Adventure (Atari 2600)

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

Adventure

Developer(s)	Atari
Publisher(s)	Atari
Designer(s)	Warren Robinett
Release date(s)	1980
Genre(s)	Action-adventure
Mode(s)	Single player
Rating(s)	N/A
Platform(s)	Atari 2600
System requirements	No special requirements
Input	Joystick

Adventure is a 1980 video game for the Atari 2600 video game console and 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, however).

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

[edit] History

Adventure was published by the console's developer, 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. ^{[citation needed]}

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 Salt Lake City, Utah first discovered the hidden message according to video game historian Steven Kent in the Age of Empires strategy guide.

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

[edit] Gameplay

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 is 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 [1]

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, however, 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.

An unexplained feature of the game involves three empty rooms in the southeast corner where items are almost never found. It would appear that these rooms were originally added as part of a larger plan (perhaps the white castle was going to be there, or possibly a fourth castle which never made it onto the game). This area was sometimes referred to as the "forbidden zone" by gamers because of its emptiness^{[citation needed]}.

[edit] 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).

Due to a limitation in the Atari 2600's hardware, the left and right sides of nearly every screen are mirror images of each other, which fostered the creation of the game's confusing mazes[2]. The notable exceptions are two screens in the black castle catacombs and two in the main hallway beneath the Gold Castle. These two hallway screens are mirrored, but contain a vertical "wall" object in the room in order to achieve a non-symetrical shape, as well as act as a secret door for an easter egg.

[edit] Easter eggs

The Adventure Easter Egg: "Created by Warren Robinett."

Inside the Black Castle catacombs (on difficulty level 2 or 3), embedded in the wall of a sealed chamber (accessible only with the Bridge), is an 'invisible' 1-pixel object often referred to as the magic dot. It is not actually invisible, but simply the same color as the background and is easily seen when placed in a catacombs passage or over a normal wall. The dot is not attracted to the Magnet, unlike most other objects in Adventure.

Bringing this dot to the east end of the corridor below the Yellow Castle while another object is present causes the wall object to also become 'invisible', allowing the player to pass into a room displaying the words "Created by Warren Robinett."

[edit] Versions

There are several clones of Adventure 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.

[edit] Cultural references

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". [3]
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). [4]
Also on Homestarrunner.com, on the Trogdor! game available to play on the site, if you get more than 2,000 points in the game, and then die, One of the game's creator's(Jonathan Howe)name will be shown on the top of the screen. An obvious reference to Adventure's easter egg.
Yet another refernce to Adventure in Homestarrunner.com is in the email highschool, when the very young Strong Bad says he's "playing better video games." He then goes on to say, "That freakin duck swallowed both my pixels!" [5]

[edit] 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 personal computers.