Adventure (Atari 2600)

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This article is about a video game for the Atari 2600 video game console. See Colossal Cave Adventure and adventure game for other games using the name.

Adventure for the Atari 2600 is considered the first action-adventure game. Its creator, Warren Robinett, also introduced the first widely known Easter egg to the gaming world (Several Fairchild Channel F titles predate Adventure's Easter egg).

Contents

1 History
2 Gameplay
3 Trivia
4 Easter eggs
5 Versions
6 Cultural references
7 Technical
8 See also
9 External links

9.1 ''Indenture'' links

History

Adventure was published in 1978 by Atari. It was inspired by a computer text game, Colossal Cave Adventure, created by Will Crowther and later modified by Don Woods. Games similar to Adventure such as dnd had previously been published in 1975 on the PLATO System. Atari had logins to Plato.

Despite discouragement from his boss at Atari who said it could not be done, game designer, Warren Robinett, created a graphic game loosely based on the text game. Atari's Adventure went on to sell a million copies and is considered by many to be one of the company's finest games.

At the time of the game's creation, Atari did not credit any of its authors for their work, so Robinett included a hidden message in the game identifying himself as the creator, thus creating one of the earliest known Easter Eggs in a video game. A young player from Utah first discovered the hidden message.^{[[Citing sources citation needed]]}

A sequel to Adventure was announced in early 1982. However, the planned sequel was scrapped. It eventually evolved into the Swordquest series of games.

Gameplay

Adventure (1978) - Here the player (top right) is carrying the Sword, and Rhindle (middle) is guarding the Chalice (left).

The object of the game is simply to find the Chalice and return it to the Gold Castle. The character, represented by a square, explores a multi-screen landscape containing castles, mazes, and various rooms. Hidden throughout the world are a Sword, keys to unlock each of the three castles (Gold, Black, and White), a magic Bridge which allows the player to travel through a wall, and a Magnet which will pull any of these objects toward it.

Roaming the world are three dragons:

Yorgle, the yellow dragon: He is afraid of the Golden Key and will run away from it. He guards the Chalice when he can find it; otherwise he wanders around or helps the other dragons guard their possessions.
Grundle, the green dragon: He guards the Magnet, the Bridge, the Black Key, and the Chalice.
Rhindle, the red dragon: He is the fastest of the three and the most aggressive. He guards the White Key and Chalice.

A dragon can be "killed" by touching it with the sword. If the console's right difficulty switch is in the "A" position, the dragons will run away when they see the sword.

When a dragon touches the player, it will "strike" (remaining motionless for a moment with its mouth open, waiting for a shorter time if the console's left difficulty switch is in the "A" position) and then "swallow" the player, who becomes trapped in the dragon's belly. While the dragon's mouth is opened, it cannot be killed.

A bat flies around randomly, occasionally picking up or dropping objects (including live or dead dragons). The bat can steal the player's sword and give him a live dragon in return, or vice-versa. The player can catch the bat and carry it around. The bat continues to fly even after the player has been killed, and occasionally the bat will pick up the dragon whose stomach contains the player, giving the player a whirlwind tour of the Adventure universe. The player can trap the bat inside a castle; this works best with the Yellow Castle, since it has only one room and (provided the player has emptied it beforehand) the bat will, if it's flying upwards (straight up or diagonally up-right or up-left), fly around endlessly in the room and will not leave the castle. If the player enters with another item, the bat will change direction to grab the new item and usually end up leaving the castle. This "feature" of the bat's AI is exploited to find the easter egg. The bat's name was intended to be Knubberrub, but that name never made it into the game [link]

There are three different games (via the Game Select switch) available:

Game 1 is a simplified version of the game and does not have the red dragon, the bat, the catacombs, the white castle, or the maze inside the black castle.
Game 2 has is the full version, having all the features described. The location of the objects at the start of a new game is always the same and because of this known initial state, this is the easiest game to use to find the easter egg.
Game 3 is just like Game 2, however the initial locations of the objects are pseudo-randomized, providing a different game each time. Because of this, the game could be easier or harder to solve (occasionally impossible, thanks to a bug in the item-placement routine that sometimes locks the Gold Key inside the Gold Castle). Due to the unpredictable placement of the items, it is more difficult to secure the bat and locate the items needed to find the easter egg (though the location of the dot is consistent).

