Timeline | 1979: Adventure for Atari 2600

Adventure was a milestone game for the Atari 2600

As the name so simply describes, 'Adventure' is about well an adventure. In the game you play as a square (a graphical representation of the top of the head of your adventurer) and you explore through the three castles to try to beat the three dragons. Conceived as a graphical version of the earlier text-based adventure game 'Colossal Cave Adventure', 'Adventure' was designed and programmed by Warren Robinett at Atari.

A screenshot from 'Adventure'

The game was rudimentary in many ways, but features like multiple items that could be carried - like the key in the screenshot above made the game quite engaging for the time. 'Adventure' also had a simple 'continue game' feature with which a player could continue their game from the beginning after dieing without loosing their items (any of the three dragons they had killed would return however) until the game was completely shut off.

While fairly shallow but even the standards of other action-adventures games in the next decade, Adventure had multiple mazes, enemies, puzzles, items and just a relative bunch of things for the player to do - for the time it was quite the game!

A screenshot of the first known video game 'Easter Egg'

 Warren Robinett was not officially credited with the game (a practice of Atari's at the time that partially led to the breaking away of many developers to form Activision) but he was able to have his name in the game in the form of the very first known video game 'Easter Egg'. The player had to navigate a fairly intense series of obstacles to unlock a room with a 'wall' that said 'Created by Warren Robinett'. This was not found until the game had been in production and circulation for some time so Atari was unable to stop it from happening.

Adventure went on to sell over 1 million copies allowing it to become the 7th best selling title for the Atari 2600. It was popular enough that Atari planned a sequel, however as Robinett had left the company the sequel would have to be made by another programmer - this eventually evolved into the Swordquest series of action-adventure games for the Atari 2600.

Adventure II as seen on AtariAge.com

Adventure has become very popular in more modern times as a retro classic for the Atari 2600, enough that the website atariage.com developed and released a sequel to Adventure that they call 'Adventure II' for the Atari 5200.

Further Reading:

Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adventure_(1979_video_game)

AtariAge.com:
http://atariage.com/store/index.php?l=product_detail&p=334