The 2000s: a smaller audience, and a new way to buy games

The story of the 2000s adventure game is usually told as a death and a resurrection. The more useful version is a change of audience and a change of shop.

What actually happened to the audience

Wikipedia’s article on the adventure game is precise about the shape: Western popularity peaked in the late 1980s and mid-1990s, then declined as first-person shooters drew the mass audience, and by the early 2000s adventures were a niche rather than a mainstream category.

Two things are worth separating in that sentence.

1. The mass audience left. Games with reflexes and 3D movement became the default big release. The adventure’s read-look-try loop stopped being what most players wanted from an evening.
2. The audience did not vanish. A niche is still an audience. Games kept being made for it, at smaller budgets, in smaller markets (our reading).

Calling that “death” mistook a market position for an existence.

The quiet continuity

ScummVM’s compatibility list includes some games released well after the mid-1990s, which shows that adventure games kept being made; the list does not tell us how many or how well they sold.

The new shop

The second change was distribution. Digital storefronts removed the shelf-space constraint that had punished niche genres in physical retail: a shop could carry a hundred boxes, a storefront could list thousands of titles and profit from each one selling modestly (our explanation).

GOG.com’s adventure section is a present-day example of a storefront selling older PC games prepared for current systems (we did not verify its history), and Steam lists many small-developer titles today.

For a player today the practical consequence is simple: many 1990s and 2000s adventure games can be bought today in versions prepared for current systems (we have not counted how many).

Why this matters when someone recommends a game

Because availability and reputation are different things, and in the 2000s they separated. A game can be a landmark of the form and have no legal route today; a minor game can be easy to buy and run perfectly. Neither fact tells you whether you will enjoy it.

The workable approach: decide what you want to play for, then check availability per title rather than assuming the celebrated ones are the obtainable ones.

What the decade’s reputation gets wrong

The 2000s are often described as the years the adventure game was absent. Wikipedia’s adventure game article says digital distribution grew in the 2000s; the article ties the later revival to independent development and crowdfunding, which came after this decade.

Sources

• GOG.com — adventure catalogue — the adventure catalogue as it is sold to a general audience today.
• SCUMMVM — compatibility list — the back catalogue of titles the open-source interpreter still supports.
• Steam — store listings for the current adventure catalogue.