Adventure games, rise and fall

I want to take opportunity of a very interesting article I read few days ago about the history of adventure games genre. We know, beetween 80s and 90s it was a great age for this genre.

Software houses like Sierra and Lucas Arts had great success thanks to epic masterpieces we loved so much. Reading the article I understood how this genre had to adapt to technology and usability, since, from the first attempts of text adventures, it was clear the necessity to make easy for the player interacting with carachter and environment.

But the success was not only due to the machine-human interaction mechanism. The great storyline behind titles such as Monkey Island or Gabriel Knight (just some example) with its comedy or its drama was really important too. However, the genre changed along the years, pushed off the main scen by FPS (First Person Shooter) before, and by casual games later.

Abandonware? points of views.

A couple of days ago I stumbled up on a very interesting article written some years ago about abandonware phenomenon. I know it's a bit annoying speaking about this topic because we did so many times in the past. I tried to recover some old discussions we had when Squakenet had a forum, and instead I found this Gamespot article by Marc Saltzman:

http://www.gamespot.com/gamespot/features/pc/abandonware/p2_04.html

I am posting just the page I would like to comment that does contain some interesting points of view of the persons that most should give opinions about abandonware: the game creators. Well, I do post that link also because unfortunately the whole document has some broken link from the first page.