Adventure & Visual Novels
This form starts in a cave. Between 1976 and 1977 Colossal Cave Adventure walked you through one in prose alone, and Zork deepened it. In 1980 Roberta Williams's Mystery House added pictures — and this “first graphical adventure” survived our checking; no earlier example turned up, which makes it a rare “first” that holds. The turn in Japan came in 1983 with The Portopia Serial Murder Case (Yuji Horii). It first asked you to type, and after watching players at a shop demo defeat his parser — “people were entering words I had not anticipated, and the program would not respond” — command selection was born the next year in Hokkaido Chain Murders: Okhotsk ni Kiyu, and the 1985 Famicom Portopia spread it across the country. “The killer is Yasu” endures as the most famous spoiler in Japan. Horii then took that interface onward, in his own words: “an RPG is hard, so I thought I would let people get used to things with an adventure game first.” Portopia was a warm-up act for Dragon Quest. The other channel is sound. Koichi Nakamura, forced to abandon an RPG for lack of cartridge space, used the Super Famicom's audio to invent the “sound novel” with Otogirisou (1992); answering survey cards that asked for a mystery next, he wrote letters to young novelists, and Takemaru Abiko's reply became Kamaitachi no Yoru (1994). That same year, 1994, romance branched (Tokimeki Memorial, and Angelique, which Koei's all-women team spent a decade reaching). In 2001 Shu Takumi's Ace Attorney made a courtroom playable: “the idea of a game about a lawyer was there from quite early on,” a pitch he pushed through even after a manager phoned to say it was confusing and he should drop the lawyer. Then Higurashi (2002) and Fate/stay night (2004), both out of the doujin scene, crossed the ocean, and Japanese novel games now sit on shelves worldwide.
The myth, corrected
Command-selection adventure games were born with the Famicom version of Portopia.
The first was the PC version of Okhotsk ni Kiyu (1984); the Famicom Portopia (1985) is the one that popularized it. The motive, though, comes straight from Yuji Horii: after building it around typed input, he watched a shop demo where “people were entering words I had not anticipated, and the program would not respond.” Losing to unforeseen input is what called the invention into being.