Video Game History Casebook

Adventure, a game released in the year 19XX

It all started a long time ago, back in 1979... or was it 1978? Or even 1980? We'll see about that; let it for now be said that this is the story of an Atari game called Adventure and its release date. Adventure was programmed by Warren Robinett, conceived in 1978 (so the story goes) as a video game adaption to the original text adventure game Collossal Cave by William Crowther and Don Woods. Limited to tiny amounts of cartridge space but blessed with the Atari VCS' marvelous (for the late 1970s) graphical capabilities, the game eventually had to take a very different shape than its original inspiration. Instead of navigating in turns through parser inputs, the player was to move around a graphical environment in real-time, maneuvering through a maze, searching for the tools to solve it (there was no inventory: the hero could only carry one item at a time), and fighting dragons like in an action game. The game is rightly considered the origin of the action adventure genre, building the foundation for milestones such as Icon: Quest for the Ring, The Legend of Zelda and Metroid. However, it goes beyond being an inspiration for a number of later games. It can be considered as the first step to combine the typical characteristics of both computer games and video games (which then encompassed arcades and home consoles) - we might have mostly the same kinds of games on all platforms now, but back then they were considered entirely different mediums: One where players were supposed to use their intelligence, and another that demanded their dexterity with a joystick.

The game's most immediate call to fame, however, was what is now called the first Easter Egg in video gaming (but what the creator himself considered his "signature" at the time). Robinett, fed up with the way Atari treated its designers, deftly snuck in his name into the game: An object barely recognizable as such, only a pixel in size and colored the same as the floor, would open the passage to a secret room when carried to a certain location under certain conditions.

Well, but when exactly was the first action-adventure, if not the first video game genre-mix ever, unleashed on Atarimaniacs? The game's Wikipedia article has long bounced back and forth between 1978 and 1980, mostly motivated through conflicting copyright information on the cartridge and manual (a box with the 1978 date hasn't been spotted on the internet so far). We can now say with certainty that the 1978 date has been an obvious error on Atari's side (more about that in a minute). Warren Robinett had since maintained that "the game was released for the Christmas season in 1979", as he stated on multiple occasions, including an 2003 Interview (Internet Archive backup as linked on Wikipedia; the site itself has since moved here). His story (in answering the question how long it took for the "Easter Egg" to be discovered) goes like this:

I don't know exactly. About a year, maybe less. I handed over my finished code (with the Easter Egg in it) in June 1979, and quit. The game was released for the christmas season in 1979. I went back to my hometown in Missouri for a while, then traveled around in Europe for a while. When I returned to California in the spring of 1980, I think it was known by then. At least by summer 1980, it was known. I went out with some of the Atari game designers one night for pizza and beer and told them about how I did it. I saw a gleam in Rob Fulop's eye, like he was already planning his own Easter Egg.

In October 2007, this quote was adopted by Wikipedia as the sole source for the release date, which since has been cemented as a universally accepted "fact". However, there are several factors that should alarm any attentive reader about taking this part of the statement on faith: First, it starts with "I don't know exactly." Admittedly, that is his answer to when the easter egg became known, but it sets the right tone for what follows: Robinett left Atari half a year before the date he gives for a release, then left the state, and the country. He doesn't give dates for his geographic departures, but that can only amount to the problems of this passage: The language simply isn't very precise. I feel like I'm regurtitating this simple fact over and over again: Interviews are helpful and valuable, but we cannot write history based on people's 30-year-old memories alone, especially given the indefinite-sounding nature of the statements in this case. After all, there is an even older interview, which seems to contradict certain details in the later account, concerning the time frame between him finishing the game and quitting Atari. When I contacted Warren Robinett, he was so kind as to clarify this perceived conflict from his memories:

I handed over the what-I-thought-was-final code for Adventure at the time that I quit Atari in April 1979. I then went back to my hometown in Springfield, Missouri for a couple months. When I returned to California in June 1979, the two pieces of code which I had handed off in April -- for the VCS cartridges Adventure and Basic Programming -- had been criticized fornot being completely finished, and/or having bugs. So I spent a few days fixing these things, and got paid for it by Atari as a short consulting job. (They were considered not finished because I had not implemented an "attract mode" in which the colors cycled if no user input was received for several minutes.) The bug was that the screen rolled in Basic Programming under certain conditions. My fixes to the code seemed to satisfy everyone. This was June 1979.

He also granted that it was an assumption - however well-reasoned - that brought him to the Christmas 1979 release date:

Soon after that, in late summer 1979, I went to Europe. I was 27 years old. I traveled around and stayed in youth hostels sometimes, cheap hotels other times, and sometimes slept on the train on overnight trips, since I had a Eurail Pass. I stayed for a month in Hannover Germany, where I had friends, Johannes Goebel and Walburg Kicia. I returned to the US in early 1980. I am pretty sure the Adventure cartridge was released during the 1979 Christmas season. But I was in Europe during that time. People were definitely playing Adventure in early 1980. (...)

