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Astute readers will recognize Kurt
Kalata's name. Besides running
Hardcore Gaming 101,
which has become an encyclopaedia of sorts for old-time PC games and
lesser-known, cultish, niche titles, he has made voluminous
contributions to The Armchair Empire over the years.
Well, he's putting all that writing and
organizational talent into an endeavour that may surprise some: a
book! Tentatively titled "HG101's Guide to Classic Graphic
Adventures" the book will take a look at the Golden Age of the
adventure genre, 1985 - 2000, complete with interviews of those that
helped to shape the genre.
When it was announced, it sounded like
a massive undertaking so I asked Kurt about the project.
Thanks for your time, Kurt!
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Kurt Kalata (Hardcore Gaming 101)
Interview
Conducted by Aaron Simmer
The introductions: Who are you, your
education, experience with gaming, etc.
A. Well, I've been writing about video games on the internet since I was
roughly 15, when I created a fansite called The Castlevania Dungeon back
on Geocities. After college in 2004, I started HG101 and began writing
for various sites, including this one right here! I mostly did this to
counteract the boredom of working in the real world. have a stronger
taste for retro gaming over new stuff, most of the time. I'm fascinated
by video game history and there's a lot to be learned from it that
modern developers seem to ignore, especially when it comes to
storytelling.
I got started with adventure games at a really young age, with various
Scott Adams games on my family's Atari 400 when I was about five. I'd
played others through the years - various Infocom stuff on my Apple II,
including Leather Goddesses of Phobos, which I was far too young to
understand, as well as Maniac Mansion and Shadowgate on the NES. I
really got into them when I rented Monkey Island for the Sega CD, and
when my parents got a computer, one of the first things I got was Monkey
Island 2. It wasn't exactly a top of the line PC though, and since I was
living off a $20 a month allowance, I tended to buy lots of cheap older
games from
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just a standard corporate office drone in
my day life.
You recently solicited submissions for a printed compendium of
graphical adventure games from the 1980's to 1990's. What's the goal of
the book? Is it a history book, a "Yearbook" or something else?
HG101 in general has basically doubled as my own personal diary of video
game experience, so I can look back and have an actual record of the
games I've played and how I felt about them at the time. It is part
history book, but it also constitutes a lot of game design criticism,
which is what sets it apart from something like Wikipedia. The goal is
to present a near comprehensive look at the genre during its height of
popularity, examining titles from both big name publishers and the
little guys, both the long-running series and the one-shots. It's also
to separate out what I think are the best games from the ones that
aren't so great. Not all of the titles covered are winners, but all of
them are interesting, in some way.
Besides essays on the games, are you seeking comment from some of the
notable game designers from this particular genre and time period like
Jane Jensen, Roberta Williams, Tim Schafer, and Al Lowe?
Absolutely. It's all dependent on who I can dig up and who answers, of
course. Some of them still have web presences - Al Lowe had a pretty big
web site with all sorts of great stuff.
In a time where "print is dead!" what makes you think a paper book
might be successful? Or at the minimum, worth your time as a writer and
editor of the book?
It's more of a personal project than anything. I might be a bit
old-fashioned in the Internet era, but I think words feel more real and
have more permanence when they're printed. Plus, it's a pretty fantastic
feeling to actually hold knowledge in your hands. I haven't printed up
any actual copies of the book yet, but I do have my printed manuscript,
and it's amazing to just flip through the thing, with both the depth and
breadth of the content covered. I wish I could get it into brick and
mortar stores, because I think that would really help sell it. For the
more progressive folks, I also intend to get it on Nooks and Kindles,
although that's going to be a secondary concern after the book is
initially published.
I'm not entirely sure it will be profitable, but if it isn't, no big
loss. The good thing about self-publishing is that it's print-on-demand,
so the up-front costs are relatively minimal beyond buying an ISBN and
ordering all of the draft/promo/contributor copies. So even if I end up
losing money, at least I have something that I can put on my bookshelf
and be proud of, and hopefully some other devout adventure game fans
will feel the same way.
 I
think in general that the gaming media under-serves niche audiences,
which is part of the reason HG101 exists. Most content is aimed at the
broader level, but I think this type of audience also looks on this
information as being disposable, and therefore unwilling to pay for it.
On the other hand, niche audiences are probably more likely to pay for
specialized content, especially if it's targeted straight at them.
What do adventure games mean to you?
