. The game was a sales success and its mass distribution achieved a considerable increase in fans.
The other factor in popularizing adventures was the availability of the PAWS parser. Quill could only be found in English, but Tim Gilberts was hired by AD Adventures and together they released the translated version of PAWS, which they sold to fans to build their own games.. This caused a significant increase in the number of them, with the years 1988 and 1989 being the most popular, due to the announcement of a national contest by the most popular Spectrum magazine, MicroHobby, which included two fixed sections in each issue to deal with questions about the creation of these games, elaborated by Andrés Samudio, the forerunner of AD.
Aventuras AD was in a way the Spanish Infocom. Between 1988 and 1992 Aventuras AD would release six games for sale, all of them a sales success until the decline of 8 bits in 1992:
- The Original Adventure (1989). Free adaptation AdventureCrowther and Woods. He presented graphics in almost all localities and changed with respect to the original when playing outside the cave, having to open a gate to give way to the second load, which is completely developed in the underground. Instead of starting with everyday elements and gradually introducing supernatural elements, in this version there already existed in the first part an elve and a dwarf, near the volcano.
- Jabato (1989). Based on the comic character The JabatoIt was set in the full boom of the Roman Empire. Its main novelty was the handling of several simultaneous characters, which would come across much of Europe and Africa.
- The goddess of Cozumel (1990). The first title of his trilogy Ci-u-Than set in the Caribbean in the first half of century. For many it was their best game. The explorer Doc Monro shipwreck on the coast of Cozumel Island, where he will live great adventures.
- Space Adventure (1990). It meant a parenthesis in the realization of the trilogy of Ci-u-Than. It was set in the future, it had some experimental touch. Several characters were also handled.
- The Sacred Temples (1991). Second part of the trilogy Ci-u-Than. A transition game full of puzzles, also set in the Caribbean jungle.
- Chichén Itzá (1992). Third part of its trilogy, for many the most complete game, with large number of NPCs and searches. It came at a difficult time for the company and especially for Dinamic, due to the crisis of 8-bit computers and the rash of graphic adventures.
All AD Adventures games had similar characteristics. They consisted of two loads, at the beginning of the second it was necessary to enter the password that you got at the end of the first. The graphics were present in almost all localities. They were programmed with a parser called DAAD, which allowed games to be exported to 8 and 16-bit platforms at the time. 16-bit games were sometimes longer and had some more complex puzzles.
For a while there was speculation about the possibility that AD Adventures would be recycled in the launch of graphic adventures, but that step was not finally taken. The activity from that moment would focus on the amateur clubs, which had already been born and had a lot of activity. An ad promoting the amateur club was distributed in the games distributed by AD, which undoubtedly helped it take off.
The two most important were the CAAD, founded in Valencia in 1988 by the then active Juanjo Muñoz, and the Year Zero Club, founded in Vigo in 1991 and whose most visible head was Fran Morell, who brought together close to a thousand partners and published interesting articles on their pages. The zines also offered advertisements and lists of adventures that could be bought cheaply from other fan groups. The production of games between 1986 and 1992, the first golden age of conversational games, could reach 300 titles, due to the creation of amateur games. From 1992 the activity of the fans decreased considerably, ceasing to publish fanzines on paper shortly after.
Internet and Second Golden Age (1997-)
Some years later, the advent of the Internet would create a second golden age, in which fans can participate through mailing lists, various websites with CAAD as a reference, and an IRC channel. The CAAD page was created in 1997, with few resources at first and a work of rescuing information that appeared in paper fanzines and old games converted to emulator format. An attempt was made to promote a newsgroup similar to the English forums, but it was soon invaded by spam and questions about graphic adventures, so the format that finally prevailed was that of a mailing list, currently on Yahoogroups.
In 1997 the two existing clubs organized an adventure contest to which less than a dozen adventures were submitted to each one. In 1998 the CAAD repeated the call and achieved the participation of 9 games, although the genre was still in crisis and the winner would not be voted for until 3 years later.
At the end of 1999, the first short adventure contest was organized, marking the start of this second golden age. The call was very successful and in March 2000 a second edition was held. The successive organization of several of these contests (in the first a severe limit of one location and three objects was established, which would later be extended) would revive the interest of the fans, who with the support of the IRC channel and the mailing list returned to be interested in gender. Some of these contests established some variants: comic games, games with original and strange themes baptized as "nanos", games set in the world of Tolkien... From 1999 to 2002 eight of these contests have been organized, which have raised the annual production to approximately 50 sets. Since 2001, an edition of annual awards has also been held to reward the entire production.
