An adventure game is a type of video game characterized by investigation, exploration, puzzle-solving, interaction with game characters, and a focus on narrative rather than reflex-based challenges. The term originates from the 1970s game Adventure, and retains a narrow definition based on the style of gameplay, and not the theme or subject matter (unlike adventure films and adventure novels).

The adventure genre's focus on story allows it to draw heavily from other narrative-based media, such as literature and film. Adventure games encompass a wide variety of literary genres, including fantasy, science fiction, mystery, horror, and comedy. Nearly all adventure games are designed for a single player, since the heavy emphasis on story and character makes multi-player design difficult.

The genre's popularity peaked during the late 1980s and early 1990s, when many considered it to be among the most technically advanced genres, and it is now sometimes considered to be a niche genre. According to the Entertainment Software Association, in 2006 Adventure Games comprised 5.7% of best-selling Computer Game Super Genres by units sold in the US, and 3.4% of Video Game Super Genres, although it is not clear how the Super Genre was defined.

Games that fuse adventure elements with action gameplay elements are sometimes referred to as adventure games (a popular example is Nintendo's Legend of Zelda series). Adventure game purists regard this as incorrect and call such hybrids action-adventures. In Europe, games which fuse action and adventure elements are sometimes called "arcade adventure" games. The term "adventure game" is used with the same meaning in North America, Europe, and Japan, and is regarded as pure genre in all regions.

Early development

The first adventure games to appear were text adventures (later called interactive fiction), which typically use a verb-noun parser to interact with the user. These evolved from early mainframe titles like Hunt the Wumpus (Gregory Yob) and Adventure (Crowther and Woods) into commercial games which were playable on personal computers, such as Infocom's widely popular Zork series. Some companies that were important in bringing out text adventure games were Adventure International, Infocom, Level 9 Computing, Magnetic Scrolls and Melbourne House, with Infocom being the most well known.

Adventure (1975-1977)

main: Colossal Cave Adventure

image:ADVENT -- Will Crowther's original version.png

In the mid 1970s, programmer, caver, and role-player William Crowther developed a program called Adventure. Crowther, an employee at Bolt, Beranek and Newman (a Boston company involved with ARPANET routers) used the company's PDP-10 to create the game, which required 300 kilobytes of memory.