An adventure game is a video game in which the player takes on the role of the protagonist in an interactive story based on exploration and puzzle solving. The genre’s focus on storytelling allows it to draw heavily on other narrative media, literature and film, covering a wide variety of literary genres. Many adventure games (text and graphics ) are designed for a single player, as this focus on story and characters makes it difficult to create a multiplayer game. Colossal Cave Adventure is identified as the first such adventure game, first released in 1976, while other well-known adventure game series include Zork, King’s Quest, The Secret of Monkey Island and Myst.

The original adventure games, developed in the 1970s and early 1980s, were text-based, using text analyzers to convert player input into commands. As personal computers became more powerful with improved graphics, the graphical adventure game format became popular, initially by augmenting the player’s text commands with graphics, but soon moved to point and click interfaces. Further advances in computers led to adventure games with more immersive graphics using real-time or pre-processed three-dimensional scenes or full-length first- or third-person video.

In Western Hemisphere markets, the genre’s popularity peaked between the late 1980s and the mid-1990s, when many considered it one of the most technically advanced genres, but it became niche in the early 2000s due to the popularity of first-person shooters, and developers found it difficult to find publishers to support adventure games. The genre has since seen a resurgence, aided by the success of independent video game development, particularly through crowdfunding and the widespread availability of digital distribution. the use of episodic approaches and the emergence of new gaming platforms, including handheld consoles and mobile devices. “The Walking Dead” by Telltale Games is considered a key game that revived the genre.

In Asian markets, adventure games continue to be popular in the form of visual novels, which make up nearly 70 percent of PC games released in Japan. Asian countries have also found markets for adventure games for handheld and mobile gaming devices. Japanese adventure games are usually different from Western adventure games and have their own development history.