Adventure International

Infobox Defunct Company
company_name = Adventure International
company_
slogan =
location = Longwood, Florida, United States [http://www.users.bigpond.com/scottjulian/page12.html]
fate = bankrupt
foundation = 1978
defunct = 1985
industry = video game publishing
key_people = Scott and Alexis Adams
products = Adventureland
subsid = Adventure Soft UK

Adventure International was a video game publishing company that existed from 1978 until 1985, started by Scott and Alexis Adams. Their games were notable for being the first implementation of the adventure genre to run on a microcomputer system. The adventure game concept originally came from Colossal Cave Adventure which ran strictly on large mainframe systems at the time.

History

After the success of their first game Adventureland, games followed rapidly, with Adventure International (or "AI") releasing about two games a year. Initially the games were drawn from the founders imagination, with themes ranging from fantasy to horror and sometimes science fiction. Some of the later games were written by Scott Adams and other collaborators. Adventure Internationals' games became known for quality, with a reputation only exceeded in the field at the time by Infocom.

Fourteen games later, Adventure International began to release games drawn from film and fiction. The extremely rare Buckaroo Banzai game, developed with Phillip Case, was based on the film The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the Eighth Dimension (1984). Other games came from a more well known source: Marvel Comics. Adventure International released three Questprobe games based on the Marvel characters: "The Incredible Hulk", "Spider-Man" and "Torch and the Thing".

By the end of 1982, game tastes were changing. The traditional text-based adventure game market had moved to graphical based adventures. Games like The Hobbit had increased expectations of such games, and although Adventure International games included graphics of a sort, they were significantly inferior to contemporary offerings at the time and the company was rapidly losing market share. At its peak in late 1983 to early 1984 Adventure International employed approximately 50 individuals, and published titles from over 300 independent programmer/authors.

Adventure International went bankrupt in 1985. The copyrights for its games reverted to the bank and eventually back to Scott Adams who released them as shareware.

In Europe the "Adventure International" name was a trading name of Adventure Soft and other games were released under the name that were not from Adventure International in the USA.

The games

Scott Adams's original twelve adventure games were:
*"Adventureland" (computer game): Explore a fantasy landscape and collect thirteen treasures.
* "Pirate Adventure" (also called "Pirate's Cove"): Hunt for lost pirate treasure.
* "Secret Mission" (originally called "Mission Impossible"): Prevent terrorists from destroying a nuclear reactor.
* "Voodoo Castle": Free a count from a voodoo curse.
* "The Count": Kill Count Dracula.
* "Strange Odyssey": Explore strange planets and collect treasure.
* "Mystery Fun House": Capture secret plans hidden in a fun house.
* "Pyramid of Doom": Plunder an Egyptian pyramid.
* "Ghost Town": Search a Western ghost town for treasure.
* "Savage Island" parts I & II: The most challenging adventure games, you are not even aware of the adventure's goal. If you complete part one, you are given the password to play the second part.
* "The Golden Voyage": Sail the world and find the fountain of youth.

The games were written using an in-house adventure creator with text compression and a sophisticated command interpreter running on a BBC Micro and a graphics tool running on an Apricot F1. The two parts were then merged, using a cross-compiler when necessary.

"Saigon: The Final Days"

A later Adventure International title, "Saigon: The Final Days", had as its very dark scenario the escape of a soldier from Vietnam at the end of the war.

A quirk in this game's input parser provided an unintentional surprise bit of morbid gameplay. At one point in the game, the player must figure out how to cross a predator-infested river. Entering the command "confess to war crimes" here would not be rejected as gibberish as one might expect, but would actually kill the player. This turned out to not be a planned feature; the parser was finding the command "swim" embedded in the phrase ("confess to war crimes"), and swimming across the river was invariably a fatal move.

The actual solution to the game was no less macabre, involving zipping oneself into a body bag to be carried out of the country by an evacuation helicopter.

External links

* [http://dmoz.org/Games/Video_Games/Developers_and_Publishers/A/Adventure_International/ Category at Open Directory]
* [http://www.msadams.com/index.htm Scott Adams official website]
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* [http://www.ifarchive.org/indexes/if-archiveXscott-adamsXinterpreters.html List of interpreters for Adventure International games]