Next year, gaming legend Ron Gilbert brings adventures to the couch with Thimbleweed Park. Here’s why you should care
Way back in 1990, a young man looking to make his fortune declared: “My name’s Guybrush Threepwood, and I want to be a pirate.” His game, The Secret of Monkey Island, wasn’t the first graphical adventure, but few others have embedded themselves so deeply in players’ hearts. Fast forward to today, and its creator, Ron Gilbert, is bringing that era of gaming to Xbox One with his latest adventure, Thimbleweed Park. Think Twin Peaks, with more jokes. And shades of blue.
Everything about it should be familiar to fans of the genre. It uses the graphical style of early LucasArts games like Maniac Mansion and Zak McKracken, and an interface modelled after its famous SCUMM engine (Script Creation Utility For Maniac Mansion). These are mechanically simple games: you select verbs, you click them on bits of scenery, and you have funny conversations with crazy people by selecting dialogue options. More than most genres though, adventures aren’t just the sum of their parts – done right, everything bleeds together to create a coherent world to explore and poke around. Classics of the genre include time-travel adventure Day of the Tentacle, the comic insanity of Sam and Max Hit the Road, history diving epic Broken Sword, and many more. Few genres have so many beloved games that still hold their magic decades after release, to say nothing of still looking as good as, say, Sam and Max Hit the Road or Kyrandia 2 still do.
Use X on Y
But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. What is an adventure? “An adventure to me is a game that’s maybe equal parts story and narrative and puzzles,” says Gilbert himself. “You’ve got this strong story and you work through it by solving puzzles – the puzzles become the mechanism that moves you through the narrative. In other genres, it’s shooting or platforming, but here, it’s puzzles.”
Those puzzles can take many different forms. On the ‘bad’ side are the ‘Elder Puzzles’ – tiresome affairs where an old logic conundrum like the Towers of Hanoi or some sliding blocks are dusted off and shoved into the game just to fill space. Good puzzles, however, are a true artform, usually combining sharp observation, experimentation and a little lateral thinking. Back in Monkey Island, for instance, there’s one where you’re trying to find the Swordmaster of Melee Island, but the only person who knows where she lives is a storekeeper. He’ll take a message, disappear for a while, and then return to say she doesn’t want to meet with you. The trick, which was revolutionary design for 1990, was to realise that you could follow him and let him lead you to her house.
Unfortunately, part of the reason adventure games faded from popularity is that there’s nothing easier than writing a bad puzzle – something unfair, something poorly explained, something that gets in the way rather than being a reason to actually play. This is especially problematic now that online walkthroughs make being ‘stuck’ a choice rather than a problem. Thimbleweed Park is one of the few games to focus on them, with most current adventures following the Telltale model of offering big but simple choices instead. Sneak into the barn or fight your way there? Accuse the corrupt mayor or not? It keeps things flowing, but still on rails.
“A puzzle to me isn’t just ‘a puzzle’ – it’s something that tells you about the story, the world, the characters,” says Gilbert. “Every puzzle has to tell you something about one of those things, or it’s just a puzzle for a puzzle’s sake. I think that’s what frustrates a lot of people – that they’re having to do something because the designer has thrown it down there. But if the puzzle informs something else, it feels like you’re uncovering something. I do know some people who design adventures, and they do it very combatively – player versus designer, not player versus the game – but I think that’s the wrong way to go about it. You want to make it challenging, but not unfair.”
Adventure time
Despite what some fans like to say, adventures never ‘died’. There’s no arguing, though, that their golden age was in the early ‘90s, when not only the genre’s classics hit the shelves, but adventures were the go-to genre for every major new technology that came along. King’s Quest sold the IBM PCjr, King’s Quest IV was the first game to demonstrate the AdLib music card, and King’s Quest V was one of the showcases for VGA graphics – 256 glorious colours! (It was a big deal back in 1990. Some of us only had four – and two of those were cyan and magenta.)
Other games were used to show that games could have full speech, videos of Hollywood stars looking uncomfortable in front of bad greenscreen backgrounds, and more. On top of technology, they were culturally hugely important. The first female game star? Adventures. (Either Infocom’s Plundered Hearts, or Sierra’s King’s Quest IV). First 15/18 rated games? Adventures. The only genre pushing the boundaries in terms of mature content, from the language of The Orion Conspiracy to having a bisexual leading man in Phantasmagoria 2? Adventures.
Sadly, adventure games lost this position with the rise of 3D, as well as other genres developing the ability to tell stories on top of providing their action, but let nobody tell you that they weren’t influential. When you watch a cutscene, for instance, the original term ‘cutscene’ actually comes from Maniac Mansion – its name coming from the fact that the game ‘cut’ away from the player characters to elsewhere.
“When we were doing Maniac Mansion and Monkey Island, those were very technologically advanced games. They were pushing the hardware a lot – a lot of graphics that needed to move and scroll… and that stuff was really hard back then. Now you can have thousands of sprites and your computer won’t even sweat, but back then it was really hard to do,” says Gilbert. Which begs the obvious question – could Thimbleweed Park actually have been made back in 1989?
“Well, there are two answers. You could take our exact game and story and puzzles, and it could have been made in 1989. There’s nothing weird going on there. But, that said, we’re relying on modern hardware. As an example, there’s lighting in the game: walk under street lamps and your character is lit, because we have shaders and we can do that to enhance it. But at its core, it’s still a game that’s faithful to all that stuff. I’ve always thought of it as not building a game like you would have played in 1989, but like you’d imagine playing in 1989. That’s where the nostalgia comes in. You remember things being better than they were. But now we are able to live up to that.”
