Has Double Fine resurrected the adventure genre?

Not twenty four hours ago the adventure game was as dead as its been for ten plus years. It was a Romero zombie, shambling but ineffably moving. Telltale’s Jurassic Park series has been a bullet in the leg, but that doesn’t stop a zombie. Even so, it’s slow, the adventure game. You could walk around it. You could steal its lunch money.

Then Double Fine happened. Over ten thousand people in less than twelve hours donated $400,000 to make a traditional adventure game happen.

So the question has to be asked: is there a market for this? Will we see more adventure games?

The adventure genre hasn’t come very far since its inception. The best modern series, the Blackwell games, could very easily have been made in 1990 except for their subject matter (which involves, you know, the internet existing). Experiments within the genre like Heavy Rain and the aforementioned Jurassic Park have led to scorn and distrust.

Fans know what they like, and they like nostalgia.

Because here’s the thing: those of us who grew up with these classic adventure games are in their late twenties, early thirties now. Most of them are professionals. They have a fair amount of cash (not speaking for my own journalist self, of course). They love video games, and while they don’t love adventure games they love their childhood, the games of Tim Schaefer and Roberta Williams and Ron Gilbert. We especially have a fetish for Double Fine, who transcended generations with Psychonauts, a game which appealed to a younger group of gamers. There’s an obvious draw to supporting people whose work was so foundational to us, especially now that we have the financial means to do so.

A similar phenomenon happened with the band Rush over the past decade. They went from a limited, niche band that appealed only to nerdy band kids to a visible band because those nerdy kids grew up to have a lot of money. Suddenly they were referenced in movies and on television. They went from a good concert draw to making millions and millions of dollars. And sure, their last two albums have been pretty excellent, but not excellent enough to turn things around; what helped was their fans becoming affluent.

The same thing is happening with old games. Double Fine has been in this situation before with their recent PC ports, and this is just a crowdsourcing of that phenomenon. I wouldn’t be surprised if a half-dozen copycats spring up, either. Would I pledge $15 for a Commander Keen sequel? Or for a sequel to Grim Fandango? Or Planescape: Torment? Of course I would. I’m sure lots of you would, as well. I wouldn’t be surprised to see some company like Obsidian fund an Infinity Engine “sequel” using this. We all could think up thousands of scenarios that our favorite older designers could use to make games “like they used to”.

But what does this mean for adventure games? Well, nothing. Not a thing. We might see a small spike—I know I want to crack into something old school and obtuse when I get home tonight—but the success of a major studio getting an adventure game published isn’t going to reinvent the genre’s wheel. It may pull the bullet out of the zombie, but it’s not going to bring it back to life.