Atari 2600 Adventure Playthrough
1Adventure is a video game for the Atari 2600 video game console, released in ca. late 1979–1980. In the game, 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 hides items around the game world. Adventure introduced a number of innovative game elements to console games, including a playing area that spanned several different screens and enemies that continued to move.
Adventure was conceived as a graphical version of the 1977 text adventure Colossal Cave Adventure. It took developer Warren Robinett approximately one year to design and code the game, during which time he had to overcome a variety of technical limitations in the Atari 2600 console hardware, as well as difficulties with management within Atari. In this game, he introduced the first widely known video game Easter egg, a secret room containing text crediting himself for the game's creation. Robinett's Easter egg became a tradition for future Atari 2600 titles.
Adventure received mostly positive reviews at the time of its release and has continued to be viewed positively in the decades since, often named as one of the industry's influential titles. It is considered the first action-adventure and console fantasy game, and inspired other titles in the genres. More than one million cartridges of Adventure were sold, and the game has been included in numerous Atari 2600 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. The Easter egg concept pioneered by the game has transcended video games and entered popular culture.
The player in the catacombs of the White Castle, carrying the White Key and being chased by the green dragon, Grundle.
In Adventure, the player's goal is to recover the Enchanted Chalice that an evil magician has stolen and hidden in the kingdom and return it to the Golden Castle. The kingdom includes two other castles (White and Black) and various obstacles and mazes within them. Further, the kingdom is guarded by three dragons: Yorgle (yellow dragon), Grundle (green dragon), and Rhindle (red dragon who moves much faster than the other two), that protect various items in the game and will try to chase and eat the player's avatar. There is also a bat that can roam across the kingdom freely, carrying a single item (which can include the player's avatar or a dragon) around; the bat was to be named Knubberrub but the name did not make it into the manual.The bat has two states, agitated and non-agitated; when in the agitated state, the bat will either pick up or swap what it currently carries with an object in the present room, eventually returning to the non-agitated state where it will not pick up an object. The bat continues to fly around even if not present on the player's current screen and may continue moving or swapping around objects.
The player's avatar is represented by a simple square shape that can move within and between rooms, each represented by a single screen. While Robinett originally intended for all rooms to be bidirectionally connected, a few such connections (including one inside the White Castle) were unidirectional, which he considered to be bugs. Such problems were explained away as "bad magic" in the game's manual. The player's goal is to find objects to help defeat the dragons and recover the Chalice. These include various keys that open the castles, a magnet that pulls items towards the player, a magic bridge that the player can use to cross certain obstacles, and a sword which can be used to defeat the dragons.Only one object can be carried at a time. The player can be eaten by a dragon if it is caught in its "bite" cycle, at which point the avatar is stuck in the dragon's stomach. At this point, the player can opt to restore their avatar's life instead of completely restarting the game, reappearing at the Golden Castle while leaving all objects where they were last left, but this will also regenerate any dragon previously killed as well. The ability to reset the player's avatar without resetting the entire game is considered the first known "continue game" option in video games.
The game offers three different skill levels. Level 1 is the easiest, as it uses a simplified room layout missing one of the castles and one of the mazes, and doesn't include the bat and one of the dragons. Level 2 is the full version of the game, with the various objects appearing in set positions at the start of the game. Level 3 is similar to Level 2, but the location of the objects is randomized to provide a more challenging game. In addition, the player can use the difficulty switches on the Atari 2600 to further control the game's difficulty by affecting the beha