Did you complete adventure games as a kid?

Who among us played and won Adventure Games, or even Interactive Fiction, as a child? Were you depending on a walkthrough, and was it a sane undertaking? Please tell me.

The genre seems like it's both particularly appealing and extremely unfriendly to kids. It has room for wit and humor. It let players roam virtual worlds, years before Mario 64. It offered puzzles, sights and accomplishments that few other games could match. (Compare the audience with the Lord of the Dead in King's Quest with any platform level you care to name.) It's also seldom violent. On the other hand, it's the trope namer for Moon Logic Puzzle. Unwinnable states were considered a feature for years, and puzzles often rely on knowledge that kids don't have.

I ask because I'm in a weird position: I'm not a native English speaker. I didn't have a prayer at understanding the puzzles as I was growing up, yet I and my friends were huge fans of Sierra and Lucas classics. We played them with walkthroughs in hands - walkthroughs provided in abundance by the country's definitive gaming magazine, and which often explained simple English concepts. I only recently realized that kids could solve adventure games on their own.

Ah, the days of translating game events for my friend and making ridiculous stuff up because the text was way over my head. The eighteen months we spent on Shadowgate, off and on, because the only walkthrough was for the wrong version. Playing Leisure Suit Larry games with friends and being blown away by the miniscule payoffs.

I did. The Dig (That One Puzzle with the skeleton is overrated, it's easy!), Full Throttle, Monkey Island one and two (three I didn't get to play until I got all adulted), Loom, Space Quest 5, Peppers Adventures In Time, Little Big Adventure 2, Torins Passage and Shivers, to name a few. I was a nerd even before I learned proper English and the word "nerd", apparently.

edited 27th Feb '11 10:33:25 AM by Noelemahc

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The first game I ever played (and beat) was Lost Eden, an adventure game by Cryo Interactive (i.e. the guys who created the Atlantis The Lost Tales series).

edited 27th Feb '11 10:39:04 AM by Firebert

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I never finished a single adventure game until I was in high school, at the earliest. In an age of Guide Dang It!, the Internet was still in its infancy and Game FA Qs' coverage was spotty at best.

The only two I ever completed were Maniac Mansion and Déjà Vu (NES versions, because I didn't have a computer, and there was no store near me that sold PC floppy disks).

I hope you get tiny bits of eggshell in all your omelettes for the rest of your life!

A lot of the Sierra and Lucas Arts adventures. Police Quest, Space Quest, Kings Quest, The Dig, Maniac Mansion, Day of the Tentacle, Monkey Island, Indiana Jones & the Fate of Atlantis, Sam & Max Hit the Road and so on.

edited 27th Feb '11 4:07:22 PM by Talby

I was lucky enough to grow up during the renaissance of Adventure games. I completed many as a child without guides (which were difficult to come by pre-internet and pre-Gamefaqs, anyway), including all the King/Police/Space Quest games, the Zork games, The Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and (much later) Myst and "modern" Lucas Arts games like The Dig and Full Throttle.

I think walkthroughs spoil modern gamers and discourage them from forming critical thinking and puzzle solving skills. *insert random grumbling about how kids these days have it easy*

edited 27th Feb '11 4:12:02 PM by ccoa

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I completed every King's Quest game except III (my sisters lost the asdfghjkl guide), although KQVI took me a full year (I got stuck at the magic door in the castle basement— ARGH!— and of course, walkthroughs didn't exist back then). I also won Police Quest I & II and Quest for Glory I & II without guides, although I was an adult when I played those.

King's Quest I was probably the most brutal game I ever played— I still froth when I think of the Rumplestilskin puzzle, and that dwarf who steals your treasure, and the giant, and the wolf/wizard/random deaths everywhere. And the condor. UGH, that game.

Thanks for the all fish!

I played Curse of Monkey Island and Grim Fandango, mostly with copious walkthrough references. I was not very good at adventure game logic back then. I'm still not. I played the remade Monkey Island 2 on Steam recently and couldn't quite beat it without the in-game hint system and a web browser.

edited 27th Feb '11 8:13:24 PM by edvedd

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Space Quest IV was the first and only adventure game I beat without ever once using a walkthru.

I still refuse to look at walkthrus for it to this day. It's a point of honor.

