ADVENTURE GAME REVIEW – Gray Defender

REPOSTED to correct AUDIO issues. Originally posted May 21, 2016.

Gray Defender

Adventure, released in late 1979/early 1980 by Atari, is arguably one of the greatest console games to have ever been released. Its simplicity in its design, its elegance & creative nature is what sets it apart from the rest of the field at the time. In this video, I will be reviewing the original Atari 2600 game, Adventure, as well as touching on a few of the homebrews and hacks that have followed over the years. I also cover the variety of ports this game has had to other gaming systems.

What is it about this game that captivated so many young gamers upon its arrival? To start with, it was different than all of the other games out there made for Atari 2600 at the time. It wasn’t a space game or even a shooter. There are no explosions, heck there is no scoring at all. Instead, it is a third-person adventure game where it is your task to find the “Enchanted Chalice” that has been hidden away deep within the kingdom and bring it back to its rightful location, the home castle, so to speak from which you start out the game. There are three such castles in Adventure, the Gold, Black, and White, each with their appropriately colored keys. Once unlocked, each castle contains its own areas to explore. This is the first action-adventure role-playing video game on a console. This game created a whole new genre of computer games that combined elements of action with elements of adventure, called “action/adventure”. It is also the first game to sell over a million copies in this new category.

Your character is a little square block you can move around the game board with and pick up objects. Your character has no name.

Home Castle

The fact that your characters graphic is not detailed out, does not take away from the gameplay. Instead, you are forced to use your imagination, …mind blown… This was the first multi-screen Atari game. In fact, there are many screens within this game and its kingdom. You are given tools to help navigate your way through the screens. You have a bridge ] [, you have a sword, a magnet and you have various colored keys that indicate which castle door they open up. Objects, such as the sword, bridge, and keys are attracted to the magnet. They will mysteriously float over to the magnet, even through solid walls. Ah, but there is also the pesky black bat that is flying randomly throughout the kingdom, picking up and dropping off random objects, and even stealing the item you are carrying. If it gets close enough to you, you can grab the bat along with whatever he happens to be flying around with and take him with you on your quest. The black bat was the first video game character to have two distinctly different states; agitated and non-agitated. When agitated he will go after an object to swap with. When he is not agitated, he will be content with the object he is holding.

Have fun by catching the black bat while he is holding the magnet!

Wait, it cannot be that easy, the games designer Warren Robinett had one more trick up his sleeve. Those pesky dragons. After all, there had to be a reason the sword was included in the game. Admittedly the dragon is not an intimidating creature to look at, but if you look closely you will notice, his stomach is just large enough to swallow you whole!

These dragons, which at first glance do resemble ducks, can be vicious, requiring you to need your sword in order to complete your adventure. They too, are sort of magical, in that the laws of physics do not apply, meaning they can navigate through walls to kill you. One interesting game mechanic is that even if they do eat you, the game does not end. Instead, you are alive within the stomach of the dragon! If the bat happens to fly by, you can still grab it, or he can grab the dragon, giving you a ride through the kingdom with a bats-eye view.

However, once you are eaten, you cannot be uneaten, but you can press the game reset switch, to reincarnate yourself back to the home castle. This will also revive any slain dragons, your retrieved items, will however remain where they were prior to hitting reset. This is one of the earliest examples of any video game using this game continuation concept, which thirty years later is now common, actually a necessity, amongst video games.

Back to the dragons. There are three in Adventure, Yordle (Yellow) is the slowest, Grundel (Green) is a bit quicker, and Rhindle (Red) is fast and extremely aggressive.

Yordl,e Grundel, Rhindle

They are what I would call, a minor hurdle that must be overcome to complete your quest. When a dragon is attacking they make a loud sound, when you kill the dragon there is a sound like the air going out of a balloon, and when they eat you there is a sound like, yummy. There is one more sound in the game, the sound for picking up and dropping objects, which sort of sounds like “ba-da-link” (picking up), then “da-ba-link” (dropping object).

Game Sounds:

Swallow

Pick up item

Kill Dragon

Drop Item

Bite Attack

Exploring the kingdom is the next and perhaps most enjoyable task of all. For you need to learn the map to figure out where the Chalice is and to know how to return it to its rightful home, the gold Castle. There are a couple of mazes or labyrinths that must be navigated. A few of the labyrinths are structured in a way that simulates being in the dark, only revealing a small part of the maze at a time. This is one of the first games to contain real mazes, multi-screen ones at that. These were a blast to figure out.

There are three difficulty levels in Adventure. Level one is the easiest. The red dragon is missing and the kingdom is much smaller. This is the introduction level, just to get you acquainted with the gameplay before graduating to the more difficult levels. Level two is the full game with the red dragon and all the objects are always in the same location. Level three is the same as level two but randomizes the object locations.

Better make the quick exit!

Adventure is credited with being the first game to contain an Easter egg or hidden feature. Unbeknownst to Atari, the games programmer, Warren Robinett, hid one of these eggs within the game. At the time, he thought he might get himself in trouble for doing this, being that this particular Easter egg took up approximately five percent of the game cartridges memory space. What he did, instead, spawned a whole new category for video games. It is now common for a video game to contain many such Easter eggs. This is the first video game Easter egg that I ever found on my own, without having prior knowledge of it. At the time I didn’t even know it was an Easter egg, but I thought it was pretty cool.

Sneaky!

As of the date of this recording, On the Twin Galaxies website the record holders for each of the three games types are as follows:

Rules	Record Holder	Time
Game 1, Difficulty B Fastest completion	Mike K Morrow	33 Seconds
Game 2, Difficulty B Fastest completion	Jason Dyer	02:27 Minutes
Game 3, Difficulty B Fastest completion	Jonathan A Ewing	40 Seconds

Adventure is a game that I often return to, even during the period when I didn’t own the console, via emulation. It has a lot of replay value, especially on the third difficulty level, where all the items are randomized. This is a great game and is currently number one on my top ten list of the greatest Atari 2600 games. It sparks your imagination and really kicked off a whole new generation of video games, way ahead of its time.

Highly recommend.
*****

Adventure has been ported to or re-released on several platforms: including