The Renaissance of the Point-and-Click Adventure

Past: Introducing the Rubber Chicken With a Pulley in the Middle

After two decades of often bizarre prototypes (including one rumoured to have been built by the military using a bowling ball for the track ball) the first commercially successful, widely available mouse shipped with the Apple Macintosh Lisa in 1983; its single button forming the template for Apple mice from that day on. Now, it’s a well known truth that any time a product designed to enhance business productivity emerges, it won’t be long before someone finds a way to subvert it into a vehicle for fun, and so it was that the point-and-click adventure was borne upon the back of this cutting edge technology. Previously graphical adventure games, like The Hobbit (1982), were merely text based adventures accompanied by images. Even the innovative King’s Quest, which launched in 1984 and introduced vibrant colourful animations and a third person protagonist, still relied heavily on a text parser system in which players had to write in commands to simulate onscreen actions and hope the computer understood. Barely a year after the innovation to home computing that was the mouse, the very first point-and-click adventures began to emerge such as the hardboiled detective story Déjà Vu, the first of Apple’s MacVenture series.

In 1987 Lucas Arts, the company that would preside over the development of the genre, relegated the text parser to the dustbin of history forever when it released the much loved Maniac Mansion with its new SCUMM (Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion) interface, a development language that was used in all the company’s titles up to 1998. The late 80s and early 90s were undoubtedly the golden age of the genre with Ron Gilbert at Lucas Arts creating the Monkey Island series based on the same theme park ride that would later spawn Pirates of the Caribbean (surely making it the most important theme park ride ever). Starring Guybrush Threepwood on his quest to become Mighty Pirate (TM), it defined video game humour thereafter. Meanwhile rival company Sierra utilised the storytelling talents of Jane Jensen to create a darker, more serious supernatural series starring a somewhat flawed New Orleans bookshop owner named Gabriel Knight, who whilst researching a series of Voodoo murders discovers that he is the last in a line of a Germanic family of Schattenjagers (Shadow Hunters), tasked with the heavy burden of fighting evil. The third point-and-click super celebrity came about relatively late in 1996 when Charles Cecil of Revolution Software created the sophisticated and sardonic George Stobbart, an American tourist who gets caught up in the hunt for the lost treasure of the Knights Templar whilst on vacation in Paris, long before the NY Times best seller list had ever heard the name Dan Brown.

This was the point-and-click genre’s most important contribution to the history of video games: its creation of sophisticated, well scripted stories featuring complex and often deeply troubled protagonists. No longer would video games simply be about rescuing princesses from castles or fluffy rabbits from robots. The deeply interactive narratives that are coming to define modern gaming owe so much to these innovative and literate designers, who had the foresight to recognise in the medium’s infancy its potential as a powerful tool for telling meaningful and complex stories.

Despite this, by the late 90s the golden age was over and the genre was already in decline. In 1996 Sierra was sold to a consumer conglomerate called CUC International and the company began its slow journey through the intestines of various large corporations; its creativity gradually absorbed until it eventually ended up somewhere in Activison’s ample colon. Meanwhile after making Escape from Monkey Island in 2000, the company that started it all, Lucas Arts turned its attention to churning out endless titles based on its commercially lucrative Star Wars licence, whilst its best designers slinked away to form their own companies such as Telltale Games and Double Fine Productions working in the shadows towards the restoration. It was hardly surprising that the genre had fallen out of favour. Tastes were changing in favour of more immediate and adrenaline laced experiences and complex narratives were either out of vogue or had migrated over to the more popular genres, such as in the case of the seminal Half Life. Meanwhile, vast improvements in PC graphics had led to the creation and perfection of the First Person Shooter, and the lovingly pre-rendered backdrops of the point-and-click seemed quainter by the day. Attempts to move into 3D territory were largely disastrous and, ill-suited as it was to its interface, the genre would find no sanctuary with the now massive console market. In this climate the point-and-click adventure was looking to publishers like a risky investment aimed at an increasingly niche audience. An exception to the rule (there is always one) is the excellent Discworld series, which found an unlikely home on the Playstation, although being adapted from Terry Pratchett’s phenomenally successful and appropriately quirky novels, they pretty much bought a guaranteed audience with them.

