Dominik Gąska: Do you think there is merit in saying that the advent of the Internet was what essentially killed the adventure game as a mainstream genre? In the 80s and the 90s adventure games were up there with role-playing games and strategy games in terms of popularity and longevity. People were playing them, discussing them for long periods of time. Now it seems they have „degenerated”, as you may say, into simple one-two-evenings affairs. How do you think the availability of FAQs and walkthroughs affected the design of these games?
Mark Yohalem: I had never thought of things quite that way. It's an interesting hypothesis, but I don't think it's right to say that the Internet killed adventure games by making FAQs and walkthroughs more available.
First, even before the Internet, hints were available (at least in the United States) via 900-number call-ins advertised in the games' manuals. Also, pre-Internet services like CompuServe and Prodigy definitely had hints and walkthroughs for old adventure games -- I know because I consulted a walkthrough on Prodigy when I got stuck on the "monkey wrench" puzzle in Monkey Island 2. I do think that designers tended to "cheat" by knowing that players would have recourse to hints; I really have no idea how players ever beat some of the old Sierra games without help. Interestingly, as walkthroughs have gotten more available, puzzles seem to have gotten less obscure. I would have expected the opposite effect.
Second, the adventure game genre thrived for at least a while even after the Internet took off. I'm not sure when exactly the Internet became a big "thing," but my recollection is that it was pretty widely available by at least 1997, after which came, at a minimum, Riven, The Curse of Monkey Island, Grim Fandango, Broken Sword: Shadow of the Templars, Sanitarium, etc. And you would think that the Internet would actually facilitate adventure-game fandom. So that also makes me skeptical of the Internet as a source of blame.
As in the book Murder on the Orient Express, I think the genre had several killers. A major one would be the increasing cost of production. Adventure games, more than perhaps any other kind of game, rely on hand-crafted content without a lot of reusable assets. As technology advanced, the cost of producing that content went up: you added voice over, higher resolution graphics, more complicated cutscenes, and so on. It's hard to think of another kind of game that requires more developer hours per player hour. My cocktail-napkin calculation is that at least 1,000 hours of development time went into every hour of play time in Primordia. And that's to produce a low-fi adventure game. I cannot even imagine the effort that would go into making, say, The Curse of Monkey Island. But by way of comparison, Monkey Island 2's credits list 8 artists; CMI's credits list over 30 artists, plus five people just for handling voice acting, not including the voice actors themselves.
Another factor, I think, is that adventures games lost their monopoly on linear, character-driven story-telling in the West. When adventure games were thriving, they were really the only major story-tellers. The action genres -- like FPS games, platformers, and so on -- had no real story-telling at all. Western RPGs tended to have relatively light story-telling (compared to where things are now), and tended not to have protagonists who were "characters"; there were just ciphers representing the player. In the mid-to-late 1990s, however, Japanese console RPGs became much more widely available in the West. Western RPGs became much more story-driven (think Baldur's Gate, Fallout, Anachronox). RTS games got more serious stories (think StarCraft or Myth). And you started to see FPS games with cutscenes and plots. So players who were attracted to adventure games for their stories now had other options, and many of them probably left.
Finally, I do think there's something to the claim that people's tolerance for obscure puzzle design declined, maybe because games like Myst -- which I never really liked -- tried to use more logical puzzles.
I would blame these things before I would blame the Internet. Also, the Internet has fueled the adventure game renaissance, through episodic gaming, Kickstarter, and communities like the Adventure Game Studios boards.
