As I've pointed out before, it's pretty much a myth that commercial adventures are dead. Just visit www.adventuregamers.com , for instance, and you'll see a bunch of new and upcoming commercial releases.

Does this possibly fortell the birth of Monkey Island VI: LeChucks Hat.

You fight like a dairy farmer!

Interesting link indeed, but one has to admit that fluffy bunny is indeed correct. There hasn't been a year without (at least) a couple major releases, and let's not just ignore both Telltale's succes and the niche market the Adventure Company has carved itself.

Then again, we could speak about freeware and indy adventures, but that's another story alltogether.

"As I've pointed out before, it's pretty much a myth that commercial adventures are dead."

Adventure games are dead in the same sense that wargames are dead. Yeah, people still make them, but they aren't a topic of conversation, they get zero coverage and, Nancy Drew aside, they mostly subsist on a small, hardcore audience.

Of course, an adventure is more likely to become a hit than a wargame, as Longest Journey and Nancy Drew have shown. But the genre is far from vital.

Even if it's not dead as a commercial enterprise, the genre mostly hasn't moved beyond where it was 15 years ago and the writing has gotten worse.

I heartily agree with Troy here - the point is, at one point adventure games were high profile. Now they're not. Maybe 'death' is a point of contention, but the sentiment is correct.

(PS I love adventure games!)

Troy & Simon, I think you forget that there's a games market outside the US. In quite a few major markets, especially in Europe, adventures enjoy a lot of popularity, and new adventure releases are considered big news.

I know this. I work fulltime writing for a general gaming site (non-english), and I know where we get our page impressions. A random example: Our review of Journey to the Moon, a fairly low-key adventure release, got the same amount of page impressions as our God of War-review, and more than twice as many as our review of Guitar Hero 2.

This is the reality I'm used to, and when people tell me adventure games are dead or only have a small, hardcore audience, it just doesn't fit with what I know from my daily experience.

And, of course, by reading sites such as Adventuregamers (which you really should check more often, Simon, they do have a lot of interesting articles there) and Telltales forum, I know that even in the US, the people buying adventure gamers are just as diverse as other gamers. And there's quite a few of them, too.

BTW, I briefly checked an unfinished list of major GC-exhibitors, and found 14 pure adventure games in the list of games that they're going to display. I know there will be more (Focus will be there, so I'm guessing they'll show A Vampyre Story and Dracula: Origin, for instance).

This doesn't actually prove anything, of course, but I wonder how many serious wargames (assuming you mean hex-based stuff and the like) you'll find among the major GC-exhibitors...

Fair comment, Mr. Fluffy Bunny! We're probably being Yank-centric here, or at least, not Continental Europe-centric.

Europe is certainly the primary market for adventure games, and for a lot of reasons. The PC is still considered a viable gaming platform, and many nations have made a cottage industry out of similar games that appeal to a set market. (That's why there are so many at Leipzig I wager - the huge North and Central European adventure game factories. Wargames have their own conferences and distribution system.)

Your clicking stats more likely reflect the scarcity of adventure game coverage than anything else. If there are only two or three places to get reviews of a particular game, those few reviews are going to get hit a lot.

One of my most clicked links is a review of a Punic Wars game; I derive from that no evidence that there is a large appetite for ancients wargaming. Only that this is a game not being reviewed by Eurogamer or Gamespot or Gamespy and that the review is being linked on genre fan sites.

Dead or not, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis was my favorite game when I was ten.