Adventure

aka: Aventura, Maceralar Beldesi
Moby ID: 11162
Atari 2600 Specs
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Description official description

A graphic dungeon quest inspired by the old mainframe game of the same name, Adventure is a graphic action-adventure game where you use your joystick to wander around, collecting keys to explore castles, labyrinths and everything in between, whilst slaying anything that moves (i.e. Dragons & Co.) to get treasures.

The game has 3 difficulty settings:

  • Level 1 (Easiest)
  • Level 2: The Kingdom is larger than Level 1, containing secret rooms and hidden items to add difficulty.
  • Level 3 (Hardest): Similar to Level 2 but all objects/items are placed randomly throughout the Kingdom.

Gameplay revolves around picking up (and dropping) items, hacking your way though dragons, finding keys to open the castle gates and using magic (i.e. reincarnation) in case you get swallowed by failing-to-follow-their-diet-plan-dragons.

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Credits (Atari 2600 version)

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Cover Artwork

Reviews

Critics

Average score: 73% (based on 17 ratings)

Players

Average score: 3.7 out of 5 (based on 70 ratings with 3 reviews)

The best possible game for Atari 2600

The Good
Everyone will tell you that this is the first video role playing game of all time. That it was the first console game to include an easter egg - that the term easter egg was in fact coined in response to this game.

So I will tell you something new: this is the first game to genuinely SCARE the player. You suspect the cup (I'd call it the "Stanley Cup" and later as the "Sacred Chalice of Reeks" but I think it's officially called the "enchanted" somethingorother) is in the next room, which you haven't entered yet. You suspect there may be a dragon, or worse, TWO dragons, guarding it. But you don't know. There could be nothing there at all. So you tentatively move the character up into the next screen, and.....

the red dragon is immediately upon you and snaps at you with a loud sound! You desperately try to push away, but while you escape its jaws, you can't get around the beast and down off the screen to safety. It snaps at you again, you flail around trying to get away. After another 10 seconds of moving around and close calls, you are swallowed. In the belly of the beast.

OR

you have just started the game (game 3, where objects are distributed randomly among some number of checkpoints, subject to certain constraints - like the stanley cup never starts out in the yellow castle or you'd win at the beginning, and it always starts in a different castle that has to be unlocked, so it isn't too easy). You don't have the sword. It's locked in some castle somewhere. But all 3 friggin' dragons immediately appear and chase you around. Every time you turn a corner, there one of them is. You find a key, but they dog you to the gates of hell.

There is also a complex interaction between the characters and items and rooms. So many of them too. Just to name a few, the yellow dragon is scared of the yellow key, the red dragon will only guard (stay in the same room as and not continue to chase you when you leave the room) the white key and the stanley cup, while the green one will guard anything black as well as the bridge and the cup, the bat, oh that infamous bat. Who can ever forget the bat. My parents would compare me to the bat, grabbing items of importance, wandering off with them and dropping them in unknown and absurd locations. There's nothing like that with any other game that was made until then or for the next 5 years afterwards.

The creator of missile command had a degree in psychology and thought he understood enough to make games addictive. Yeah, right. I sure got tired of missile command in a hurry. Ok, we get it, more and more missiles come, and you eventually lose. But this, now THIS is a game that could be played for a long time.

The Bad
The sword, I think should have been drawn a little differently. For years and years I thought it was an arrow, and imagined that I'm supposed to stick the end of the arrow into the dragons. But it only dawned on me in 2004 that it's a regular sword with a handle, not an arrow, and it actually points the other way.

The single most annoying thing about the game however is that in game 3 it is OFTEN the case that you have a situation where it starts out with the yellow key locked in the yellow castle or the black key in the black castle with the cup. Or more complicated situations yielding impossibilities, like the white key locked in the black castle and the black key in the white castle, or all 3 keys locked among the 3 castles. Warren Robinett took measures to insure the cup always started out locked in the white or black castles, but you'd think he could have at least bothered to make the game potentially solvable every time. I find it really annoying to successfully slay all the dragons only to find that there are no keys anywhere.

