Here, I’ll start. When I was 8 years old, my parents went to a dinner party and plonked me down in front of the host’s computer so I’d stay out of their way. The game they booted up to keep me occupied was Space Quest II. Little did they know what impact that would have on me…
It’s funny to read comments bashing King’s Quest 3, because freak show over here (me) got into adventure games because of KQ3.
Before my psychotic parents got rid of it for being occultic, and replaced it with Space Quest 1 (not a bad exchange, I must say) I loved KQ3. I never got far in it, but it was just this open world for me to explore. The fact that wizard guy could just poof in at any time just captivated my imagination and made it feel like someone other than my character was out in the world doing things. It made the world feel much bigger than it was and it captivated my sense of wonder.
King’s Quest III: “occultic.” Here, have a game that starts out with a bloodbath aboard a spaceship instead. Good priorities. 😂
Same parents that let me play Manhunter: San Francisco. We’re clearly dealing with parents of the year, here.
Does “Adventure”, Atari, 1980 count?
It absolutely does! The OG adventure game!
Well, a graphical port of the OG adventure game. The guy who made Adventure would go on to use the same engine to create Rocky’s Boots and Robot Odyssey.
My favorite too!
Sam & Max: Hit the Road!
To this day, it’s one of my favorite games of all time. I haven’t played it in a while, so thank you for making me remember! I’m definitely going to go for a new playthrough when things settle down here.
I remember my childhood in Brighton, When dear old dad would bounce me on his knee, He’d say “son there is nothing as exiting, As exposing beasts to inhumanity!”
Oh my god I just remembered Sam and Max had cd audio. I used to listen to that song off the cd loads!
Ha ha same here!
Sam & Max taught me more clever multisyllabic words than school ever did.
I think the first point n’ click adventure I played was Maniac Mansion (for the NES!) at a friend’s house.
But really what got me into them was Monkey Island. I had an Amiga 500 and we got some games from a friend who had recently got a PC. among them were 4 (I think?) disks labelled “The Secret of Monkey Island”, and - dammit Ron - I was immediately intrigued by The Secret.
Monkey 1 was one of very few games I bothered to actually come back to and eventually after many months complete by myself as a kid.
I got to play Zork in 4th grade on the single C64 in the classroom. Was obsessed with that computer. I beat Zork with a couple classmates and help from the hints book. The teacher gave me a physical Zorkmid coin that came with the boxed game, I still have it somewhere. Zork got me so hooked on computers that it was all I wanted to do.
I had a hard home life, my dad was an abusive addict. I lived in fear of his seemingly random behavior, one day he would be overjoyed and another miserable about everything. The computer was predictable, if it didn’t work right, it was because I did something wrong. The teacher saw how much that computer meant to me. He taught me what he knew about BASIC programming, he gave me the manual. I’d sit in my room and read it cover to cover, trying to understand everything without having a machine to try it on.
One day near the end of the year, the teacher pulled me aside and told me that the school was getting rid of some computers, and that I could have one. I think they were getting Apple II’s, so he put aside a VIC-20 for me. I had to get my mom to drive me to school on a weekend and the teacher met us there. In hindsight, I don’t think he had permission or anything.
Sorry for kind of getting off the topic
@SQHistorian Good ole Leisure Suit Larry.
Still remember “buying” a pirated copy on two white 5.25” inch floppies from a local computer *store* 😂
Planet Fall by infocom. I worked backwards to Zork. The mystery was so enticing to me!
It must have been either a copy of Skipper & Skeeto 4 or Voodoo Kid that we had gotten with the old Compaq my mother bought through work. Later I played Pink Panther: Passport to Peril that we had borrowed from the library.
That said, I didn’t become aware of Adventure as a genre until I was 13 and the adult at my after-school computer club put The Curse of Monkey Island on a projector and we all played it together. That was my gateway drug, as soon after I played around with a front-end for DOSBOX to play the first two Monkey Islands and Sam & Max at a LAN party.
Having missed out on the golden age of adventure games helped create the drive that is currently fuelling my preservation efforts at The Royal Danish Library.
Full Throttle!
That’s going back a ways… I think the first one for me was King’s Quest 1, actually. “KILL SNAKE WITH SWORD” was far beyond what I could type in the amount of time I had to type it, but the idea of moving around a screen interacting with the world to solve problems was utterly intoxicating.
The second one was Leisure Suit Larry, which I probably should not have been allowed to play but I was the only one who knew that at the time. Perhaps fortunately I never got very far in it, but the boss key made me laugh hard enough to make it worth it.
It wasn’t until somewhat later that I encountered the Space Quest series, which I really got into. I actually completed some of them!
My sister and I used to play as much as we could from Purple Moon: Secret Paths in the Forest, Rockett’s New School, and so on. And look at me, now I’m working towards getting the Rockett games supported in ScummVM, haha. So, if I had to pick one to answer the question, it’d be Rockett’s Tricky Decision which got me into adventure games.
Putt-Putt and the various Disney Animated Storybooks were lots of fun, too, I have fond memories of those. (As you can see, I grew up in the era of 1990s CD-ROM edutainment)
But the game that made me realize the true potential of what you could do was Riven. I borrowed my friend’s CD-ROM set when I was in 6th grade or something (a box of 3 or 4 discs, that’s how big the game is) and I was like, holy crap, this is better and even more immersive than Myst. Riven is how I fell in love with the whole Myst universe.
The Secret of Monkey Island is the first one I can remember playing. I also remember watching my dad play Police Quest 3 as a kid.
@SQHistorian Adventure for the 2600. Probably the worst port, but a compromise for the hardware.
Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy when I was a bit older.
The first one I played was Les Manley Search For The King. I was around 8 and we got it from a family friend who gave us a box full of floppies. I remember being amazed and thinking “you can do anything in this game”.
I later discovered it was a sorta ripoff of Leisure Suit Larry, but in my opinion a better game.
I’ve yet to play those. I played Rex Nebular, the “Leisure Suit Larry in space,” and it was… not good. I have half a mind to do a very scathing video about it at some point.
Technically Leisure Suit Larry was the first adventure game I played when I was 3, but I was just walking back and forth in front of the bar because I didn’t know what a text parser was. I think the game that actually got me into the genre was Myst, as divisive as it may be. I loved playing it with my family and exploring that world.
