Adventure Game Studio was created by British programmer Chris Jones[1] in 1997 as an MS-DOS program entitled "Adventure Creator". Jones was inspired by Sierra On-Line's adventure game interface, specifically as showcased in Space Quest IV.[2] The first version of Adventure Creator allowed users to create only low-resolution keyboard-controlled games.
Lassi Quest was released as the first complete AGS game in late 1999. The engine gained popularity with the release of Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw's Rob Blanc and Philip Reed's Larry Vales games in 2000-2001.
Version 3.0 in January 2008 included a complete rewrite of the editor using the .NET Framework and an update to the game engine to support 3D hardware acceleration.
On 26 October 2010, Chris Jones released the source code for the editor under the terms of the Artistic License, version 2.[3] On 27 April 2011, the runtime engine code was released under the same licence.[4]
By 2015, community developers were maintaining and improving the engine and IDE, and began to implement cross-platform capabilities as well as support for more modern screen resolutions (4:3, 16:9 and custom high resolutions).[5]
Capabilities
The editor and runtime engine were originally designed for Microsoft Windows operating systems; the runtime engine was ported to Android, iOS, Linux, Mac OS X and PlayStation Portable[6] after the release of the source code. Prior to AGS 2.7, an MS-DOS engine was also available; this has since been discontinued. It is not yet possible to run the editor on operating systems other than Windows without an emulator or API wrapper such as Wine.[7]
The AGS community is based on the AGS Forum,[9] the AGS Internet Relay Chat channel[10] and Discord channel.[11] There are real-world meetings of the community each year, known as "Mittens".[12]
