An adventure game is a video game genre in which the player assumes the role of a protagonist in an interactive story, driven by exploration and/or puzzle-solving. The genre's focus on story allows it to draw heavily from other narrative-based media, such as literature and film, encompassing a wide variety of genres. Most adventure games are designed for a single player, since the emphasis on story and character makes multiplayer design difficult. Colossal Cave Adventure is identified by Rick Adams as the first such adventure game, first released in 1976, while other notable adventure game series include Zork, King's Quest, Monkey Island, Syberia, and Myst.
A computer terminal running Zork (1977), one of the first commercially successful text adventure games
The Whispered World (2009) is an example of a context-based point-and-click adventure game using high-definition graphics and animation.
The Stanley Parable (2013) is a first-person walking simulator set in an office building.
Myst used high-quality 3D rendered graphics to deliver images that were unparalleled at the time of its release.
Colossal Cave Adventure is a text-based adventure game, released in 1976 by developer Will Crowther for the PDP-10 mainframe computer. It was expanded upon in 1977 by Don Woods. In the game, the player explores a cave system rumored to be filled with treasure and gold. The game is composed of dozens of locations, and the player moves between these locations and interacts with objects in them by typing one- or two-word commands which are interpreted by the game's natural language input system. The program acts as a narrator, describing the player's location and the results of the player's attempted actions. It is the first well-known example of interactive fiction, as well as the first well-known adventure game, for which it was also the namesake.
Colossal Cave Adventure running on a PDP-11/34 with a monitor, showing the point system
William Crowther in 2012
Teleprinter computer terminal
Unix version of the game on an Osborne 1 computer circa 1982