Back to the future
Nostalgia has been the genre’s best friend and worst enemy in recent years. With the exception of Telltale, which found a new direction with The Walking Dead and is now milking it with different licences until the cash-cow’s udders drip blood, most adventures are more or less based on the same designs and concepts laid out in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. Mouse cursor. Verbs. Though most have cut these down to just ‘look’ and ‘use’ based on which mouse button the player clicks, and others just have the one option: ‘interact’. This involves using items on things in the world to solve puzzles, and trying not to think about how fast most of them could be solved with £10 and a trip to a local DIY store.
Even if you have never played an adventure, you’ll have seen the genre’s impact at some point. Monkey Island 2, for instance, introduced the idea of an opening chapter, then a hunt for four map pieces leading (past another obstacle) to the end of the game. Sound familiar? It’s been the structure of every BioWare RPG since Knights of the Old Republic, as well as heavily used elsewhere. ‘Three Trials’ Design – splitting up an objective into three individual goals that can be pursued in any order, so you always have something else to work on if you get stuck or bored – also started here. These are both as embedded into gaming right now as the idea of having three lives. (“A magical number. Two isn’t enough, four is too many,” comments Gilbert. “You see it all over the place. A three-act play, jokes coming in threes… there’s just something about three.”)
The catch is that while it’s easy to see all of the elements, it’s far harder to combine them into an interesting game than to take the best bits and sprinkle them onto something else. Role-playing games in particular borrowed much from the genre, but were able to combine it with swords, sorcery, dragon fights and rather more important quests than whether or not some kid gets to become a pirate, so adventures quickly got pushed off to one side. This led to a lack of innovation, with most designers still working in the genre following the templates laid down by the old games without the same desire to innovate and break the rules. For starters, you couldn’t die in Monkey Island. Well, technically, you could, but you really had to work at it, which was a huge departure from how most adventures played at the time. Take games such as Police Quest 2, Leisure Suit Larry 2 and Shadowgate: you could die by not looking left and right before crossing a road; eating a sandwich that turned out to have a pin in it; and opening a door with deep space behind it.
Puzzles, right and wrong
The best games were always the ones that not only avoided that, but took what worked in a clever direction. LucasArts’ biker game Full Throttle, for instance, was still in every way an adventure, but with puzzles geared more around the biker mindset – the ability to kick down a door rather than find the key. The Dig was largely built around archeology, its puzzles about picking through the ruins of a lost civilisation. Most famously, Monkey Island featured sword-fighting, but instead of doing it as arcade sequences, the mechanics were based around the scenes in classic movies. Fighters traded barbs as well as blows, with the whole thing becoming insult swordfighting, where the clank of blades depends on how well you match witticisms. “There are no words for how disgusting you are!” “There are, you just never learned them!” (clash clash)
The games that followed – not all, by any stretch – tended to forget this bit, focusing just on puzzles and often missing the point of those. Far too many were just roadblocks, and often very stupid ones. Even good designers fell into the twin-trap of seeing the LucasArts games particularly as the apex of the genre rather than simply the best that their creators could do at the time. They didn’t want to do anything that might offend fans who saw their beloved genre being stolen and were sick of being told RPGs and the like were inherently better. This lead to severe stagnation, and games that could never live up to fond memories of the original titles.
“A lot of people who are trying to capture that nostalgia or pay homage to it, if they weren’t part of it initially then they tend to build something that looks like the old games but doesn’t play like them. It doesn’t have the same humour, the way the puzzles were done, all those elements that gave those games their flavour. I think they’re missing what made those games special,” says Gilbert, who codified his design philosophy in a set of rules written in 1989 and called it ‘Why Adventure Games Suck And What We Can Do About It’. It’s still depressingly relevant today.
The classics prevail
There are still great adventures being made today, however, from nostalgic ones largely funded by crowdfunding site Kickstarter, to indie games, to the return of old classics like King’s Quest. In look, they can vary from classic pixel art (as with Wadjet Eye Games’ fantastic Blackwell series) to 3D and traditional artwork (German publisher Daedalic being the most prolific, with Germany having long been a huge adventure game market). But what all of them have in common is that they’re made for the PC/iPad market. On console, alas, we only really get Telltale’s offerings.
Something like Thimbleweed Park, with its ‘80s aesthetic, might not immediately look like a great fit on Xbox One, and it’s certainly not going to strain our next gen console too hard. Gilbert was keen to bring it across though, not least in the hope of recapturing the social element that’s long been missing from adventure games. “I remember my first experience of them was on a college computer, which was a text game in junior high, and it was me and my friends. I never played that alone. The thing that interests me most about the Xbox One isn’t the console itself, but where it’s played. PC games are still traditionally played at a desk, a home office, something like that. With a console, you play on a couch – more relaxed, more public, with people around. It’s an intriguing environment to be in.”
The hope is that this will return us to one of the best, and most forgotten parts of adventure gaming – working with friends to solve puzzles and experience the world, to find new jokes and responses, and to recapture the fun of solving tricky problems instead of just going online and having someone give you the answer. “They’re not as interesting if you’re just sitting there with a walkthrough. Part of the fun and the charm of the genre is in discovering things.” As just one example: “There are 3,000 books in Thimbleweed Park’s library right now, and every one of them has a name! You can’t open the books and read them, of course, but they all have a name, and as you scroll around you’re going to find some really interesting and funny things. I’ve always said that an adventure’s main character is its world. You need to develop that, let people explore it and poke around. Whether it’s leafing through police reports or finding a joke in a library book in the background of a scene, we’ve got a lot of that stuff because it’s fun and builds the world.”
Thimbleweed Park’s charms await to be either discovered or rediscovered early next year. Meanwhile, if you want to get up to speed with the genre and don’t mind taking a break from your TV, many classic adventures have recently been re-released over on GOG.COM, on iPad and on Steam. Point, click, prepare. It’ll be 1989 again before you know it. In a good way, that is.