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My dad (from whom I inherited my geekdom, though he didn't play games himself) once brought home King's Quest IV for our Windows 3.1 computer. I played it and couldn't beat it, and this was the era before we had reliable Internet access to walkthroughs, nor did we have game magazines...they probably still had phone-in hint lines in that era but I don't think it ever occured to me...and it probably wouldn't have been allowed by my parents anyway, since I would have still been in elementary school.

You see, I got stuck on getting the unicorn's bridle. Apparently you had to swim across the ocean to get it...but I had already learned that swimming too far in the ocean got you killed by sharks...and the shark attacks happened randomly...and the game had a time limit...

I play quite a few adventure games now. I try to play without guides, but only to the point where being stuck becomes not fun anymore, and then I'll try to look at hint-through style guides instead of straight walkthroughs.

I also played Where In The World Is Carmen Sandiego a lot, which is adventure-game "ish".

Not counting the aforementioned Carmen Aandiago, I did finish Blazing Dragons, but I walkthroughed it to death. I just couldn't figure out the bit about sticking the pipe cleaner into the termite hill and then using it on the crazy pied piper's pipe.

Now I'm playing Jolly Rover and I hope that being older and wiser will make me be successful. So far, so good.

Taking a break from FE1, for the FE8 draft instead

I did Monkey Island and Loom when I was like, seven or something, and at my sister's insistence attempted to do Monkey Island in German (actually got decently far — and some of the gags are funnier in German). I think I managed to do Zork Zero on my own too around the same time, Heaven only knows how, but all the other Zorks were family efforts.

edited 27th Feb '11 10:54:15 PM by Pykrete

I started playing Rogue at the age of 5 or 6 ... I finally beat it at the age of 19!

I can remember playing some text adventure games for the TRS-80 when I was around that age too - Mission Impossible, Pirate Treasure, Dracula's Castle, Wild West - those ones I could beat, the rest of them, the disk was corrupted so you could only get to a certain point in the game before it would fail on you.

I also played the hell out of the King's Quest games, especially 2 (never beat it) and 4  ^*

-6  ^*

^{stupid labyrinth, hilarious beach sense-gnomes}

(beat them all!) and the entire Quest for Glory series (with the same character, despite all the bugs). I never had the Space Quest series, though I can remember playing one of them on a friend's computer.

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(11)

Wow you're young. The age of adventure games was long before Game FAQS even existed, let alone had "spotty at best" coverage . :/

@Moe, you're either superhuman, very lucky or probably both, considering how epic the glitches in SQ 4 were, especially if your machine was faster than a 486 =)

Videogames do not make you a worse person... Than you already are.

You're one to talk about superhumans, Noel! That list of games you won is as long as your arm, and The Dig is not considered easy by gamers of any age. Did you get through it without a walkthrough?

Are you sure you don't mean Quest For Glory IV? That game was riddled with bugs, many of them tied to clock speed. Its final version runs quite well on Dosbox these years. The only noteworthy bug in Space Quest IV was the one where the game could get stuck on certain cutscenes. A close-up shot of an enslaved survivor of a robot rebellion, mutilated until he(?) was little more than undead, would loop endlessly as he stared at the screen and screamed.

Though that bug kept me from progressing pretty effectively when I was little.

I'm sure I'd be diagnosed with OCD if Russian medicine recognized it as an actual disorder instead of a consequence of bad upbringing. And that was just the adventure games =) Living in a country with rampant video game piracy has weird perks, don't it?

Yep, no walkthroughs, did it before there was any way to get any. Took me YEARS to notice the multitude of Shout Outs to Loom in it, though (like how some of the locations are lifted as-is, just with updated graphics).

Yes, Space Quest 4, with it's timed-based death-by-goo and death-by-droid-o-death and death-by-Sequel-Police (which made it impossible for me to even get out of Space Quest XII in the very beginning of the game — and that sort of thing is just sad). Qf G 4 is at least completable, because the show-stopping bugs may or may not happen depending on your class and phase of the moon and the NYSE values for the last three days =)

Videogames do not make you a worse person... Than you already are.

Yep. All of the Kings Quest series and most of Space Quest without a walkthrough. I learned to take notes, make maps, and always have access to someone else who's playing through the game at the same time as you.

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Fuck no. It took me the longest time to even figure out that there were other locations besides the main town in Monkey Island. Nowadays, I'm not much better.

edited 28th Feb '11 7:40:22 PM by DonZabu

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