‘Full Throttle’: One Last Lap
Why do we call ‘adventure games’ ‘adventure games’?
Short answer: because Colossal Cave Adventure (1976) is considered the pioneer of the genre and has been a convenient name, like when first-person shooters were called doom-like.
But if we look at the concept of the adventure genre in other media, some comparisons emerge. They are generally defined as stories where the protagonists are thrown into new environments and situations that break out of their comfort zone and force them to adapt. If one strains one’s eyes enough, almost all stories can be called ‘adventures’. And yet, when we think of adventures we think of that need to adapt as something quick, in the moment. Getting out of a dangerous situation, dodging, picking up the sword on the wall and defending yourself in a duel, grabbing the candlestick or the main pole and landing on the other corner.
In essence, when we talk about adventures there is an element of haste. Adventures are a matter of skills (which are acquired in the course of the adventure) but also reflexes and, let’s face it, unexpected strokes of luck.
By contrast, in most games that we originally defined as adventure games — prior, at least, to Tomb Raider (1996) which at the time was considered closer to the platform genre* — we find that the mechanics are the opposite of the need to respond quickly. Much of what defines the experience of playing an adventure game is leisurely traversing (very exotic, mind you) almost static spaces, with all the time in the world to interrogate characters, listen to descriptions and interact and collect items, trying out combinations in the hope that one will unlock new story events.
(*Small intermission: there is indeed a long list of antecedents to Tomb Raider that were also defined as adventure games despite the core mechanics being platformers. Being different from the ones not covered here, I think they deserve their own space for discussion in a future post).
In fact, these limitations are inherent in his best designs. Take Lure of the Temptress (1992) where our protagonist starts out locked in a cell and we have to figure out, in that small space and with limited interactive elements, how to escape from it. Once we succeed, the game’s city opens up to us with an engine called Virtual Theatre that allowed the NPCs to move around the map following their routines. Routines that we have to analyse and understand in order to evade guards or discover the right moments to complete certain puzzles but, alas, that are repeated in the same cycle meaning that if we miss the opportunity to do something we can always try again a few minutes later.
This ‘open world’ was also present in games like King’s Quest, Sam & Max: Hit the road (1993) or Discworld (1995), with the dreaded situation where characters navigate through different screens sometimes not knowing which is the next step to take, trying all inventory items with all the characters and highlighted elements of these screens.
It is curious. Being called an adventure genre it is, in essence, a type of game where the main work is intellectual, centred on puzzles and dialogue options, but which, in the end, many ended up solving by the very scientific method of bumping two stones against each other, to see what would happen. With very minor exceptions — hello, the boxing system in Indiana Jones and the last Crusade (1989) — there was no urgency or skill.
The background
Pixel hunting is a term that indicates the idea of adventure games that required scanning the entire screen for tiny objects or objects indistinguishable from the background to find the solution to a puzzle. For anyone who hasn’t experienced it, imagine how commonplace it was as to have given birth not only to the term but to specific buttons on which I remember in particular an item in Simon the Sorcerer (1993) hidden among the leaves of a forest that was essential to progress and drove me particularly crazy at the time. Simon the Sorcerer had a specific button to indicate interactive objects, in the same way that the remaster of Full Throttle (1995) does now.
And yet, sometimes it’s not enough.
Full Throttle is an ambitious adventure game for LucasArts’ then-current run in the genre. Compared to the $200,000 cost of The Secret of Monkey Island (1990) this was a million dollar project. There is great attention to animation and style, the story flows more naturally than in other adventures. The game featured 3D modelled vehicles over classically animated backgrounds and characters, the result of Tim Schafer’s team at LucasArts living alongside the simultaneous development of Star Wars: Dark Forces (1995).
A Road Rash (1991) style motorbike combat mini-game is incorporated here, which, while weak on its own, adds variety. It’s a sort of substitute for the insult swordfights in The Secret of Monkey Island and the Highway Surfin’ mini-game in Sam & Max Hit the Road. The idea is to progress through various fights to upgrade with different accessories and precise timing to attack your opponents. It is curious that returning to this game in 2021 reminded me that the video game adaptation Mad Max (2015) centres all its mechanics on this same idea, which reflects the cinematic influence that Full Throttle exhibits with nods to George Miller’s saga but also Yojimbo (Akira Kurosawa, 1961), Hard Target (John Woo, 1993) and Clint Eastwood’s westerns.
These motorbike fights are quite unpredictable: the characters with their various weapons hint at strategies and the time needed to act based on our reflexes, but losing also means losing some of the weapons we’ve taken from them and starting over. Sometimes, while our enemies are blustering, the game doesn’t allow us to brandish our weapon so we have to wait to find a split second between when they finish their monologue and attack us for the first time or dodge the attack, with the difficulty that they can move in the meantime and corner us against the gutter. In the end, getting through this section comes down to a mixture of chance (finding the right moment and the game presenting a staggered order of enemies) and knowing which weapon is most effective for which, which is not always obvious.
