Adventure

Adventure as innovated in many ways. It was the first game of its type, an "adventure game". It was the first game that allowed you to explore an area using multiple screens (you move up off the screen and are changed to a new screen in the same world) It was the first game that allowed you to pick up items, keys for example, and carry them with your character to other parts of the world.

It was also the first game ever to have an "Easter Egg". When Adventure was written over 25 years ago, game designers where not given any credit, so the games designer (Warren Robinett) programmed in a secret room with his name flashing in lights. You could reach this room by placing a certain object at a specific place in the game. This idea is now commonplace in games, it's not at all unusually to find secret levels or areas in many of today's most popular games.

In some ways the story line for Adventure was not as clear as storylines are today. It was limited by the size of the game. The instruction booklet for the game explained that you where retrieving treasure, however there was not actually any text in game. From the posts that I have read from people who use to play this game, it seems that even without the text you understood the general story and what was going on.

Adventure was based on a text base game that ran on mainframe computers, and took up lots of space. When first pitched the idea, Atari did not think it was possible to put such a large game into a 4kb game, however Warren Robinett went ahead with the idea anyway, and it ended up being one of their biggest selling games.

Adventure was a very influential game. Its general concepts are what influenced later Nintendo games like Zelda and Final Fantasy. Although a 4k Atari game seems worlds away from a game like Final Fantasy 10 that's entirely on Dvd, its easy to trace back the basic concepts to this early predecessor. Today, although it is sometimes hard to come by a working Atari and cartridge, many nostalgic gaming sites offer this game on ROM or in flash format.