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One of the programmers who had the opportunity to explore the Colossal Cave was Scott Adams. After ten days of traversing the underground, he solved the entire game and became a great master, sparking a great passion. Owning a TRS-80 and knowing that not everyone had access to a PDP-10, he decided to create an adventure on his own microcomputer. There remained, however, the problem of storing a lot of information in the small memory of machines of that time. Remembering that he had written several interpreters, he realized that that type of software was exactly what he needed. Furthermore, once an interpreter was developed, it could be reused for other adventure games.
Scott Adams's adventure game series—produced from 1978 to 1985—was born, and the company Adventure International soon followed. The first adventures were text-based and written in the BASIC. To improve response times, Adams then translated them into assembly and the series was expanded to twelve adventures.
The great advance which immediately followed was the introduction of images. With the use of machine language allowing shorter programs, and computer memory increasing, it became possible to use the graphical potential of a computer like the Apple II and companies like Infocom soon switched from producing pure text-based adventures.
Soon the clumsy basic vector graphics gave way to more asthetic imagery drawn by professional artists. Examples include Sherwood Forest (1982), Dale Johnson 's Masquerade (1983), or Antonia Antiochia 's Transylvania (1982, re-released in 1984).
The introduction of such high-quality bitmap graphics required more substantial storage capacity with many adventures requiring several diskettes for installation, which would be the case until the CD-ROM made its appearance.
At the end of the 1970s, Ken Williams sought to set up a company for enterprise software for the market-dominating Apple II computer. One day, he took a teletype terminal to his residence to work on the development of an accounting program. Rummaging through a catalogue, he found a program called Colossal Cave Adventure. He and his wife Roberta both played it all the way through and their encounter with Crowther's game would have a strong influence on video-gaming history.
Having finished Colossal Cave Adventure, they began to seach for something similar, but found the market underdeveloped. Roberta Williams liked the concept of a textual adventure very much, but she thought that the player would have a more satisfying experience with images and began to think of her own game. She thus conceived Mystery House , the first graphical adventure game, a detective story inpired by Agatha Christie's Ten Little Niggers.
Ken spent a few nights developing the game on his Apple II, and in the end they made packets with ziploc bags containing the game's 5¼-inch disk and a photocopied paper describing the game. They sold it via a local software shop and to their great surprise, Mystery House was an enormous success. Though Ken believed that the gaming market would be less of a growth market than the professional software market, he persevered with games. Thus, in 1980, the Williamses founded On-Line Systems which would become Sierra On-Line in 1982. The company would be a major actor in the video-gaming of the 1980s.
Sierra soon took things further. Until this point adventure games were in the first person; images presented the décor as seen through the eyes of the player. Williams's company would introduce a new feature in the King's Quest series: a game in the third person. Taking advantage of the techniques developed in action games which had progressed in parallel, Ken introduced an animated character who represented the player in the game and whom the player controlled. With the 3D Animated Adventures , a new standard was born, and nearly all the industry latched onto it. The commands were still entered on the keyboard and analysed by a syntax interpreter, as with text adventure games.
Sierra would develop new games and push the boundaries of adventure gaming until its purchase by Cendant in 1998.
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