Authoring systems
In addition to creating conversation adventures, the Spanish-speaking community has created authoring systems or own parsers for the development of conversation adventures.
Towards the middle of 1992 the first Spanish parser for PC was published: SINTAC based on PAWS and created by Javier San José ("JSJ"). Initially distributed under a shareware license, and later under a freeware license, it had a good user base until the project was abandoned in 2000.
Shortly thereafter, around the end of 1992, the second Spanish-language authoring system for the PC, CAECHO? was completed by Juan Antonio Paz Salgado (Mel Hython) and several collaborators. CAECHO? represented a profound departure from the wake of PAWS, as it contained a completely different structured language than the 'list of conditions' of the PAWS. CAECHO? was released simultaneously for the PC and Commodore Amiga.
At this same time, many other authoring systems arose, both for the PC world and for other common platforms at that time, many were more or less similar to PAWS, with NMP being especially noteworthy. Other development packages were the Professional Adventure Designer (DAP), created by Javier Basilio (Jaba), which allowed creating most of the adventure through menus and had versions for Amstrad CPC and PC, and CUTRA, by Alberto Salazar, compatible with the first and with the characteristic of generating PASCAL source code which, when compiled, produced the specific adventure.
In October 1998 José Luis Díaz (Zak McKraken) published InformATE (Inform Now Totally in Spanish) a library of the English parser Inform (based on Inform v6.30) to develop conversational adventures in Spanish. The library, with a healthy base of documentation, utilities and created games. The official publication announcement is still available on the YahooGroups caad list (broken link available at Internet Archive; see history, first and last version)..
Later, in June 1999, the same author of SINTAC published the first version of another parser called Visual SINTAC. This parser appeared only for Windows environments and it would be the first Spanish parser in these environments to have a complete IDE that was intended to facilitate the development of conversational adventures. The project is currently abandoned in favor of more modern parsers with a larger user base.
In 2001 Némesis was published, by the same author as DAP, consisting of a specialized adventure language similar to BASIC and which compiled to ANSI C. It had versions for Windows, Linux and Solaris.
In January 2005 Uto, Yokiyoki and Baltasar published Beta 4 of Superglús, a parser based on PAWS and NMP that generates games for Glulx, also widely used by the community.
At the end of 2006, a group of CAAD collaborators launched INFSP, a library of the English parser Inform to develop conversational adventures in Spanish that, unlike InformATE, is compatible with later versions of Inform v6 and Inform v7.
News: CAAD, Fanzine SPAC and Forums
In June 2000, those responsible for CAAD resumed the publication of the fanzine, this time in PDF format to be distributed on the web. In total there were seven very complete issues, until December 2000. Almost at the same time, in October 2000 another ezine appeared, named SPAC with a clear inspiration from the English equivalent (SPAG) but published monthly, reaching our days in good health. thanks to the collaboration of an increasingly active community; Furthermore, since the end of 2007 its migration to a dynamic webzine format was implemented, with the possibility of publishing compilations of articles in PDF every two months.
In 2004, almost at the same time as the remodeling of the CAAD website, the forums were created, which allow a better classification of the topics covered in CAAD and give a new air and more agility to the community, the lists are still active but with a lot of less volume of messages than before.
The community, around those dates, ceased to be exclusively Spanish, with increasing contributions from fans and Latin American authors.
In 2007, a Wiki was added for the Spanish-speaking community of adventurers.
Another interesting initiative in recent years has been a project to recover classic games, called Base Project, which in a short time has managed to recover more than a hundred classic games from a decade ago (for ZX Spectrum computers). In addition, the Adventure Store presents a growing collection of games authored more recently (year 2000 onwards) through individual Windows installers.
At the beginning of 2009, Literactiva appeared, a web page designed to show works of Interactive Fiction, commenting on them and showing precise instructions to be able to experience them in the easiest way possible.
In mid-2011 the CAAD portal was relaunched, updating it to Web 2.0 technologies.
Currently, more and more people are interested in this type of games, and there are several thematic fan blogs.
Transcription
The following is a transcript of the screen output of a chat adventure session or interaction. Text entered (written) by the player (or reader) is preceded by the cursor ">".
The entrance door opens in a large arch to the living room of the house. From the luxurious living room, two runners, east and west. You can see a card on your left. takes the card Take it. examinela On the card you can read: "Remington Steele" ▪ this You've reached the library, where you can see lots of books. One of the books, luxuriously booked, stands out about the others. takes the book From the book a note falls to the ground. takes the note Take it. inventory You're wearing: a note, a card and a book.