A strong emphasis on narrative, world building, characterization,
dialogue, and so forth. Some of these elements have crept into other
games, but adventure games are more purely focused. It's about exploring
another world, talking to their inhabitants, taking in the scenery, and
so forth. Obviously other people find different things to like about
them - some look at them as frame stories for puzzles, which is
perfectly valid, but it's not the reason I play them.
Also, for laughs, too. Too many games these days are way too self
serious. Most of the funniest games of all time are adventure games -
Monkey Island 2, Day of the Tentacle, Sam & Max Hit The Road, Space
Quest IV, Eric the Unready, and so forth. The only company that
consistently has a great sense of humor is Double Fine, which, not
coincidentally, was founded by Tim Schafer, who also worked on adventure
games, including some of these I just listed!
Agree or disagree: Adventure games never died, they just changed.
I guess it depends on how you define that. In North America, from a
commercial standpoint. the point n' click adventure genre absolutely
died around the turn of the century.
In Europe, though, the genre continued on, and there have been numerous
titles
published in the last decade. The problem is, in my opinion, most of
these are pretty awful! They tend to have really sterile computer
rendered backgrounds with awkward polygonal models. They look and feel
really low budget, and not in a classy, loveable in way, but in a really
boring, slapped together kind of way.
Plus, the writing in most European-developed games is pretty dire. I
think some of it just may have to do with sloppy localization, which
results in dull, witless dialogue and subpar voice actors. Some just
might be cultural differences. For instance, the Spanish-developed
"Runaway" purports to be a comedic adventure, but compared to a
LucasArts or Sierra game, it's almost astonishingly unfunny.
There are a few exceptions. Funcom's The Longest Journey and Dreamfall
were both fantastic, but both were also initially written and voiced in
English, despite being developed in Norway. Daedelic is based in Germany
and their games also seem pretty decent, but I haven't had much
experience with them. They have excellent art design, but the only game
of theirs I played, "The Whispered World," also suffered from some
crappy voice acting. Some of their other interesting games haven't even
been translated from their original German yet.
 The
Japanese visual novel-type game sort of gained a little bit of
popularity with Phoenix Wright, which is rejuvenating. But most of the
other similar DS games - Theresia, Lux-Pain, Miami Law, a few others -
have flopped. And the fact that Nintendo of America didn't localize the
sequels to Hotel Dusk or Trace Memory shows that their initial entries
didn't perform as well as they'd hoped. Again, though, they brought them
to Europe, where they're still going relatively strong.
What was the single biggest change that happened to adventure games
between the '80s and '90s?
I would initially say the CD-ROM was one of the biggest changes. This
propelled the games to be more cinematic, and also allowed the disc
space that allowed developers to create games like Myst. But even before
that, I think is the change from text-entry to an icon-based parser,
because that definitely made them more approachable for regular people.
Why not extend the time period into the '00s? Is there some game that
acted as marker that signalled the "end" of the adventure genre right
around the end of the '90s?
This sort of dovetails with my opinion on European adventure games - a
large part is I just have no interest in playing them. The other reason
is out of practicality. I have a page limit I don't want to exceed -
it's already shaping up to be 650-700 pages, and I don't want to make
costs too high. I think most people look at the mid-90s as the golden
age of the genre, so it made sense to keep that in the limelight, and
expound upon how the genre reached that point.
A couple of more recent games are covered. One of the site's
contributors is a huge Homestar Runner fan so I got him to contribute an
article on the Strongbad game for Telltale. A lot of Telltale's games
are in, though, because they tie in with Monkey Island and Sam and Max.
I put in Limbo of the Lost because of its notoriety, and for being one
of the worst adventure games in the last two decades or so. I also
covered Syberia and Runaway because they were both recent-ish games that
tend to be well liked, even though I disagree with those assessments.
I would love to cover more independent games but honestly outside of the
ones I've already done - The Shivah, Machinarium, and Been There, Dan
That! - I'm not even sure where to start. It's a whole other breed and
probably deserves a book to itself, so I just focused on the ones I
personally enoyed a lot. Same with interactive fiction - a few games are
covered, like Zork, Leather Goddesses of Phobos and The Hitchhiker's
Guide to the Galaxy, but you could do a whole book on Infocom and its
competitors in the early 80s.
As for the "end" marker, Sierra and LucasArts were easily the most
popular developers, so when they released their last games, I think it
was over. That was Gabriel Knight 3 for Sierra and Escape from Monkey
Island from LucasArts, both around 2000-ish. Neither are terrible, but
they are hardly the companies' best efforts either.
(December 20, 2010) |
