Why do you think that adventure games are so commercially unviable these
days?
Simply, the cost-revenue model for the average adventure game is so far from being
profitable that almost no publishers will touch them, since almost all publishing deci-
sions these days are being made on a purely commercial rather than creative basis. It’s
just one of the most expensive types of games to make, and the topnadventure games
sell less than the topngames in almost any other category.
Of course, it can be argued that the adventure game isn’t dead, but has simply
evolved into action/adventure games, e.g.,Tomb Raider, and platform games, e.g.,
Mario,Crash. Personally, I don’t consider any game that relies on even a relatively
small degree of hand-eye coordination to fit the bill of an adventure game.
I suspect that a major technical innovation could revive the genre, but I don’t know
whether that will be a voice recognition interface, Turing-proof NPCs, 3D-surround-VR
environments, or what.
It’s particularly distressing when a well-budgeted game that everyone agrees
is well done doesn’t sell very well. In particular I’m thinking ofGrim Fandango.
Yes,Grim Fandango. I don’t know the exact numbers, but I don’t think it broke a hun-
dred thousand. And that was everyone’s pretty much unanimous choice for adventure
game of the year. It was a wonderful game. I didn’t think from a puzzle point of view it
was that great, but from an art direction point of view it was probably the best adventure
game I’d ever seen.
It seems strange that adventure games used to be among the best-selling
games, and now they don’t sell well at all. Maybe my numbers are off...
No, that’s really true. Around the time of theKing’s Questgames of the very late ’80s
and early ’90s, they really were the best-selling genre at that time. And the Infocom
adventure games, from circa ’83 to ’85 were too. There was a point when we had five of
the top ten selling games for a given month.
So what happened to the players of adventure games?
Well, there are certainly genres that exist now that didn’t even exist then. And there are
other genres that may have existed then but have certainly come along quite a ways. So
it may be that the people who were playing then liked an interactive experience, but
they would have been playing the sort of games that are popular today if they could have
then. And in 1985 there wasn’t anything like a first-person shooter, there wasn’t any-
thing like a real-time strategy game.
It might be that there are still quite a few adventure game people out there but sim-
ply that the critical mass of them has dropped a little bit to the point where the ones who
are left can no longer support the same degree of game. An adventure game that would
cost two million dollars to make now would require ten times as many people to be
interested in it as an adventure game that might have cost two hundred thousand dol-
lars fifteen years ago. And maybe the market has even doubled since then, but it hasn’t
gone up ten-fold. So it has dropped below the critical mass that would make that kind of
game economically viable.
200 Chapter 10: Interview: Steve Meretzky