50 Years of Text by Aaron Reed
A definitive book about the first half-century of interactive fiction.
Has anyone read this? It exclusively covers text games, but goes a lot into the development of graphics in parallel, including when Infocom was a major competitor in the adventure gaming marketing.
I got an advance copy from Aaron to review and was expecting it to be a fluffy/coffee table book, but it turned out to be really good. My reaction is here.
Curious what other people's thoughts are.
The Coles are experimenting with making visual novels-- see Summer Daze: Tilly's Tale. Mostly because it's well suited to their artist's art style and (in theory) quicker and simpler to produce. Long Live The Queen, Dream Daddy, and Loren Amazon Princess were inspirations.
Not sure how much crossover the VN community has with adventure games in general.
So many, but:
Quest for Glory: Shadows of Darkness by Aubrey Hodges
Gabriel Knight 2: The Beast Within by Robert Holmes
Not quite an adventure game soundtrack, but also all of Swan Lake.
I've weirdly managed to build a sustainable career doing contract programming for Sierra alums, mostly in Unity. My studio is Cat and Witch Games based out of New York City.
Projects I've worked on:
The Owl Consults -- parser-based text adventure where you play a villainous consultant helping out hapless clients, way back in 2023. me and two other programmers from the Boston area.
Hero-U: Rogue to Redemption -- joined the team as a Unity developer around the second round of crowdfunding in 2015, got the game shipped in 2018 rather than languishing in development hell.
Colossal Cave 3D Adventure - did a 6-month contract for Ken and Roberta back in 2021 figuring out if doing the VR port was feasible, back before the project was announced.
Summer Daze: Tilly's Tale -- new game in the world of Quest for Glory by the Coles, shipped in 2023.
Have also done some solo indie dev for gamejams but nothing on the same quality level (since for those I do the art/programming myself).
So glad this exists! Thanks for doing the work of setting it up.
King's Quest 4 was the first game I remember playing. I was 3 years old. On a meta-level, Adventure or Dungeons and Dragons.
Wadjet Eye Games's The Shivah (old enough to be a classic at this point! But still pretty obscure and underrated.)