Last week, I finished Launch of the Screaming Narwhal, the first episode in Telltale’s episodic Tales of Monkey Island series. Enraptured by the world, I immediately bought Secret of Monkey Island on the Xbox Live Arcade and have been sinking my teeth into that, taking a break only to go through the finale of Wallace and Gromit’s Grand Adventures. Suddenly I had a flash of insight; a moment of clarity if you will.
Something is wrong here.
Adventure games? What the hell? Didn’t those things die off in the mid 90s? Telltale’s growing hegemony is nothing new, so don’t think I’m trying to present this as some sort of revelation. But isn’t it ironic, don’t you think, that a person whose only experiences with adventure games prior to August 2008 were a rental of Discworld for the PS1 and maybe half an hour of clicking around Day of the Tentacle on a Lucasarts compilation when they were young is now completely and utterly in love with the genre?
(It may not be dripping with sweet, sweet irony, but it’s at least better than ray-ee-ain on your wedding day)
It’s not just adventure games, either. The fighting genre is seeing a transition back from ‘niche Japanophile market’ (sidebar: why is it that China gets the cool sounding Sinophile while Japan gets the infinitely more obvious Japanophile? No justice.) and I’d say the trend extends to racing games after Burnout Paradise, but I might be confusing ‘no one cared about racing games for years’ with ‘I didn’t care about racing games for years,’ so I’ll leave that one be for now.
Why, then? Why now? I don’t think the two genres are related: Capcom didn’t see Sam and Max Season One and say ‘Oh dude we have to get in on this!’ But maybe the proper amount of time had passed for both of them to allow for what I’d claim is the single greatest driving force in gaming today: nostalgia. People who grew up with these games are now hearkening back to the good old days, not realizing that they’re already acting like their slightly-senile grandfathers telling stories about The War (which war itself doesn’t matter) and saying that the Kaiser had stolen their word for ‘twenty’ so they had to say ‘dickety.’
Nostalgia isn’t everything, though. I knew Sam and Max from the easter egg in Dark Forces 2, but didn’t understand why they were important. It seems harder to picture someone not knowing about Street Fighter or Mortal Kombat — my co-editor’s new wife will even throw down as Honda and do that goddamn hand slap thing repeatedly — but given that Super Street Fighter II HD Remix was put out to pump people up for the release of the new incarnation, if Street Fighter IV was a subpar game then it would suffer a backlash akin to pistol fanatics’ disdain for ‘Spraylo 2.’ So, the games have to be good, too.
Here my two lane highway of talking about fighting and adventure games end, as I’m just not qualified to speak to the intricacies of the fighting genre. Mortal Kombat vs DC Universe is the only MK game I’ve ever owned, and I’ve never had a Street Fighter game to call my own. I played both franchises plenty, of course, but it was always on a friend’s Genesis and so I never got much beyond button mashing.
A third prong to the Adventure attack, though, is that I’d say the technology is there to support it. I would contend that, unless you’re Blizzard, mainstream PC gaming has been on a steady decline for years. First Person Shooters only narrowly survived the transition to consoles, appropriately enough making the final dramatic leap through Halo like its protagonist does in the final level of the game. Real time strategy games don’t seem like they’re going to make it without significant changes to the core mechanics, and MMOs would be pretty screwed if not for the towering behemoth that is World of Warcraft (as shown by every other MMO ever who isn’t WoW, and now I’m sure I’ll be hearing from angry EVE players).
Adventure games and their clicky nature, well, they don’t transfer well to a gamepad (which is my primary complaint with Secret of Monkey Island so far). Wallace and Gromit is trying a new method of input with a decent level of success, but just like ‘all units’ takes away some of the je ne sais quois, the genre really does best when you’ve got a mouse at your (literal) fingertips. Wii aside, then (as Sam and Max transferred perfectly), why are non-PC gamers like myself willing to sit down at their email-and-Firefox machines?
I would say the key to Telltale’s success (besides, y’know, making good games) is that they don’t require a high end rig. That thing you’ve got laying around? Yeah, that’ll probably work. I played through Sam and Max on a year-old low end Macbook running Boot Camp, and the desktop handling Wallace and Gromit and Tales of Monkey Island is a Media Center approaching its fourth birthday. These games don’t look like Crysis — they don’t look shabby either, and I’d say graphical fidelity is the last thing they need to worry about anyway — and as such I don’t need to drop significant chunks of money on upgrading my system before I can enjoy a game on it.
This is a largely personal perspective, of course. I’m simply not willing to upgrade my PC to play games on it, but I know many people are. Even if you couldn’t care less about fighting or adventure games, though, I would still maintain that their level of popularity has risen recently to the level that, like MMOs are for me, you still have to say ‘Yep, a lot of people sure are into that. For some damn reason.’ And while Telltale is, I would say, undisputed King of the Land, that doesn’t mean there aren’t any kickass dukes floating around. When the result is more awesome games, wouldn’t you say we all win?
Yeah, bring it in. Group hug.
There it is.
