The Early Years is a collection of adventure games, and a part of the Adventure Games Live series. Like all games from this series, it is presented as a text "choose-your-own-adventure" game. On the screen, you see everything that happens around, shown as text, and you can choose what you want to do out of a few options presented to you.

The Early Years is a showcase of old Apple II adventure games which the creator of Adventure Games Live, Samuel Stoddard, produced when he was still a youngster. The games are often charmingly naive, filled with bugs, weird and illogical plots, and strange, infantile writing. All the bugs, typos and imperfections have been preserved when the games were ported to Adventure Games Live.

Initially, there are just a few games available to play. As the player finishes the games, he unlocks new ones to see; old Apple II screenshots and development notes become available to see, too. During the games, Samuel Stoddard's commentary (marked in italics) appears often, to explain the backstory of certain parts, describe how the original game exactly worked, or just poke fun at particularly ridiculous errors.

To play The Early Years, you have to register, but it is a very quick process, only requiring you to type an username and password. Your game is saved automatically, and you can leave at any point and later resume playing from where you left.

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