[breadbox]

Oh jeez -- Thayer's Quest. That game was a complete money sink. A quarter only bought you time, and there was no such thing as a skip-ahead button, so just getting through the opening cutscene ate up most of your first quarter. I spent so much money getting all the way to the end of that game ... only to discover that it ended at a cliffhanger. A final screen announced that Part II was in the works, but they never actually made it, presumably because the first one did so poorly.

I was all in favor of seeing adventure games break out of their text-only mold (this was years before Myst), which is chiefly why I gave the game a chance in the first place, but Thayer's Quest was a poor exemplar.

[antimagic]

Well, there were plenty of graphics-based adventure games before Must, such as all of the Sierra games, like King's Quest, Space Quest, Leisure Suit Larry, etc. After that, there were all of the LucasArts SCUMM-based games, before Myst arrived on the scene.

Myst brought two new things to the genre - quicktime movies embedded in-game to make things come to life far more vividly, and the inability to pick things up - a constraint that generally lead to problems being more logical than had typically been the case for adventure games.

[breadbox]

It wasn't really the graphics that I was referring to as much as being in a video game arcade. I wanted to see adventure games break out into the mainstream.