Adventure (1980 video game)

, pursued by the green dragon, Grundle In Adventure, the player's goal is to recover the Enchanted Chalice, which an evil magician has stolen and hidden in the kingdom, and return it to the Golden Castle. The kingdom is made of a total of 30 rooms, with various obstacles, enemies, and mazes located in and around the Golden, White, and Black Castles. The kingdom is guarded by three dragonsthe yellow Yorgle, the green Grundle, and the red Rhindlethat protect or flee from various items and attack the player's avatar. A hostile bat can roam the kingdom freely, carrying an item or a dragon around; the bat was to be named "Knubberrub" but the name is not in the manual. The bat's two states are agitation and non-agitation. When in the agitated state, the bat will either pick up or swap what it currently carries with an object in the present room, eventually returning to the non-agitated state where it will not pick up an object. The bat continues to fly around, swapping objects, even offscreen. The player's avatar is a square that can move within and between rooms; each room is represented by a single screen. Helpful objects include keys that open the castles, a magnet that pulls items towards the player, a magic bridge that the player can use to cross certain obstacles, and a sword which can be used to defeat the dragons. The player may only carry one object at a time. If eaten by a dragon, the player can then opt to resurrect the dead avatar instead of completely restarting the game. The avatar reappears at the Golden Castle and all objects remain at their latest location, but all slain dragons are resurrected. The ability to resurrect the avatar without resetting the entire game is one of the earliest examples of a "continue game" option in video games. The game offers three different skill levels. Level 1 is the easiest, as it uses a simplified room layout and does not include the White Castle, bat, red dragon, or invisible mazes. Level 2 is the full version of the game, with the various objects appearing in set positions at the start. Level 3 is similar to Level 2, but the location of the objects is randomized for a greater challenge. The player can use the difficulty switches on the Atari 2600 to further control the game's difficulty; one switch controls the dragons' bite speed, and one causes them to flee when the player carries the sword. ==Development==

2015 Adventure was designed and programmed by Atari employee Warren Robinett and published by Atari, Inc. At the time, Atari programmers were generally given full control on the creative direction and development cycle for their games; to stay productive, this required them to begin planning their next game as they neared completion of their current one. Robinett was finishing his work on Slot Racers when he was given an opportunity to visit the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory by Julius Smith, one of several friends he was sharing a house with. There, he was introduced to the 1977 version of the computer text game Colossal Cave Adventure, created by Will Crowther and modified by Don Woods. After playing the game for several hours, he was inspired to create a graphical version. The exceptions include two screens in the Black Castle catacombs and two in the main hallway beneath the Golden Castle. They are mirrored, but they contain a vertical wall object in the room to make an asymmetrical screen as well as a secret door for an Easter egg. Robinett originally intended for all rooms to be bidirectionally connected, but programming bugs make a few such connections unidirectional, which are explained away as "bad magic" in the game's manual. Robinett overcame these limitations to introduce concepts novel to video games. He constructed thirty different rooms, whereas most games of the time presented only a single screen. Robinett was initially discouraged from working on Adventure by his supervisor, George Simcock, who said the ambitious game could not be done on Atari 2600 based on knowing how much memory Colossal Cave Adventure uses. When Robinett developed a working prototype within one month, Atari's management team was impressed, encouraging him to continue the game. A second prototype was completed near the end of 1978, with only about eight rooms, a single dragon, and two objects. Robinett recognized that it demonstrated his design goals but was boring. He put the game aside for a few months and came back with additional ideas, finishing it by June 1979. and soon left Atari. Atari released the game in March 1980. ==Easter egg==

Generally defined as a "message, trick, or unusual behavior hidden inside a computer program by its creator", the Easter egg concept was popularized by Adventure, influenced by the corporate culture at Atari. After Atari's acquisition by Warner Communications in 1976, there was a culture clash between the executives from New York and the Californian programmers who were more laid back. Atari removed the names of game developers from their products as a means to prevent competitors from identifying and recruiting Atari's programmers. These attitudes led to the departure of several programmers; notably, David Crane, Larry Kaplan, Alan Miller, and Bob Whitehead all left Atari due to lack of recognition and royalty payments, and formed Activision as a third-party 2600 developer, making many hit games in competition with Atari. Unknown to anyone else, Robinett, inspired by popular rumors that the Beatles had hidden messages in songs, Robinett kept the secret for more than a year, even from Atari employees. Wright made it an official policy at Atari that all future games should include Easter eggs, often limited to being the initials of the game developer. The Dot is a single-pixel object which is invisibly embedded in the south wall of a sealed chamber accessible only with the bridge, and the player must bounce the avatar along the bottom wall to pick it up. The dot can be seen when in a catacombs passage or when held over a normal wall, but it becomes invisible again when carried or dropped in most rooms. The dot is not attracted to the magnet, unlike all other inanimate objects. The player must bring the dot, along with two or more other objects, to the east end of the corridor below the Golden Castle. This causes the barrier on the right side of the screen to blink rapidly, allowing the player avatar to push through the wall into a new room displaying the words "Created by Warren Robinett" in text which continuously changes color. The text was removed from the version on the Atari Classics 10-in-1 TV Games standalone gaming unit, replaced with "TEXT?" It has been included in most subsequent reissues of the game. ==Reception==