Anyway, the Adventure cart was definitely out in the world by June 1980, and had been out there for a while. My belief is that it was released during the 1979 Christmas season, but I did not actually see an Adventure cart in a retail store prior to Jan. 1, 1980. So I guess I don't truly know for sure.

Since then, more evidence has been brought forth to put the Christmas season 1979 date in question. Atari has published not one, but two revisions of their software catalog with a 1980 date, both of which aim to build up hype for the game, which would become "available soon." Only in their 1981 catalog (judging from those that are preserved and available at the archives of the awesome AtariAge.com), the label dissapeared.

An extensive sighting of newspaper advertisements of the time yielded two ads by Hobbyworld Electronics in InfoWorld issues, which don't list the game by May 1980, but in the June variant. Now it would be naive to assume that every retailer got and advertised the game at the same time, but how much time can pass in between? Unfortunately this approach is crushed immediately by the only other added game: Indy 500, one of the very first games Atari published for the VCS. It should be noted, though, that it seemed impossible to find any advertising samples before June 1980 that have the game, but plenty printed after that, as well as many more earlier ones that don't. (It appears that the adresses for these pages have been changed, and currently a paid membership is required to search the archives; links are kept for reference only - ed.)

Furthermore, the Magazine Video, one of the first outlets in the US to regularly report about video games thanks to legendary editors Bill "The Game Doctor" Kunkel (RIP) and Arnie Katz, was also the first to give independent awards for video game achievements. Video proclaimed Adventure the most innovative game of the previous year for the 1981 awards. Given the wording as later referenced in Kunkel & Katz' standalone video game magazine Electronic Games (Winter 1981, page 38/39) isn't as specific about the release date as one would hope ("reflects accomplishments during the 12 months of the preceding year"). The 1980 awards were still clearly cut (at least officially) to the end of the year 1979: "The first set of Arkies was announced in February 1980 and covered all hardware and software produced prior to January 1, 1980" which - if followed through to the next year - would have included Adventure had it been put out for Christmas 1979. For the record it should be said that by 1983 the time frame had shifted significantly: "a title must have become available between October 1, 1981 and October 1, 1982 to be eligible this time." The text in the magazines gives no reason to assume either way for the 1981 Arkies (so those for 1980 games, bit confusing), but they do contain other games we think were released for "Chrismas season 1979" (And one that was long thought to have been released in 1978, Superman).

Finally, the database of the US Copyright Office, which professes to contain all filed records from 1978 to the present, contains only one entry by Atari for Adventure (main index title as Advent), registrated years after the fact on May 14th, 1985, with the registration number TX0001344614. It lists the date of creation as "1979", but the date of publication as June 29th, 1980. The datasheet doesn't give conclusive information as to what exactly had been copyrighted here; the type of work is listed as "Computer File," but Atari had only submitted a printout, as opposed to the audiovisual material that would usually go with registrating a video game, but it lines up in the long row of sources that don't know of any kind of publication before 1980.

Contemporary reviews of the game don't offer much consolation, either - at the time of its release, video game magazines weren't around yet, and video game coverage in general entertainment magazines was spotty at best. Bill Kunkel and Frank Laney covered the game in their "Arcade Alley" column in the January 1981 issue of Video - which had been around since 1978, so they definitely could have covered it earlier if it was available (for the record, "Arcade Alley" and its successor Electronic Games were typically up to 6 months late after the fact in their review coverage, one year seems like a bit much). Adventure was also reviewed in the book How to Win at Home Video Games, but that was published even later, in 1982.

The oldest available source to hint at a 1979 release is Robinett's belief, which it seems was first made public in Judith Butler's Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative in 1997 (although the author gets entangled in unclear citation and nonsensical conclusions, so it's hard to tell what it was that Robinett actually said at the time) - a statement made almost twenty years after the fact by someone who was not an eyewitness to any direct signs of the release.

For most, however, that one interview quote should suffice, and thus Adventure became "a 1979 video game." The date has been regurtitated in countless works of classic games coverage:

The Medium of the Video Game, by Mark J. P. Wolf is the oldest of them, and the only one published before Warren Robinett's statements reached gamer circles through more specialized interviews. It suffers from blurry phrasing - the claim is that Adventure "appeared" in 1979, which can mean a number of things, ranging from conception to publishing - but most importantly it is very shoddy with fact checking, made obvious by countless little mistakes, like its statement that the protagonist of Donkey Kong was named "Mario Mario". This wasn't established until later games, originally he was known as "Jumpman". It also lists Haunted House as a 1981 game (which was labeled with "Estimated Availability - February 1982" in Atari Catalog CO16725-Rev. D, published late in 1981). These are only the errors from two pages of the book. The book offers no sources for any of its claims, and needless to say, it proves itself quite unreliable.

1UP included Adventure in their The Essential 50 series, This particular entry was posted on January 31st, 2004 - before the date was adopted by Wikipedia, but after the interviews with Robinett that popularized the Christmas 1979 date. Being a strictly journalist venture, 1UP of course simply lists the release date, without elaborating how they ended up with it.

