Some of my best gaming experiences; actually only some of my best solo experiences during the last year of the 80’s and during the 90’s came from the amazing “Point and Click Adventure” genre. Also known as “Graphic Adventures”, each game was an absolute journey, deeply layered and immersive: I was disconnected from reality and attuned to a different world, allowing me to be another person from the moment those discs were inserted. the moment he flipped me that ON/OFF switch and went to bed.

To escape my normal life as a kid at school, all I had to do was boot up, and I instantly became a pirate, secret agent, time traveler, space janitor, detective, archaeologist, magician. or a king. Douglas Quaid had “Rekall”, I had my Amiga.

This was beyond “the book”; Point-and-click adventures allowed the player to delve into a rich story, but actually be the protagonist, walk like them, respond like them, interact with other characters like them, and make decisions for them; each time being rewarded with more arguments, riddles and riddles. Before the integration of actual audio dialogue into games when they came on CD-ROM years later (which I think botched them); the much cooler generation of limited-capacity floppy disk users were forced to read all the dialogue in their heads (creating their own voices if they wanted) with a 16-bit soundtrack and sound effects to go along with it. It was a sublime experience.

I preferred Point’n’Click alone

Often with intriguing plots and the intense need to solve the current puzzle; gamers spent countless hours in the games without a break, playing all day, all night, and into the early hours of the morning. With a tired mind, this could transform them into a trance-like, dreamlike state, as if the dream they were having was in front of them but in full color, fully controllable and lucid. These were the best dreams they had ever had. Everything beyond the 4 sides of the screen in front of them collapsed and nothing else existed except the adventure; the only reminder that they were still a human looking was the feel of their wrist and hand pointing their mouse and the clicking sound as they chose a verb and then an object.

It was a very personal and lonely experience; a journey that can only be thoroughly enjoyed when done alone. I once sat with a friend, trying together to solve some puzzles from a certain game that was available at the time, at his house. I had the feeling that I was invading his experience, and he was definitely spoiling mine; this was an experience I wanted to have locked up in my own room, not his. It was akin to trying to sit down and read a classic novel at the same time as someone else, both looking at the same pages, one wanting to turn a page and finish it, the other wanting to stay and take in the intricacies. of story and dialogue and apply imagination to enhance the scene. We were just two different instances of that sprite in two different mindsets. On his screen was exactly the same animated collection of pixels, but I did not recognize this character, he was not the same one who was waiting for me at home. We had been through different things at different times; I built a relationship with mine, and here was just a clone doing actions I wanted to save for later, it just wasn’t the same. Needless to say, I never tried to co-play a Point’n’Click again.

Point & Click Piracy, before Monkey Island

It all started for me in 1989, my uncle had given me a bootleg (naughty naughty) copy of Delphine’s brilliant Future Wars; This dampened my appetite for the genre, however, since it was (unbeknownst to any of us) only a two-disc game, I was only able to complete a few of the puzzles before being prompted to “Insert Disc 2”. Without the disc, I couldn’t continue, which was frustrating to say the least, but this had me hungry for graphic adventures – I needed to play more.

I used to order Amiga games from some kind of mail order catalog (I can’t for the life of me remember what this was called, or why I was doing it this way, since I could probably go to a computer store in the city). However, I believe that this catalog contained games that were not widely known or distributed at the time, perhaps from abroad. Inside it was a small ad showing a game with a weird and exciting cover art, like some cool 80s movie or cartoon, accompanied by a captivating sales pitch – right there you had to find out what was going on. in the manic mansion. And so it was ordered and the waiting time began (I seem to remember 14 – 28 days?). Every day was a “Has the postman been in?” routine, until a warm and fuzzy Saturday morning finally arrived. I remember opening the big brown bag and taking out this amazing box. On the front, a large, colored version of what was shown in the catalogue, but on the back, a strange painted image of the antagonists of the stories: Dr. Fred, Nurse Edna, and Weird Ed. That inside the box there was a huge poster displaying a bulletin board with all sorts of references related to the plot and the backstory of the characters really sold him. Maniac Mansion Disk 1 was in, and I was going to go into Maniac Mansion.

Adventures for a time without adventures

With a strong desire to point and click, and as the 90s arrived, many more titles followed; Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, The Secret of Monkey Island, Operation Stealth, Loom, Day of the Tentacle, Cruise for a Corpse, Leisure Suit Larry, King’s Quest, Space Quest, Police Quest , Dark Seed , Dreamweb, KGB.. Some atmospheric and serious, some full of incredible wit and humor; they came fast and dense, each one taking me to a different place, time and life.

As the genre became popular and steadily topped the charts, it wasn’t long before sequels appeared giving us even more adventures and more time to spend with (as) our favorite characters.

However, as consoles became more and more prominent with their gamepads, this meant the end of point-and-click (of course, consoles don’t use a mouse), and with game sales at an all-time low due to to the amount of floppy disk piracy; this spelled the end of the Amiga. PCs continued the genre for a while, but the new generation wanted more shock value and graphically exciting real-time 3D games; the whimsical innocence of point and click games as we know them faded and the adventures were seemingly over. Fast forward about 15 years… Although it lacks authenticity in interaction (less like “point and click” adventures, more like “look then touch” adventures), in recent years, with the intimacy of devices From touchscreen and tablets, the point-and-click adventure made me come back and was happy to see a re-release of some classics. It’s nice to see the genre becoming popular once again, though sadly, to me, they’ve lost the charm that made the games what they were. Maybe it’s because the actual hardware that was used at the time to play them is missing; With little storage space, processing power, and graphics capabilities, the stories and characters really shined because they had to. Or maybe it was because of what else was happening (or not happening) outside of the computer screen at the time. In an era before the Internet, mobile phones, social media, MMOs and instant digital entertainment, there were few places to transpose the consciousness of a child looking for a real adventure. With such a lack of options at the time for escapism, the Point and Click adventure was a Point and Click away from a whole different world.