Two great swan songs from this era of decline come to mind. In 1998 Lucas Arts, in its death throes, released the suitably macabre Grim Fandango, an incredibly creative masterpiece written by Tim Schafer (who worked with Ron Gilbert on the Monkey Island games) that fused the unlikely elements of the hard-boiled detective novel with the iconography of the Mexican underworld. A year earlier Westwood’s 1997 adaptation of Ridley Scott’s classic Sci-Fi would serve to become as much a sleeper classic as its cult cinematic counterpart. One of the few great adaptations of film into game, the developers bravely chose to utilise the already ageing point-and-click genre over any of the more popular emerging vehicles and equally bravely chose to craft an entirely new narrative rather than slavishly follow the film’s story. The game carries a poignant sense of nostalgia that is almost a self-aware hymn to the death of the genre, which was perfectly expressed in the game’s dystopian narrative, Vangelis’ ephemeral score and that classic line delivered by Rutger Hauer: “All those moments will be lost in time like tears in rain.”

Present: “Take Anything that isn’t Nailed Down”

But what goes around, comes around, and now the time has come for this elder statesman of gaming to re-emerge riding upon the coat tails of a new generation of touch screen and sensor based tech like the iPhone, Nintendo DS and Wii, whose interfaces just happen to be perfectly suited to a new breed of point-and-clicks. Of course there has been the usual flood of remakes and remastered classics that often accompanies such a resurgence, notable examples being Ubisoft putting out the classic Broken Sword as a director’s cut or Telltale Games revitalisation of the Monkey Island (inviting Ron Gilbert back as a ‘visiting Monkeyologist’) and Sam and Max franchises.

Much like any genre that has lived through a golden age, modern point-and-clicks have come of age with an often sly, postmodern self-awareness. In the second season of Telltale Games’ ingenious resumption of the classic Sam and Max series (the original game Sam and Max Hit the Road is a 1993 classic), the two zany protagonists end up time travelling into the future where they meet an elderly and senile version of Sam, who sits in a rocking chair blurting out things like “I can’t combine those two items!” “I never knew I said those things out loud”, Sam comments. “I always thought you were reciting your memoirs”, Max responds with his usual talent for sardonic wit. Rarely a point-and-click is made these days without, to varying degrees of success, making a series of self reflexive jokes about the clichés and charming limitations of the genre. The rubber-chicken-with-a-pulley-in-the-middle from Monkey Island has become a sort of short hand for the genre’s often far-fetched demands on lateral (or diagonal) thinking.

Restoring or ironically evoking the rich heritage of the past is all very well, but the true excitement lies in new stories told in new ways. Nowhere is this more apparent than with Zack and Wiki on the Wii, which to this day remains one of the handful of games to have really captured the full potential of Nintendo’s pioneering motion controller, standing out like a beacon of hope on a console floundering in a fickle sea of casual gaming and lazy mini-game compilations. Zack and Wiki not only resurrected the genre — but it gave it bells and whistles (literally). In a nod to Guybrush Threepwood, Zack is a young aspiring pirate who teams up with his erstwhile sidekick Wiki, a flying golden monkey with a Japanese school girl voice who turns into a bell in order to transform enemies into useful inventory items. This unique and bizarre gameplay mechanic sees the player harnessing the Wii remote to perform various tasks with said items in order to solve some particularly ingenious puzzles, whilst the game throws brilliant ideas at the player at about the same frequency as Mario Galaxy.

That said few new entries into the genre have attempted to break so far away from the old ways, which is particularly the case with the PC based titles. Just recently Jane Jensen released Gray Matter, which is surprisingly traditional in its structure considering how experimental the Gabriel Knight trilogy has been in the past (adopting cutting edge pixel art, full motion video and a pioneering 3D engine respectively). Whilst the genre slipped into obscurity in Britain and most of the rest of the world, Germany, a country in which PC gamers outweigh console gamers by a huge ratio and where board games still enjoy a prominent status, has long kept the dream alive for the genre. Lost Horizon, The Whispered World and Black Mirror II are amongst the best recent games to come out of German or nearby central European development houses; each of them feature brilliantly told stories with vibrant aesthetics and well designed puzzles. However they do little to innovate on the structural foundations of the genre.