The Video Game Theory Reader 2 and Vintage Games: An Insider Look at the History of Grand Theft Auto, Super Mario, and the Most Influential Games of All Time both mention the game in passing, with "1979" in brackets. Vintage Games does put a couple citations, though it is very spotty about it. The part about Adventure contains none, and indeed it would be reasonable to expect from any of the books to do any amount of original research for such a minute, seemingly trivial detail that doesn't relate at all to the purpose of the books. But this also means that they are not useful in determining a consensus, as they are likely to have followed the preestablished consensus (about this particular factoid!) without any reflection on it. It should also be noted that Robinett contributed the foreword for the first volume of The Video Game Theory Reader, so the authors are very likely to have gotten their information from him, if they indeed made any attempts in determining it beyond a quick look at a database.

Even the current Atari's old official page for the game, where it could be played inside web browser, mentioned the year 1979. The page itself wass not dated - only the Atari homepage as a whole was decorated with a 2012 copyright. That doesn't matter at all, though, as the site doesn't even say the game was published in 1979, merely that Robin Warinett created it that year, which by all existing accounts is correct, but it is not what's in question here.

Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System by Ian Bogost and Nick Montfort is a bit more relevant to this issue. In the earliest print of the book (and its ebook version), Warren Robinett's Adventure was listed under 1978 in the timeline at the beginning of the book, but with an 1980 date in the bibliography. In subsequent prints, both dates were corrected to "1979", so some work is bound to have been put into determining this. I reached out to Nick Montfort to try and find out details, and he was so kind as to elucidate the process:

Noah Wardrip-Fruin and I used 1978 as the date on the New Media Reader CD, which contains the Atari VCS Adventure, since that was the copyright date. Usually one trusts such dates when writing a bibliography, and they are used sometimes by convention, but if it's a release date that is the goal, the game wasn't released in 1978.

We looked at several sources to try to date the game's release. Robinett did say that he completed both Adventure and BASIC Programming in June 1979 and then quit Atari. It's not always that case that people remember all dates correctly, but this seems like good evidence. That by itself doesn't mean that the game was released in 1979, but it does mean that 1978 can't be right (despite the copyright date).

To summarize: It is a common practice for publications about video games to go by the displayed copyright date, but in this case this was demonstrated as inaccurate. Given the time distance to the release of the book, my correspondent unfortunately wasn't able to cite any concrete sources that were used to determine the 1979 date, but the general drive seems to be that the data was never conclusive:

Since our book isn't about the uncertainly of release dates, and we did find some additional evidence for 1979, we used that date rather than "c. 1979" or "1979?," although those would be appropriate.

This is very important to note: Any publication whose main focus is not the establishment of release dates will usually be content with using shorthand without pointing out all the small issues that arise when determining such facts. Secondary sources thus simply cannot be of help in determining the release date - the proper research using primary sources has to be demonstrated at least once if any claims are to be validated.

Early readers of this column might remember a previous version of this text, which was rather critical of the treatment of this issue demonstrated by one of the authors of the book Atari Inc. Business is Fun. This prompted the other co-author, Curt Vendel, to talk a bit about the research for the work on our blog:

We even went so far as to track down an original fan folded green/white print out of Adventure from its compiling on a PDP-11 computer and unfortunately the printout didn't have a date on it, so believe me, we really went all out in tracking leads and hitting some dead ends to uncover as much detail as possible.

This statement implies the claim that indeed extensive research has been done - even if only one example is given - but no conclusive evidence could be found. Contrary to that notion, the other author, Marty Goldberg, has made claims about the existence of an "internal ROM release list" with the title that is supposed to be dated 1979, but even if that list can be produced, it still begs elaboration as to what kind of release is meant here, and without further context, there is no ground to assume it correlating with the publishing. Many internal company documents were used in the research for Business is Fun, but as usual the book itself largely foregoes exact citations. But either way, Adventure is never even mentioned in the book, which focuses on the business side of things and the broader strokes of how the company was being run.

We've arrived at an impasse similar to the one Frank Cifaldi found himself at when trying to establish a definite date for the US release of Super Mario Bros.. Although we have several clues that hint at different dates, we're left with no solid proof for either of them. We found a lot of indecisive clues, but there is no solid proof to ultimately dertermine when Adventure was actually released. A 1979 publishing date seems rather unlikely at this point, but cannot be positively disproven. It's still in the realm of possibility that 1979 is correct - but if it is, it's so by chance and not by method. We have no facts to really support the assumption. All we can say for sure that Adventure was available by June 1980, as evidenced in advertisements and supported by the point in time Warren Robinett is confident to attribute absolute certainty to, as well as the only available copyright notice with that name filed by Atari.

Of course, nothing of this changes Adventure's role as a seminal achievement in the history of video games, marking the first time vaguely adventure/RPG like concepts were taken over from the mainframe computers to a lo-fi console experience. In the best case it'd make only a difference of a couple of weeks, and certainly no more than six months, and it's not like there have been any other games quite like it in the intermediate months, and it stands as a groundbreaking achievement either way.