Adventure International
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Adventure International was a video game production company started in 1978 by Scott Adams and his wife Alexis. Scott Adams' games were notable for their compact size and ability to run on very small systems. At a time when games like Colossal Cave Adventure ran on mainframe systems, Scott conceived the idea of writing the game in its own compact interpreted language. His first game "Adventureland" (1978) ran on early microcomputers in only 16K bytes of memory.
After the success of Adventureland, games followed rapidly, with Scott releasing about two games a year. Initially the games were drawn from his own imagination, with themes ranging from fantasy to horror and sometimes sci-fi. Some of the later games were written by both Scott and his wife Alexis. Scott Adams' games became known for quality, with a reputation only exceeded in the field at the time by Infocom.
Fourteen games later, Adventure International began to release games drawn from film and fiction. The extremely rare Buckaroo Banzai game was based on the film The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the Eighth Dimension (1984). The other games came from a more well known source: Marvel Comics. Adventure International released three games based on the Marvel characters: "The Incredible Hulk", "Spiderman" and "Torch and the Thing".
By the end of 1982, game tastes were changing. The traditional adventure game market had moved to more graphical games, the game The Hobbit had shaken up expectations of such games, and although Adventure International games included graphics of a sort, the company and the game genre were rapidly losing market share.
Adventure International went bankrupt in 1985. The copyrights for its games reverted to the bank and eventually back to Scott Adams who has re-released them as shareware. In 2000 Scott also released his first new game for many years: "Return To Pirate's Island 2".
In Europe the "Adventure International" name was a trading name of AdventureSoft and other games were released under the name that were not from Adventure International in the USA.
Alexis Adams has remained in the online world and runs an online sex site[1] (http://fatfantasy.net).
The Games
Scott Adams's original twelve adventure games were
- Adventureland,
- Pirate Adventure (also called Pirate's Cove),
- Secret Mission (originally called Mission Impossible),
- Voodoo Castle,
- The Count,
- Strange Odyssey,
- Mystery Fun House,
- Pyramid of Doom,
- Ghost Town,
- Savage Island parts I & II, and
- The Golden Voyage.
External links
- Play Scott Adams games in your web browser (http://www.freearcade.com/Zplet.jav/Scottadams.html)
- IF Legends, detailed guide to Scott Adams Classic Adventures (http://www.if-legends.org/~adventure/Adventure_International/Classic.html)
- Category at Open Directory (http://dmoz.org/Games/Video_Games/Developers_and_Publishers/A/Adventure_International/)