Are walkthrough a kind of cheat?

We loved to play adventure games. Playing this kind of games we faced many times being in front a very difficult puzzle, so, what to do then? Majority of "point and click" games as Day of Tentacle ,Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis , Simon the Sorcerer ,Sam & Max hit the road were the ones I remember with more joy. But, how much time lost in seeking the solution of the riddle and find the object to use in order to move forward in the history of the game. And maybe it was just in front of players and we never noticed. When I was 15 I remind I used to play with all my classmates, every morning we exchanged tips on how to solve puzzles... first experiments of social gaming.

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.

Voice from Monkey Island

During last week I was having a beer with one colleague of mine, Matteo, and, as usual beetween tech guys we started talking about games. Well, discussions with Matteo are two, games or girls, so it happens frequently (less frequently than speaking about girls) to end up speaking about (old) videogames.

Nothing special, we were chatting about the firsts episodes of Monkey Island series, and I made an observation. Who knows how the series have been developed if Ron Gilbert would have followed it instead of leaving Lucas Arts.