Adventure Gaming: Never Dead

By: Derek Yu

On: July 18th, 2007

The random Gnome’s random lair has posted some very random news about random independent adventure gaming. Random!

They can be wildly innovative, copyright infringing, in full pixelated 2D, remakes of classic games, political, silly, absolutely shite, pop, over 500MB, excellent, boring, free or very cheap; anything at all. And, unlike commercial games, especially the ridiculously expensive ones which we’ve been living with for quite some time, they just can’t be proclaimed dead. As long as people ~~ordinary people~~ care for them, they’ll be around.

It’s true. Nothing ever dies in independent gaming. I’m pretty sure there’s some guy out there who’s a fan of Sewer Shark who’s working on a fantastic new FMV game in his spare time.

Check out the rest of the Gnome’s blog, too… it’s fun times.

Posted in Adventure, Community, Developers

PoV

The future of indie gaming is sewer shark clones.
gum

There are some some fake-FMV indie adventures out there. They’re really just using photos for the animations and backgrounds, but they manage to capture the FMV look. At least in the screenshots! =)
Soviet UnterzÃ¶gersdorf comes to mind. If you haven’t written about it on TIGS, you really should, since it’s absolutely adorable.
http://www.monochrom.at/suz-game/index_en.htm
Timmy O’Toole

Amusing reference Derek old chap, but the sad thing is there’s already a successor to Sewer Shark; it’s called “Enter the Matrix”.
John H.

Excellent! Another blog for the feed reader, thanks much!
gum

I obviously didn’t check the link before I posted, btw =)
devin

indie adventure games will never die as long as AGS exists.
failrate

They forgot to mention the excellent AGI Studio.
http://gnomeslair.blogspot.com/ Gnome

Thank you so much for the plug Derek and -as you know- TIG source is an absolutely fantastic blog. Deeply touched, I am… :)

Oh, and failrate, you’re very very right. Don’t know how it slipped my mind.

Cheers guys (‘n’ gals)!
Skaldicpoet9

Adventure games rock! People say all the time that rock and roll is dead, maybe in the world of commercial rock but there are tons of indie bands out there kicking out the jams just like the indie developers out there. I think the fact that indie developers pay more attention to adventure games just shows how much indie devs are more interested in good gameplay then the big AAA game companies are…
gum

I wouldn’t say that adventure games have got a lot to do with good gameplay… Story, dialogue, atmosphere, sure. But it is its gameplay that has (supposedly) killed the genre, you know.
skaldicpoet9

I don’t necessarily believe that it killed the genre. What I meant by adventure games having good gameplay elements is the fact that in adventure games (if your like me) you get a great variety of story, exploration, mystery and puzzles to solve that are all very story and gameplay driven (rather than a lot of AAA titles which are graphics and novelty driven). I love the fact that a game doesn’t have to be all about killing and destruction but can be about characters and the degree of a player’s immersion into a story, and that I believe can only be accomplished if the game has significant gameplay value.