Adventure received mostly positive reviews in the years immediately after its release and has generally been viewed positively since then. Norman Howe reviewed Adventure in The Space Gamer No. 31. Howe commented that "Adventure is a good game, as video games are measured. It is neither as interesting nor as complex as Superman, but it shows great promise for things to come." The 1982 book How to Win at Home Video Games called it too unpredictable with an "illogical mission", concluding that "even devoted strategists may soon tire of Adventures excessive trial and error." Electronic Games in 1983 stated that the game's "graphics are tame stuff", but it "still has the power to fascinate" and that "the action adventure concepts introduced in Adventure are still viable today". A separate review from 1983 in the magazine's Electronic Games 1983 Software Encyclopedia awarded the game a 9 out of 10 rating, praising its gameplay and single player gaming as excellent and outstanding respectively while only finding its graphics and sound as merely "good". Jeremy Parish of 1UP.com wrote in 2010 that Adventure is "a work of interpretive brilliance" that "cleverly extracted the basic elements of exploration, combat and treasure hunting from the text games and converted them into icons", but also conceded that it "seems almost unplayably basic these days". Atari Headquarters scored the game 8 of 10, noting its historical importance while panning the graphics and sound, concluding that Adventure was "very enjoyable" regardless of its technological shortcomings. In 1995, Flux magazine ranked Adventure 35th on their Top 100 Video Games. They described the game as: "challenging and incredibly fun." ==Legacy==

Considered one of the first action-adventure video games and fantasy games for consoles, on video game consoles. It is the first video game to contain a widely known Easter egg and the first to allow a player to use multiple, portable, on-screen items while exploring an open-ended environment, making it one of the first examples, even as small and primitive as it is, of an open world game. The game is the first to use a fog of war effect in its catacombs, which obscures most of the playing area except for the player's immediate surroundings. The game has been voted the best Atari 2600 game in numerous polls, In 2010, 1UP.com listed it as one of the most important games ever made in its "The Essential 50" feature. A sequel to Adventure was first announced in early 1982. The planned sequel eventually evolved into the Swordquest series of games. In 2005, a sequel written by Curt Vendel was released by Atari on the Atari Flashback 2 system. In 2007, AtariAge released a self-published sequel called Adventure II for the Atari 5200, which is heavily inspired by the original; . Robinett himself took the idea of using items from Adventure into his next game, ''Rocky's Boots'', but added the ability to combine them to form new items. In both the 2011 novel Ready Player One and its 2018 film version the Easter egg in Adventure is prominently mentioned as the inspiration for a contest to find an Easter egg hidden in the fictional virtual reality game OASIS, and finding the secret room within Adventure is a core plot element within both versions, with footage from the game (specifically the Easter egg) incorporated into the film version. The Lego Atari 2600 set includes three "cartridges" and three corresponding dioramas. The diorama for Adventure has a scene of the game's castle with an egg hidden at its center, referencing the Easter egg. Atari SA, which holds the bulk of the intellectual property rights to the original Atari company, purchased the publishing rights for Tower of Samsara after developer Ilex Games had repeatedly failed to obtain funding for it. Atari reworked it into a re-imagining of Adventure for modern systems in a similar manner as Yars Rising, styled as a 2D platformer with Metroidvania gameplay elements. The game, now titled Adventure of Samsara, was released on September 4, 2025. Re-releases • Atari Classics 10-in-1 TV Games (Standalone hardware unit, 2003) • Atari: 80 Classic Games in One (PC, 2003) • Atari Flashback (Standalone hardware unit, 2004) • Atari Anthology (PlayStation 2, Xbox, 2004) • Game Room (Xbox 360, PC, 2010) • Atari Greatest Hits (Nintendo DS, iOS, 2010) • Atari Flashback 3 (Standalone hardware unit, 2011) • Atari Flashback 4 (Standalone hardware unit, 2012) • Atari Vault (PC, 2016) • Atari Flashback Classics, Vol. 2 (PS4, Xbox One, 2016, Switch, 2018) • Atari Flashback Portable, 60 game and 70 game versions (2016, 2017) • Atari Flashback 8 (2017) • Atari Collection 1 (Evercade, 2020) • Atari 50 (Switch, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series, PC, 2022) ==See also==