The Nintendo DS has seen the most creative new additions to the genre with the Phoenix Wright and Professor Layton series’ notable successes, the latter causing logic based puzzles to be adopted wholesale (for instance the additional code break puzzles in the recent Broken Sword Directors Cut). Meanwhile Studio Cing’s masterful Hotel Dusk and recent sequel Last Window, featuring gumshoe detective Kyle Hyde, also do well on the innovation front, prompting the player to flip the DS onto its side to emulate an interactive detective novel, whilst its elegant rotoscoped sketch book aesthetics provide a refreshing and beautiful manner of presentation, as well as a homage to genre classic Last Express. However the fact that Cing went bankrupt in the process, something that the Last Window alludes to allegorically in its sombre setting of an apartment building on the verge of demolition, demonstrates the genre is still high risk when it comes to boxed releases.

Another recent development that aids the genre, then, is the rise of broadband internet, ushering in a new age of browser based games and download services with drastically reduced production costs, such as Steam and Good Old Games (www.gog.com) as well as XBLA and PSN on the consoles. In the years between the fall of the genre and its recent resurgence a veritable underworld of independently produced flash based games have kept appetites alive, even spawning a new sub-genre in the form of ‘escape the room’ challenges. Likewise one of the most successful and inventive point-and-clicks of recent years is the charming, independently produced and distributed Machinarium, in which players control a little robot limited in their actions by the reach of his extendable limbs.

Future: “I Can’t Combine Those Two Items”

Even the next-gen consoles seem to be getting in on the act. After all what is Heavy Rain’s ‘interactive drama’ if it isn’t a more sophisticated take on the adventure game? Indeed Heavy Rain does much to revitalise the genre by drawing generously on the influence of American TV and providing lavish production values. Rather impressively it also takes one of the most reviled gameplay mechanics ever, the Quick Time Event (QTE), and presents it in a fresh and utterly exciting way. Now the QTE is contextual; an X attached to a fist as it cruises towards your jaw, or an up and down slyly reversed as you attempt to escape from a flipped car on a freeway, effortlessly transferring the confusion and desperation of the protagonist as he scrambles with his locked seatbelt onto the player as he scrambles with the buttons on the controller.

It’s ironic that the most old school of genres is undergoing a renaissance driven by cutting edge technology, but if you consider that it emerged in the first place on the back of similar technology in the form of the mouse it’s somewhat less surprising. What’s interesting is how the games and their creators refresh the genre by adapting to these new technical opportunities. As we’ve seen games emerging on the PC have less of a need to meddle with tradition, adopting an ‘if it ain’t broke don’t fix it’ mentality, and often replacing true innovation with a self-parodying attitude to the genre’s tropes. Telltale Games, made up as it is of former Lucas Arts creatives, provides an interesting fusion of the old and the new; creating nostalgic revivals of classic franchises even whilst it simultaneously fully embraces a clever low-risk online marketing/distribution paradigm and a modern, financially savvy episodic structure.

But it’s on devices driven by new tech, such as the DS, iPhone and Wii where the true experimentation has happened, spawning games such as Zack and Wiki and Hotel Dusk. This begs the question of what delights are in store for us now that the next-gen consoles are experimenting with motion control in the form of Move and Kinect? Imagine investigating a crime scene and actually reaching in to grasp vital clues? Or playing a new Gabriel Knight game that borrows from modern survival horror elements, in which you actually have to hold out a crucifix to repel the children of the night? Interaction can now be conducted on a whole new level of immersion than the old ‘pick up’ and ‘talk to’ paradigms. The point-and-click genre can become emotionally and intellectually vital once more, something that’s already been explored in one form in the Move edition of Heavy Rain. Only time will tell where new designers who have grown up with these influences, will take the genre using new technology; for the first time in over a decade there’s a true sense of excitement and potential attached to the point-and-click adventure.