Saturday, February 5, 2011

Spreading the love

Every once in a while people question our choice of genre. Adventure games are dead, they say. The genre died in its sleep back in '98 supposedly, and we'd be well advised to stop beating the dead horse.

Obviously we disagree with this notion. Sure, it might not be the commercial power house it was back in the golden days, but it's far from dead. It's not even particularly niche either, since it's one of the best selling genres of the Nintendo DS.

You don't have to take our word for it. Recently the supreme chaps over at Ars Technica and IGN decided to revisit the "ailing" genre and found that it's doing quite well, thank you for asking. Fact of the matter is that it's feeling better than it has in a long time. Both articles make for nice reading together over a cup of coffee and some pastry, and can be found here and here.

Feel free to send us links to similar articles, if you know of any. We can't get enough of reading about this!

Cheers,

 - a

8 comments:

  1. The article on IGN is pretty weak, actually. There is no mention anywhere on A New Beginning or The Next Big Thing, though they both look fantastic.

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  2. adventure games aren't dead at all: a german game mag ( geemag.de ) just reported about some theater stuff that works with games and the most promissing one is a point and click adventure theater piece ( machinax.de ). so its not an dead genre. its just transforming, like dreammachine does also show quite impressive. point and click adventures are becoming greater than ever. just more... specialiced. or better to say more sculptural, plastical

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  3. Grim Fandango is very nice ;)
    But...when is the next Dream Machine chapter going to come? :)

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  4. Luca: Unknown at this point.

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  5. Yep, adventure games aren't dead at all, they made their comeback.
    Thanks for being part of it!

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  6. Argh! I want/need the next chapter! ;)

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  7. How can they say that adventure games died back in '98 when only two out or five MYST-chapters were released at that point?!?? I LOVE adventure games. Maybe because I don't enjoy being killed over and over again in stupid action games... :-P

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  8. People are getting sick of first person shooter games (except maybe teenage boys); they are a mindless form of entertainment which frankly, I find to be an insult to one's intelligence.

    The problem is not that people don't want to buy and play adventure games, but that the big publishers don't want to publish things that they think don't appeal to the common gaming crowd. Publishers like EA have successfully watered down every great game recently because they force game creators on a tight schedule which can hinder their creativity, character and plot development.

    The demand for adventure games definitely exists. Tim Schafer recently put a new project up on Kickstarter, asking for 300,000 dollars in donations to make a new adventure game. You know how much people donated? 3.5 MILLION dollars. If that isn't demand, then I don't know what is.

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