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 Gabriel Knight 3
Why it's vanishing: We blame Myst for all of this. In the olden days, back when the concept of a gigabyte was nothing more than a wishful glimmer in some engineer's eye, we tended to our beautiful adventure games, like the Quest series (King's Quest, Space Quest, and so on), and enjoyed our puzzles and our exploration. Those Sierra classics were gems of true puzzle mastery. Before them were the golden days of Infocom, back when Zork ruled in mere text adventures telling stories that were just the beginnings of interactive gaming. It was a wondrous time.
And then Myst arrived.
With its flashy graphics and faux interactivity, Myst drew in gamers like no other game had before. For many, the word Myst became synonymous with computer games. And the numbers of people playing adventure games dwindled. "This is too hard," some people whined. "Why am I walking around? Why don't these graphics look as pretty as Myst? Why is that thing moving on its own?"
The number of people playing the Quest games diminished. People wanted eye candy, not real storytelling. Never mind the fact that Myst had the worst ending in gaming history; never mind the fact that Myst's idea of interactivity involved sparse clicks followed by hours of skull scratching. True adventure games came--Grim Fandango, Blade Runner, Gabriel Knight 3--and they failed to get sales.
Now it seems people want more action than adventure. They would rather run around in short shorts raiding tombs than experience real stories. People want it simple. Even in the fight between two first-person shooters with adventure leanings, the simpler of the two (Half-Life) won out over the more imaginative (System Shock 2). The golden days are gone; the dream is over.
Casual gamers killed adventure gaming, and Myst made them do it.
We wish we could tell you that adventure games have a place in the future of gaming. We wish we could tell you that. But we're sorry to say that we think their time has passed. It seems people want action these days or they want something simple. Games have gone from the complex to the point-and-click, and it seems like adventure games have taken the same pathway.
We wanted System Shock 2 to sell a million copies just so that other developers would take heart, just so that we could take heart and be convinced that games with strong adventure leanings would do OK. Our hopes had already been crushed by the poor sales from Grim Fandango and Blade Runner, and System Shock 2's poor sales were the final nail in the coffin.
There's no way to beat this one, we're afraid, and we don't think we'll see these games make a return, not for a long time, anyway. Sierra, the pioneer in this field, seems to have given it up. Sierra cancelled the last Space Quest game, there isn't another Gabriel Knight game in the works, and King's Quest is MIA.
Alas, adventure, we hardly knew ye.
--Cliff Hicks, Gamecenter editorial assistant
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