The Bottom Line
First of all, Adventure is one of the few PROGRAMS (some examples of others are Air Sea battles and 3-D tic-tac-toe) for the Atari 2600 that is ACTUALLY a game. Yes, you heard me. MOST of the so-called "games" for the atari 2600 are unworthy of the status of "game". To be a game, you have to be able to win it, and you have to be able to lose it. The things that pass for "games" on this system are almost exclusively without any goal. You just shoot/avoid aliens/asteroids/ghosts/cats/robots/nuclear missiles that come at you faster and faster until you lose. That's not a game. That's a friggin' waste of time. And the few true games are really pretty pathetic for the most part. Mostly it is a competition against a REALLY stupid artificial intelligence where you and the computer each control a character which is on equal terms. Whoever shoots the other the most times in the time allotted wins. Whoever catches the most fish wins. Whoever gets 4 x's or o's in a row wins.

But Adventure is unlike everything else. It is a MASTERPIECE.

To all those naysayers who have the NERVE to say that it is no good because it had lousy graphics, you are obviously unqualified to make such an obtuse comment. Good graphics are not POSSIBLE for the Atari 2600. You merely demonstrate that you are pitifully unaware that the programmers were limited to 4 kilobytes of ROM and 128 bytes of RAM. YOU HEARD ME! The entire program for the entire game must be no bigger than 4 KILOBYTES. No, not megabytes. Kilobytes. Yes. 4 kilobytes. For the whole game. And every stored variable can't exceed 128 bytes. At a whopping processing speed of under 2 megahertz. The entire game console had all the computing power of what is considered a very low-end microcontroller today, the unspoken computers all around which are relinquished to minimal tasks like controlling the clock in your microwave oven. To complain about its graphics is to demonstrate one's ignorance of the fact that it is IMPOSSIBLE to have fantastic graphics in a game limited in size to 4 kilobytes and RAM to 128 bytes. So why do I rate the graphics at 5 stars? Because it is as good as it could have been. No amount of additional effort could have made it better. Nowadays, programmers are limited not by hard drive space or RAM, but merely by man-hours in creating the program. Not so with the games of this era.

I would go as far as to say that this game is about the most powerful, interesting game that is even theoretically POSSIBLE for the atari 2600. This is coming from someone who made from scratch a digital clock using a microcontroller. I can appreciate the brilliant efficiency, above all else, employed in this program, to make use of what few miserable resources were available to their utmost limit. And then I come to read that one reviewer even had the NERVE to suggest that there are actually other games for the Atari 2600 that are better than this one. To SUGGEST that this isn't the best game for the atari 2600 is the pinnacle of absurdity.

Like Phantasy Star for the Sega Master system, this ONE GAME is the only single game for the entire console system it goes with, that for the lack of, would make the entire console unworthy of a look back. So what if your character is a square. So what if the "dragons" look more like ducks. They're plenty scary when they're chasing you around and you don't know where the sword is.

Atari 2600 · by Sandor Swartz (6) · 2009

More stunning than Elden Ring

The Good
Everything. Magnificent and perfect work, absolutely fantastic. There will never be anything that will surpass it.

The Bad
Nothing. Impossible to find a defect when we talk about a work of perfection.

The Bottom Line
The peak of the GOAT.

Atari 2600 · by nikos3194 · 2023

A very basic, yet entertaining game with more surprises than you might think.

The Good
This was one of the first game cartridges that I bought for my old Atari 2600. What struck me was how different this game seemed from all the typical arcade games of the atari system. The game is simple; you must recover a golden chalice and bring it back to the golden castle where you start. Opposing you are 2-3 dragons who try to eat you and an annoying bat that steels stuff from you. The trick is that while you can kill the dragons with a sword, the bat is invulnerable. The layout features 3 castles with interiors, plus catacombs and mazes.

  For its day the layout was pretty impressive. While the maze was well lite, the catacombs were dark and you had to feel your way round. Also the dragons, each a different color, had bits of personality. The red dragon, for example, was always aggressive, while the green and gold ones where more interested in guarding key items.

   There were lots of interesting little items to use to help in your quest, including the aforementioned sword, a bridge to cross into otherwise inaccessible areas (such as in the white castle, keys to castle gates, and a magnet to extract items embedded in the wall.

