Thanks, Larzini!

I understand that some of you guys might be upset about it, but please bear in mind that the article will be published on AA after it's debuted on Gamasutra. Plus, it's not like it will cost any money to view it there! However, I do admit to feeling a bit guilty about it.

However, I've been thinking about the GAG article, and am pondering an alternative to selling the piece somewhere else first. I haven't thought it through yet, but I might just use PayPal to garner the funds first. If the donations added up to, say, $250 (seems to be the going rate for a major piece like this on other sites), I'll post the article in its entirety here first. Otherwise, it's only sensible for me to try to sell it somewhere else first, then repost it here after a specified period. At any rate, it will be available here eventually.

What do you guys think? I know a lot of you have said many times that you'd be willing to donate/chip in however you could, provided it was a small amount. I'm really not sure how many people would be willing to chip in five or ten dollars or so to read what will probably end up being a 50+ page history of GAGs, though. Spread out over enough people, it'd be chump change. Maybe I could email it to anyone who donated $5, but post it on the site for everyone after the goal was met or the time had expired. Lots of possibilities, but I like the "shareware" approach. I could release the first part for free, and then get paid for the rest of it.

What I had in mind was doing the article, then waiting to try to the PayPal thing. Then I'd post the article, either as soon as the goal was reached or after a specified time (say, a week), whichever came first. I guess I run the risk, though, of not receiving any donations. Won't know until I try it, I suppose.

Does anyone have any thoughts on such a scheme? Would you be willing to donate if I went to the trouble of setting it up?

Well, at some point, I suppose it's just a matter of personal opinion. However, when I look at games, I don't so much care about how they were programmed or the hardware, but rather how they stood up to the competition. Scott Adams and the Williams may have been working with very limited hardware, but that's no excuse for the particular problems I see with their games (rampant grammatical/mechanical mistakes, childish plots, non-intuitive puzzles). And again, I'm not saying that these games don't have value. Of course they do. They demonstrated new possibilities that eventually led to truly outstanding games. Even with the King's Quest series, I can't believe anyone would claim the first game was in any way better than some of the later ones. It isn't just a matter of graphics; the latter games are much more sophisticated in terms of story and gameplay.

the problem is you are talking about games like mystery house which were nothing more than hires pictures.

I think you either need to start with kings quest 1 and go from there. If your going to start with mystery house then its nothing more than a two word text adventure with static pictures, its IF not GAG. Thats why I brought up mag scrolls + level 9 etc.

matts initial post was about starting with mystery house + hobbit. Both of which are text adventures with static pictures.

gags really started with kq1.

dont forget the shareware (with a semi ripoff sierra engine) hugo's house of horror.
agds which created a commercial system to create sierra agi adventures (it was a reverse engineer + sold in russia). I have a wealth of info on sierra agi if you need any....

not sure if little computer people count ;) but its a good mention. mask of the sun etc

- Stu

Matt, I wanted to let you know that I realy liked your article on the history of RPG's and I think it is GREAT that CMP Games and Gamasutra are running with the rest of the series. I allways thought that you and Bill should do a bi-weekly article on the sister site www.gamesetwatch.com about classic games. It would be a great draw to AA.
-Cecil

Well, as Mat and I figured out when we started doing research for our GAG book, the early GAGs were almost a joke compared to their Infocom contemporaries. Infocom had actually gotten their text parser to a level that was only recently surpassed, and they had brilliant writers on board--including many professional authors like Douglas Adams. Of course, you know all that. The early GAGs, Mystery House, The Wizard and the Princess, and the many revamped Doug Adams adventures, meanwhile--those were just childish. The interface was terrible, and the text parsers were primitive to the point of absurdity. The only value these games possessed was raw novelty value.

Honestly, I didn't think the King's Quest series was much better, and even the best of them are deeply flawed. Comparing Infocom classics to King's Quest and Space Quest is like comparing Mozart to the Beatles. Sure, both are "classics," but appealed to widely different audiences. The best of the interactive fiction games are almost literary in quality. A game like King's Quest or The Secret of Monkey Island is, at best, charming.

Still, most gamers preferred the graphical games to the text ones, just as most people prefer movies to books and beer to wine. Even the GAGs that were arguably of literary quality (Myst, Syberia, The Longest Journey) were more often than not touted for their graphics than their story lines, characters, or puzzles. It's really only in the last few years that you see GAGs being hyped for other reasons--such as the hype surrounding the recent Agatha Christie games, which draw the bulk of their appeal from Christie's legendary novels and famous characters. It's really only after the pressure of producing "mass appeal titles" abates that a genre is allowed to really come to fruition; you need a dedicated niche audience that is willing to appreciate more than eye candy and lots of boom boom. I really liked where LucasArts was going with The Dig, a game I think that really set the stage for games like The Longest Journey and Grim Fandango. I also saw great promise in the Gabriel Knight series. Unfortunately, modern GAGs really seem to be stuck in that linear sequence mode--do X, Y, and Z, advance to point B, etc. We also keep seeing ridiculously bad crap from folks who ought to know better--The Black Mirror, Journey to the Center of the Earth, Nibiru...Poor games that should have been fantastic. The GAG's key strength, in my opinion, is its ability to show dramatic action. We need strong, vibrant characters and actors who can act (whether voice or FMV). At the very least, we need realistic facial expressions and body language (the free game Facade had both).

Meanwhile, we both know how much better IF has gotten since its commercial heyday (I wouldn't be surprised if text-based IF became commercially viable again in just a few more years, perhaps surpassing GAGs). Now that we're seeing games like Scratches and Dark Fall emerging from relatively small-time operations (one or two folks fully in control of the project, like authors of novels), quality is shooting up again. The only problem left is to get rid of those little annoying kinks in the interface and structure, the same ones Ron Gilbert pointed out in his essay on why adventure games suck.