I figured this could be an interesting thread to get started. Let’s reminisce together about our initial experiences with the adventure game genre.

So there I am, a young child basking in the otherworldly glow of a green monochrome monitor. An Apple IIe from 1983 specifically. The imagery conjured on the screen is the 1985 release of King’s Quest II: Romancing the Throne.

The freedom this game offered my still-developing mind was twofold: First, the open-ended exploration of the various map screens. Second, playing around with the robust text parser. Only the abruptness of the built-in speaker snapped me back to reality... Thanks a lot Hagatha.

It may come as a surprise to you what year this actually was. While most of my peers would have been playing contemporary games, I was making my first foray into the swashbuckler’s favourite genre in the year 1997!

There’s something special about playing a game which was intended for a previous generation that I could have easily missed out on. It evokes a broader appreciation for game design in general I reckon.

Two years later I still hadn’t won the game yet. Coming back home from a long day at school, I was predictably back in front of the computer screen. The spelling test they gave us during the morning lessons featured various new words, in particular the word TAN stood out to me. I typed in the instruction: ‘graham tan’ – it resulted in the following:

“King Graham is not dressed for tanning.”

Naturally I was elated that they programmed in such a response. I like to imagine in my headcanon that Graham’s complexion improved that day on the beach of Kolyma. It certainly didn’t help with winning the game though.

Fast-forward to the year 2021, I finally completed the game as a team effort with a younger sibling, in conjunction with a walkthrough for the more difficult sections. It was rewarding seeing the ending to King’s Quest II with a family member.

However, it’s worth noting that the journey was just as satisfying, as it taught me during my formative years the importance of tenacity and creativity when playing specific video games that require those skills.

Thank you for reading. Feel free to share your nostalgic memories of the games that sparked your passion for adventuring.

I don't know which game was the literal first adventure game I played, but I do know that the first I remember playing were the King's Quests with my sister. We got 1, 2, and 3 all at once, and then 4 came out and we stopped playing through 2 to start 4, and my sister was obsessed with it when we were kids!

My first adventure game was actually King's Quest VI, playing it with my brother on our aunt's computer. Replaying it as an adult, and also playing the other KQ games, it's the only one in the series I personally think is really great, and not because of nostalgia. I think it's because there's more of Jane Jensen's DNA in it than Roberta Williams'. And don't get me wrong, the other KQs are still fun, and I love RW, I think she was quite the visionairy... but JJ was without a doubt the superior storyteller of the two.

Parents bought a 286 computer mid to late 80s? Bought lots of shareware games. Was the computer I got into DOS adventure games. I do remember my dad getting us Simcity. He wasn't a computer guy but my mom caught him up at 4am building his city. My best memories started with going over to a friends house after school. His mom worked at a radio shack and would bring him games. Watching space quest for the first time and I was hooked. Was obsessed with that series.

First Adventure Games would have been text adventures on my 48k Speccy

This one being my first

 

I think the very first one I played would have been either Monkey Island 2 or Ringworld Revenge of the Patriarch, both of which were in a random assortment of old DOS games that my parents bought for me to play on the newly purchased family PC running Windows 95.

My first factual adventure game experience was "Hugo's House of Horrors". I was about 12-13 at the time and bought my first computer, a 386 running on DOS and featuring DOS-Shell, with the help of my ten year older sister's boyfriend. He also gave me some games he had and Hugo was one of them.

I never actually finished the game, because I got stuck at the part where you have to answer the ferryman's questions. I just didn't have the necessary knowledge, and you couldn't yet look things up online.

But my first TRUE adventure game experience was "The Secret of Monkey Island". My mom took me to a computer store and I could choose a game for my birthday. I just fell in love with the box's artwork and screenshots on the back. That's the year I learned a lot of new English, especially when it came to insults, lol! To be honest, some insults I even learned what they meant only years later, lol! Not to mention how you pronounce the words!

My parents had a DOS PC, but games they had on it were like... Zeliard, and Jill of the Jungle (platformer/action games). I was too young to pick my own games, and my parents instilled in me a love of side-scrolling platformers. Those were the games they were into. So I've got real DOS nostalgia, but it points in a different direction.
If we count edutainment/activity center games as adventure games, those could be my first. Titles made on the mTropolis game engine, like The Magic School Bus tie-in game series. Kind of shit they had on school/library PCs for kids. I also think I played Myst of something, it was too long ago to remember and I remember the distinct art style as well as not knowing how to play it at the time and just looking at the pictures and wandering the world...

Ok but for real: It was Peasant's Quest. Uncontroversial first. And I remember looking up a guide on how to beat it, an early lesson I would repeat several times. It would take more years before really diving into the genre deeper - starting with Strong Bad's Cool Game for Attractive People on Wiiware ofc, moving to what other games Telltale was doing at the time like Sam and Max, and finally going back for older titles! They'd got me!  Homestar Runner ftw.

I also played Ace Attorney and other DS adventure titles like Hotel Dusk and Professor Layton between Peasants Quest and Strong Bad. Those were more considered visual novels or something else by the gaming community at time of release, but its kind of obvious now they have elements that put them in the adventure genre. Because they were kind of disconnected from the broader genre in discussion at the time, its probably why it took until something with that connection to do the back catalogue dive.

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Anyway, in terms of posts to reveal how old somebody is, I feel this one gets you 90% of the way there.

I was more of a console kid, but when we had our first PC capable of reading CD (I had an old machine with its floppy disks, who kept screaming 'AKEKOUKOU MWHAHAHAHA' before. No it's not a joke.) it came with two adventures games : Pajama Sam and SpyFox.

The first didn't appeal to me but I can't explain the pure nostalgia I have for Spyfox, I still play them today ! Especially Dry Cereal, which is the one I had.
I can perfectly remember spending DAYS redoing the beginning of the game because I didn't understand how to save at first haha.
The pure trial and error with gadgets, how the game wasn't completely the same on repeated playthroughs, how I could interact with so many things on the screen... And playing Go Fish for trinkets !
I think looking back now, it's because of this game I always look forward to play adventures games. The joy of discovering something or to speak to a lot of different characters full of colors.
Even in games that aren't adventures point and click games, it's always something I'm searching for : dialogues, word building, replayability.

So yeah, I'm here now

I was middle-aged when I played my first computer game ever in 1999.  I had started using our first computer, a Mac laptop, for work-related reports the previous year and didn't "feel the need" to play games. 

One day my husband spotted an ad for Starship Titanic.  The fact that it was by Douglas Adams, had a shipful of robots, a crazy parrot, and a mystery to solve grabbed my attention and convinced me to buy it.  Several months later I finished the game, partly because I only had time to play on weekends, but mostly because I had no idea what I was doing.  I was such a novice that when Fentible, the doorbot, asked me if I would help, I typed in yes several different ways before I realized that I had to press Return (Enter) to get a response from him.  Still, that game has a warm place in my heart.  I love the humor, the environment, and most of the puzzles.  After that, we bought another laptop for my husband because I made up for lost time by scouring eBay and other sites for games I had missed.