Adventure International was an American video game publishing company that existed from 1979 until 1986. It was started by Scott and Alexis Adams. Their games were notable for being the first implementation of the adventure genre to run on a microcomputer system. The adventure game concept originally came from Colossal Cave Adventure which ran strictly on large mainframe systems at the time.
History
After the success of Adams' first text adventure, Adventureland, other games followed rapidly, with Adventure International (or "AI") releasing about two games a year. Initially the games were drawn from the founders' imaginations, with themes ranging from fantasy to horror and sometimes science fiction. Some of the later games were written by Scott Adams with other collaborators.
In 1980, five of the company's games were ported to the VIC-20. Developer Neil Harris recalled: "[O]ur sales guys could not figure out what they were gonna do with them. 'What are these games? It's all words on the screen! There's no graphics! What kind of a video game doesn't have video?' [laughs] And they became the best-selling cartridges for the VIC-20, period."[3]
By 1983 the company was employing 40 people and was based in Longwood, Florida.[4]
In 1982, Adventure International began releasing Scott Adams Graphic Adventures for computers like the Apple II, while continuing to sell text-only games for less powerful computers such as the VIC-20 and TI 99/4A.[6] Graphic adventures like The Hobbit increased expectations of such games, however, and Adventure International's graphic adventures were inferior to others resulting in a rapid loss of market share. At its peak in late 1983/early 1984, right at the cusp of the video game crash of 1983, Adventure International employed approximately 50 staff and published titles from over 300 independent programmer/authors.
Adventure International was based in the Sabal Point subdivision of Longwood - at 155 Sabal Palm Drive, Longwood, Florida near the east side of Sabal Point Elementary School. The company also had a retail store located in Sweetwater Oaks at 966 Fox Valley Drive, Longwood.
Adventure International went bankrupt in 1986. The copyrights for its games reverted to the bank and eventually back to Scott Adams who released them as shareware.
In Europe the "Adventure International" name was a trading name of Adventure Soft and other games were released under the name that were not from Adventure International in the US.
Savage Island parts I & II: The most challenging adventure games, the player is not even aware of the game's goal. If the player completes part one, they are given one of two passwords to play the second part.
The games were developed using an in-house adventure editor. The original interpreter was a two-word command interpreter running on a Radio Shack TRS-80 computer, with later ports to many platforms.
The source code for Adventureland was published in SoftSide magazine in 1980[8] and the source code for Pirate Adventure was printed in the December 1980 issue of BYTE,[9] with an addendum in April 1981.[10] This enabled others to discover how the engine worked and the database format was subsequently used in other interpreters such as Brian Howarth's Mysterious Adventures series.[11] The later graphics versions (SAGA) featured graphics drawn on an Apple II, mostly by in-house artist Kem McNair.
^Adams, Scott (July 1980). "Adventureland". SoftSide. p. 36. Archived from the original on 28 March 2016. Retrieved 13 April 2015.
^Adams, Scott (December 1980). "Pirate's Adventure". BYTE. Vol. 5, no. 12. p. 192. Archived from the original on 31 March 2015. Retrieved 18 October 2013.
^"Adventurous Bugs". BYTE. Vol. 6, no. 4. April 1981. p. 302. Archived from the original on 14 April 2014. Retrieved 18 October 2013.
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