The original, I would say primordial, action-adventure
video game. Adventure is a direct ancestor of Nintendo’s immensely popular
The Legend of Zelda. Written by
Warren Robinett for the
Atari 2600 and published by Atari, this was the game that pioneered the concept of an overhead-view world made up of interconnecting screens, where the edge of one screen led directly into the opposite edge of the next. It also predicted Zelda in that the player had to find and use a variety of items in clever ways in order to win. Robinett has been quoted as saying that Adventure for the 2600 was an attempt to reproduce the experience offered by
mainframe text games, such as
Colossal Cave and
Dungeon (which later became the
Zork series) in a graphical fashion. The game's third variation, in which the required objects are scattered randomly around the map, has rudimentary
Roguelike elements.
Adventure also contained the very first hidden secret, or "Easter Egg," ever included in a video game, hiding Robinett's name in a special room somewhere in the maze. He included the egg to get around the policy Atari had at the time of not publicly crediting its programmers. Robinett has said that the graphic of his name takes up 5% of the ROM space in the Adventure cartridge. The entire ROM for Adventure itself is only four kilobytes in size, which is less than half the size of an empty Microsoft Word 2000 document.
A well-made recreation (not emulation) of Adventure with a few new features, called Indenture and written in assembly by Craig Pell for systems which can run MS-DOS programs, can be found at:
http://www.retro-remakes.com/Adventure!/adventure.php