Mr. Bill's Adventureland

It's somehow appropriate that a site dedicated to PC adventure gaming, a genre that spawned many of its most wonderful, classic examples ten years or more ago, is itself more than ten years old and to this day has not compromised by updating its design style. You might easily pass over this one on looks alone, but if you have any interest at all in PC adventure games you should definitely spend some time here. Adventure games have been in decline for many years now, their unpopularity seemingly linked in proportion to the success of high-speed, three-dimensional action games that stretch modern hardware to its limits. But they're not forgotten. I don't have the space for a discussion about the adventure gaming genre itself here, so suffice it to say that it is characterized by a requirement for the player to use intelligence and imagination in at least equal quantities, the presentation of sometimes complex but always rewarding puzzles which advance the player's progress, an often astonishingly high standard of design art, and deep and complex storylines. And almost no blowing the body parts off aliens with ridiculously large guns, at all. It is still possible to find many of the older adventure games as budget CDs or downloads, even though many of the companies which produced them have themselves long gone. And adventure games are still being written, some, like the Sherlock Holmes series, having an illustrious heritage. The true classics, though, seem to be the older games and the names Myst, and The Longest Journey, and Syberia, immediately spring to mind. Occasionally, adventure games have been popular enough to get up there on the heady heights shared by, say, Halo or GTA3. But I think everyone will admit that the demand for more intellectual, artistic and imaginative gaming, if not gone forever, is at least temporarily much limited. In some respects, this site is a museum of the wonderful adventure games of years gone by. But hopefully it may also encourage newcomers to the genre to search out some of these gems and breathe some life back into a style of gaming that is undeservedly ignored by a new generation of players today. If you haven't yet played Myst, there is still time, and you'll never forget the moment that you solve your first puzzle.