When a player is eaten by a dragon, he does not necessarily have to start over. Hitting the "Game Reset" switch resurrects the player back at the Gold Castle and resurrects any killed dragons. The objects all remain where they were at the time of the player's death. This could be thought of as one of the earliest usages of the "continue game" feature, which is now prevalent in most video games. Hitting "Game Select" after death returns the game to the game select screen and an entirely new game can be played.

Trivia

The player in the catacombs of the White Castle, carrying the White Key and being chased by the dragon, Grundle.

Not only was Adventure the first action-adventure game on a video console and the first to include an Easter Egg, it was also the first ever to allow a character to carry and use moveable objects. Until then, other games of its type allowed a character to have a stash of items, but required the player to select which one to use at any given moment, usually through keyboard or joystick input. Adventure allowed the player to drop one item and pick up another without having to type in any commands. Adventure was also the first console video game with boss-like characters (though the dragons are now not considered to be true bosses).

The left and right sides of nearly every room are mirror images of each other, with the notable exceptions of two rooms in the black castle catacombs and two in the main hallway beneath the Gold Castle. These two hallway rooms contain a vertical "wall" object which changes color to match each of the other objects in the room, and selectively denies or admits passage to the player, depending on which objects are present.

Easter eggs

A secret room can be revealed by bringing an "invisible" 1-pixel object (frequently dubbed the "Magic Dot") from the sealed corridor of the black castle's catacombs to corrider located to lower right of the Yellow Castle. If there is another object in this room when the Dot is brought in, the wall becomes "invisible" and the player may access a room to the right, which has the words written in it: "Created by Warren Robinett." The "invisibily" of the objects is achieved by coloring them the same as the background color. The "invisble" dot is quite visible when placed in a wall or other object that is not the background color.

Versions

There are several clones available. Indenture, programmed by Craig Pell, adds games 4 and 5 as well as a secret area with over 300 more rooms. The name Indenture refers to the fact that programmers at Atari were not allowed to claim credit for their games.

A simplified Flash version of the game, programmed by Scott Pehnke, can be played online and a DirectX clone of the game, programmed by David Copeland, is also available. As with Indenture, this version has additional rooms and a few new objects.

In 2005, Adventure was one of the games included with the Atari Flashback 2.0 system.

Gregory D. George made an Adventure mod for Quake 3 that renders the original game's primitive colors and pixelations in three dimensions.

Cultural references

One of the menu screens of the website Homestar Runner features the character Strong Bad carrying the chalice and running from the gold dragon while exclaiming, "Somebody get this freakin' duck away from me!" (roll over the email button). [link]

Adventure was also featured on The Onion, in the sidebar: a yellow cube was holding a 3D-looking arrow on a Quake 3-like 3D castle, with the caption "Atari Releases Updated Adventure Video Game". [link]

Technical

The total memory used by the game program was 4096 bytes (4K) for the game code (in ROM) and 128 bytes for program variables (in RAM). The processor used was a 1.19 megahertz 8-bit 6507 processor, which was a cheaper version of the 6502. However, many people today play the game on Atari 2600 emulators on much more powerful home computers.

External links

[MobyGames' entry on Adventure]
[Warren Robinett's page on adventure] including a PowerPoint presentation on its design
[A map of the Adventure world] (including information on finding the easter egg)
[AtariAge page on Adventure]
[Flash version of Adventure]
[David Copeland's DirectX version of the game]
[Interview with Programmer Warren Robinett]
[Adventure mod for Quake 3]

Indenture links

[DOS version]

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