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+--- Thread: Establishing A Golden Age Timeline (/showthread.php?tid=300)
RE: Establishing A Golden Age Timeline - Legerdemancy - 10-16-2025
Trust me, I totally get it.
This thread was created mainly as a fun creative thinking exercise. 
RE: Establishing A Golden Age Timeline - MenhirMike - 10-17-2025
Grim Fandango was an amazing game, and not the cause of the genre declining. It was more like the magnifying glass that made everyone focus on and realize how bad the genre was doing.
It’s like someone sending you a post card telling you that your house burned down a year ago. It may be a beautiful postcard, and it’s not the post cards fault that the fire happened. But it makes you aware that what you so dearly beloved is gone.
So I would put the end of the golden age _before_ Grim Fandango. Not sure I would go all the way back to The Dig in 1994 because Broken Sword and Riven were both critical and commercial successes. But I don’t think it’s unfair to saw that after Day of the Tentacle, the genre got stale and we got iterative improvements rather than revolutionary changes (even by the studio called Revolution), which led to stagnation.
Critical voices might rightfully argue that the genre still stagnated. We still have games today that are great adventure games and yet still suffer from the same generic “I can’t use that” limited inventory puzzle stuff that 80s and 90s games had. We’ve gotten a better Day of the Tentacle, but did we really get all that many games that truly evolved past this in terms of interactivity? One could argue that games like Deus Ex or Cyberpunk 2077 are that evolution, but I think that’s an entirely different genre.
RE: Establishing A Golden Age Timeline - BobVP - 10-18-2025
I like that, MenhirMike.
I've been trying to look at it from a couple of of angles. I'll put "re-evaluate the Golden Age" on hold until I figure it out.
One thing I noticed looking into sales and top 100 lists and such: 1997 was a Golden Year for AGs. The biggest titles had decent sales numbers, not too far off from Quake II. Not in the same ballpark as games like Final Fantasy VII, though. Which did well on consoles, where AGs flopped, if they were released at all.
I also looked at the end of the AG departments of Sierra and LucasArts, their final games and business decisions. How they evaluated the situation. I think this is the root of this Golden Age concept, but that's for a later post.
Back to the timeline. I get ending the Age around '98. Grim Fandango is apparently divisive. To me, it was still developed with "The Golden Age" LucasArts mentality. It's ambitious, it has distinctive creative direction based on authorial vision, a lot of thought has gone into the world, it's presentation and puzzle design. But I see Joe's point in how it was a sign of things to come. It was also an outlier in 1998. Where '97 suggested AGs were still a force to reckon with in the US market, the following year was probably disappointing to fans and developers alike.
The Golden Age runs side-by-side with the concept of "classic adventure games", though I think the latter starts with King's Quest 1 in '84, while almost everyone seems to pick 1990 as the beginning of The Golden Age. The Secret of Monkey Island. Loom. King's Quest V? If I'm honest, I think it's mostly about Monkey Island. I think the specific impression this game made on boomers and their children is a big part of The Golden Age phenomenon. Again - maybe later.
I'm curious about people's favourite Golden Age games - and which games they think are mid or even kind of bad. Are all of your favourite games from The Golden Age or The Renaissance? Have you replayed any of them, did they hold up?
RE: Establishing A Golden Age Timeline - LeftHandedGuitarist - 10-18-2025
I'm not sure I have a strong opinion on this, but this is a fascinating discussion to read!
"Golden age" is a relative term, especially since we are currently experiencing one right now for adventure games. I guess for me the classic era would begin in 1990 with the release of Loom and Monkey Island (however much I enjoyed the Sierra text parser games of the '80s), and continues on to around 1997 or 1998. When I step back and look at that period, it does largely line up to LucasArts' adventure output.
So I guess I'm super bias?
I was initially disappointed by the early experiments in moving to 3D, but in retrospect I feel much warmer towards them now. Personally I really enjoyed the multimedia/FMV era of the mid '90s.
RE: Establishing A Golden Age Timeline - MenhirMike - 10-19-2025
(10-18-2025, 09:30 AM)BobVP Wrote: I'm curious about people's favourite Golden Age games - and which games they think are mid or even kind of bad. Are all of your favourite games from The Golden Age or The Renaissance? Have you replayed any of them, did they hold up?
I definitely think that Full Throttle was mid and The Dig was bad. The Dig was ambitious and high-budget, but I hated the puzzle design. Maybe it's not bad but more "What it is and what it promised are so far apart".
When it comes to my favorite games, there are a few outside the golden age. My favorite of all time is Fate of Atlantis, but I have to give huge credit to Zak McKracken for being impactful for me early on, and Monkey Island 1 will always be awesome. Then there's Beneath a Steel Sky (Reich getting shot by the laser was shocking to 13-year old me), and Broken Sword 1&2 (several of my classmates were playing it, so extra fond memories).
Outside of the Golden Age, the first Lost Horizon and Gemini Rue stand out as favorites of mine.
Thimbleweed Park, Lucy Dreaming, Brok the InvestiGator and Hob's Barrow are two relatively recent favorites, though they can't reach the level of my absolute favorites. And the Blackwell series as a whole, it was a satisfying journey with a satisfying conclusion. I think it's an age thing, it's harder and harder for games to make and leave a lasting impact. To go to an adjacent genre, 999 and Virtue's Last Reward were awesome and memorable. VLR is my second favorite PS Vita game.
RE: Establishing A Golden Age Timeline - Joe - 10-20-2025
My favourites:
The Golden Age: Riven, Monkey Island 2 & 3, Day of the Tentacle, Fate of Atlantis, The Legend of Kyrandia: Hand of Fate.