 There were two settings and both a basic and advanced game. For example in the first setting the dragons would run right into your sword, while in the second they would run. This was important as you could only carry one item at a time, including the chalice, so having the sword around to fend off dragons may be difficult if you are transporting something else. Also, as mentioned above, there was no defense against the bat, who always wants to trade items with you. Sometimes its a handy trade, and sometimes, he trades a live dragon for your sword. I usually would lock him up in a castle I no longer needed to visit.

 Lastly, the designer of the game, Warren Robinett, put in a hidden puzzle that will ensure his name for posterity<br><br>**The Bad**<br>     The graphics are very basic. You are a square; the sword is an arrow and so forth. The dragons and bat are better done. There is minimal sound - usually the biting of the dragons as they try to eat you, and yes you can end up in their stomach!

  Lastly, although there were some variations, overall the game could become dull after repeated play. As I pointed out above, I found a trick to deal with the bat and you can just hunt down the dragons first before going for the chalice, which was always either in the black or white castle, though sometimes you needed the magnet to pry it from the wall. <br><br>**The Bottom Line**<br>     A rare treat for the Atari 2600 that will provide fun and some challenge, but is now more a nostalgic piece for most people than anything else. Nevertheless, if you are into old fashioned adventure games then this little gem might well be for you.

Atari 2600 · by Apparatchik (16) · 2004

Trivia

1001 Video Games

The Atari 2600 version of Adventure appears in the book 1001 Video Games You Must Play Before You Die by General Editor Tony Mott.

Easter Egg

Adventure was perhaps the first video game to contain a hidden "Easter Egg." While playing levels 2 or 3, players who enter the black castle and use a bridge in the catacombs will find a single grey dot near the bottom of one of the rooms. Bringing this dot to the screen south and east of the gold castle will cause the wall to the right to become transparent as long as another object is present on the screen. Players can then pass through the wall to a secret room revealing the words "Created by Warren Robinett" in flashing gold letters.

In an interview, Warren Robinett explained his reasons for hiding his name in the game:

Each 2600 game was designed entirely by one person. But on the package it said basically "Adventure, by Atari." And we were only getting salaries, no cut of the huge profits. It was a signature, like at the bottom of a painting. But to make it happen, I had to hide my signature in the code, in a really obscure place, and not tell anybody. Keeping a secret like that is not easy. I decided that if I could not keep the secret myself--I was very tempted to tell my two main friends at Atari, Tom Reuterdahl and Jim Huether--how could I expect anyone else to keep the secret? So I didn't tell anyone, handed over the final version of the program, Atari manufactured and distributed several hundred thousand cartridges of "Adventure," and then it was too late for them to undo it.

Of course, an adventure game, with multiple rooms, is perfect for secret things, because it's easy to make extra rooms that are really hard to get into.

Atari did not discover the presence of Warren Robinett's Easter egg room (an indulgence estimated as taking up 5% of the cartidge's storage space) until notified by a curious letter from a 12-year-old Adventure explorer from Salt Lake City. At this time, Warren had left Atari (in July 1979) and was unreachable for comment or explanation, traveling through Europe. Had he not just quit, he almost certainly would have been fired.

Multiplayer

Robinett worked on a multiplayer function, but had to abandon it because of lack of RAM.

Awards

  • FLUX
    • Issue #4 - #35 in the Top 100 Video Games of All-Time list
  • Game Informer
    • August 2001 (Issue #100) - #47 in the Top 100 Games of All Time poll
  • Retro Gamer
    • Issue 46 - #4 in the Top 25 Atari 2600 Games poll

Information also contributed by Big John WV, PCGamer77, Pseudo_Intellectual and FatherJack.

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Contributors to this Entry

Game added by Scott Monster.

Plex Arcade added by firefang9212. Windows, Xbox 360 added by Alaka. Antstream added by lights out party. iPhone added by Ben K.

Additional contributors: uclafalcon, Indra was here, LepricahnsGold, Patrick Bregger, FatherJack, firefang9212.

Game added November 30, 2003. Last modified March 12, 2024.