Adventure

Before console adventures became vast, one kingdom fit inside four kilobytes.

Released for the Atari 2600 in 1980, Warren Robinett’s Adventure reworked the room-and-object structure of Colossal Cave Adventure into a graphical game controlled with a joystick. The player crossed a connected kingdom in search of the Enchanted Chalice, carrying one object at a time while dragons and a roaming bat complicated the journey.

Its combination of direct movement, exploration and object-based problem solving helped establish an early language for graphical action-adventures. Instead of treating each screen as a self-contained challenge, Adventure made the spaces between them part of a larger world that players had to understand.

Earlier games had hidden surprises, but Adventure gave them a lasting name. Robinett hid his credit inside a secret room; after players found it, Atari began calling such secrets “Easter eggs.”