The Renaissance: Lucy Dreaming, The Legend of Sky, Will of Arthur Flabbington. Quern.
That said, my The favourite is The Longest Journey (1999).
I rarely replay games, but I (kinda) recently played Hand of Fate again and it was great.
The problem with "The Golden Age" point-and-click games is that they have some issues.
- they are hell-bent on wasting your time (slow transitions, unskipable animations and characters that move like snails).
- there is no or almost no QOL (I dare anyone who says pixel hunting is fun to play The Prisoner of Ice).
- dead states to maximise profit from selling guides (hi Sierra).
On the other hand, "The Renaissance" games fixed these problems, but introduced new ones.
- low production values are due to limited budgets.
- short gameplay with few screens.
- low difficulty or borderline visual novel gameplay to appeal to more casual gamers with short attention spans (or because people generally don't want to challenge themselves anymore).
I'm still waiting for "The Perfect Era", when p'n'c games will be made by big studios with money, and have difficulty options so every player can enjoy them.
RE: Establishing A Golden Age Timeline - Legerdemancy - 10-20-2025
I decided to take a deeper dive into this topic from an analytical perspective. Using the MobyGames search engine tools, the following are the results from my basic research efforts:
I specifically looked up games in the adventure genre, and I split the timeline into half a decade each. I’ve only included games with a minimum Moby Score of 8.0 or higher, so that it clearly represents a broad recognition of quality. Moby Score is a mixture of critic reviews and player ratings.
I then reorganised the data with colour-coding, listing them from the most amount of games to the least amount in total. Shake away those preconceived notions, because the results may come as a surprise to you:
1985 – 1989: 7 games.
1990 – 1994: 21 games.
1995 – 1999: 32 games.
2000 – 2004: 11 games.
2005 – 2009: 25 games.
2010 – 2014: 39 games.
2015 – 2019: 41 games.
2020 – 2024: 74 games.
RE: Establishing A Golden Age Timeline - Joshua AGH - 10-20-2025
I don't know when it started but it certainly ended around 95 IMO. The Space Quest 6 time frame saw almost everything go downhill. There are obviously exceptions like Curse of Monkey Island but overall it becomes very clear that decisions are being made to capture the modern audience. That tells you that it's no longer the "Golden Age"
RE: Establishing A Golden Age Timeline - sjmpoo - 10-20-2025
I agree with Joshua. The "golden age" peaked in 93-94 and ended early 95 with Full Throttle. There where noticeable stragglers like MI3 and GF, but the commercial success was limited at best.
Personally, I think it started with Maniac Mansion (1987) and Zak McKracken (1988). The scumm engine was rock solid and introduced the verb interface. The graphics were manually cleaned for stray pixels and looked beautiful, writing and direction was amazing, slowly leaving crap design like dead ends behind.
RE: Establishing A Golden Age Timeline - BobVP - 10-21-2025
Just when I try to be less contrarian, you pull me back in!
Before I go there; these mentions are great. Especially those from out of left field (ZAK, BASS, BROK). I still need to play The Longest Journey, gonna use this as reminder to finally give it a go. The time investment as suggested by the title is an obstacle. Might've been different back in the day, where longer games were seen as more bang for your buck. I think that's more for games like Dark Souls now.
I can follow (and agree with) Joe's reasoning more now. Still have the "no Golden Age!" spirit in my heart, but I have Joshua and sjmpoo to disagree with now! And I will, next post.
I found some quotes of people in the industry being quite negative about AGs in the early 2000s. Some blame the genre, others just assumed the consumer base was no longer there (in the USA). Here's a quote from an interview with Ragnar Tørnquist, writer/director of The Longest Journey, on AdventureClassicGaming.com.
You coined the term "modern adventure" (as opposed to "action adventure") to describe Dreamfall. How do you define "modern adventure"? What is your vision of how the adventure genre must evolve in relation to this definition?
I don't know if I coined the term, but I definitely ended up using it quite a lot. I've said it before, and I still stand by it: the classic point-and-click 'graphical adventure' is dead. Yes, there's still the odd game popping up from time to time, but they don't make much of an impact.
We really need to allow the genre to evolve, much like every other gaming genre has evolved. Do RPGs play the same today as they did ten years ago? Sports games? Shooters? No, they've all changed because the technology has changed, and technology still drives game design - to a large degree. (..) So why do people expect adventure games to play the same today as they did ten or fifteen years ago? It doesn't make sense. It's fine to replay Monkey Island - retro gaming is huge, and people still play Pac-Man - but we need modern adventures to drive the genre forward, to inform and build an audience, and to sell more copies.
That's the only way publishers are going to want to pay for these games. Adventure games can't afford to just be niche - they're too expensive for that. They need to be mainstream. Sure, there's still room for smaller independent games, and there's still room for the odd point-and-clicker, but those games aren't going to make an impact, they're not going to get noticed beyond the core segment - and the core segment is small, and getting smaller.
The point of the 'modern adventure', as I see it, is to bring adventure gaming back into the mainstream, and to use technology and gameplay advances to bring the genre forward into the 'next generation'. You can argue whether or not Dreamfall succeeded at that, but we did get noticed - people did pay attention, and I also hope we've created a few new adventure fans in the process. Now I'm just hoping someone else will jump on the bandwagon and develop a true next generation 'modern adventure'.
I like how there's something there for all of our narratives, one way or the other.
PS: Does anyone here own a copy of the book Rogue Heroes, The Story of LucasArts? i found an interesting quote on the Escape From Monkey Island wiki, but it's paraphrased - the original quote isn't available. It seems like the book isn't commercially available anymore.