Adventure (1980 video game)

Adventure is a 1980 action-adventure game developed by Warren Robinett and published by Atari, Inc. for the Atari 2600.^[a] The player controls a square avatar whose quest is to explore an open-ended environment to find a magical chalice and return it to the Golden Castle. The game world is populated by roaming enemies: three dragons that can eat the avatar and a bat that randomly steals and moves items around the game world. Adventure introduced new elements to console games, including enemies that continue to move when offscreen.

The game was conceived as a graphical version of the 1977 text adventure Colossal Cave Adventure. Robinett spent approximately a year designing and coding the game while overcoming a variety of technical limitations of the console's hardware, as well as difficulties with Atari management. As a result of conflicts with Atari's management which denied giving public credit for programmers, Robinett programmed a secret room within the game that contained his name; this room was only found by players after the game was shipped and Robinett had left Atari. While not the first such Easter egg, Robinett's secret room pioneered this idea within video games and other forms of media, and it since has become a part of popular culture, such as in the climax of Ernest Cline's 2011 novel Ready Player One and its 2018 film adaptation.

Adventure received positive reviews at the time of its release and in the decades since; it is often named as one of the industry's most influential games and among the greatest video games of all time. It is one of the first action-adventure and fantasy games, and inspired other games in the genre. More than a million copies of Adventure were sold, and the game has been included in numerous Atari game collections for modern computer hardware. The game's prototype code was used as the basis for the 1979 Superman game, and a planned sequel eventually formed the basis for the Swordquest games.
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