Here I pause to comment on a small detail that took place during my last playthrough of the Remastered version that came out in 2015. During the mini-game of motorbike battles, losing a battle, the protagonist gets back on the bike and the animation of the road… started to move in the opposite direction the bike was pointing, as if it was reversing. Like a rear projection in an old movie — actually, a Full Motion Video system designed for Star Wars: Rebel Assault (1993) — the effect highlights the juggling act the team was doing to integrate different mechanics into the genre with the technology and resources at their disposal.
The usual verb system that had lasted until Maniac Mansion II: Day of the Tentacle (1993) had been replaced by a series of icons in Sam & Max Hit the Road to facilitate full-screen graphics. Full Throttle follows the same path with an activatable “wheel” with icons for “Eyes”, “tongue” (usually talking but also comes to have another use), “hand” (usually a punch) and “foot” (certainly a mechanic the game makes good use of) The downside? It’s sometimes unclear which objects one can highlight, something LucasArts had perfected since the use of the “What is” command in the origins of the SCUMM system, and worse, as with Sam & Max, it’s also unclear how far the maps and backgrounds extend.
There is nothing more frustrating in an adventure than knowing the solution and trying to figure out how to proceed. Take one example from the game: to infiltrate a junkyard, you have to deal with a rabid dog. Those of you who remember The Secret of Monkey Island will have had the idea of finding some kind of distraction for the dog, such as food. Nearby, in a trailer, we can find a litter box indicating that the owner may be the owner of a large dog. Inside the trailer there is a cooler and inside, a piece of meat. It seems obvious.
So, we head to the junkyard with our piece of meat and… the first two places where one can interact and leave the bait for the guard dog are not recognised. What’s more, if we move to the right towards a group of flattened cars and have the happy idea of leaving the meat in the boot there, the dog comes rushing over… to immediately come back out and chase us. And now we are without meat, which we have left in that boot.
The solution? We walk along the edge of the warehouse gate on a side of the map which, at first glance, doesn’t seem to lead anywhere, only to find ourselves in a magnetic crane cabin. It turns out that the dog, in our absence, is still in the boot fighting with the piece of meat, and we can operate the crane to grab the car, lift it up, and stop the dog from abandoning it and chasing us.
It’s… it’s unintuitive, really, but on paper I can see how they thought it would work. The problem is that deducing the spatial situation of where to place the meat or how to get to the crane cab are indispensable elements in resolving the situation, and yet the visual aspect of the game doesn’t help guide us towards it, it almost seems purposefully hidden.
It is an issue that is equally apparent in Broken Age (2014), perhaps the game it most reminds me of. At one point in Broken Age, a puzzle that the player has already solved with one character must be solved again with the other, different character, and the two characters have not exchanged information with each other. It is up to the player himself to use his own knowledge to “break” the narrative logic that indicates that that character does not have the necessary information. It’s risky and it sort of works, though in a much less intuitive way than the character changes in Day of the Tentacle. Full Throttle commits a similar transgression when we are informed through a cinematic that there are some compromising photos of vital importance to the plot. Ben, the protagonist, arrives at the scene of the crime and later finds an empty camera. At this point, the player knows that he must retrieve the film, but Ben is not informed of this until a couple of scenes later, leaving us momentarily without a clear narrative objective.
Both of Schafer’s games maintain a very well-defined and attractive visual style, a superb presentation that also enjoys a simple and impactful story, able to quickly engage and enjoy the characters and dialogue, but both falter when these elements are contrasted with very limited gameplay.
The friends we made along the road
In 1989, Ron Gilbert wrote an article about why he thought adventure games sucked back then. Not only does he address the problem of talking in terms like “interactive movies” that lose perspective on the gameplay elements of the experience, but he outlines some of the problems that plagued Sierra games in particular: keeping objectives clear and defined, presenting problems before solutions, not allowing important items to go uncollected, using puzzles to advance the plot, or, perhaps most famously and controversially, not allowing the player to die, i.e. not penalising them for exploring.
In fact, Gilbert mentions in the last section a problem that plagues the genre: screens where the player gets stuck until he solves a puzzle and advances to the next screen only to get stuck again. Their approach to solving this is in line with their refusal to use death in these games. That the player wants to try everything and learn more about the world should be an incentive, not a penalty Can’t move this way? Try this direction: maybe you meet a new character, find an item, and slowly find a clue. Your brain is still working on other problems as you explore and, at some point, that light bulb is going to turn on.
Seen in this light, one could say that these games are much more suited to mystery stories, and games like Mystery House (1980), The Portopia Serial Murder Case (1983), Déjà Vu (1985) or Cruise for a Corpse (1991) seem to attest to this. These are not “adventurer” stories: they are detective stories. That is the real role that the player assumes.
So why be princes, pirates, time travellers or dangerous bikers? There is something counter-intuitive. Perhaps it’s the fact that it’s not just about the puzzles, the information we glean from dialogue or the clues that allow us to move forward. It is in that “exploration” factor, of allowing the player to calmly walk through the various screens and meet characters or find themselves in situations of all kinds that stands out the most in the genre. It’s a more general and, therefore, less well-defined perspective, but it’s a valid one.
Take the world of Full Throttle. It’s not just the aesthetic factor of the bikers but all that it brings to the game’s plot: the main threat to these gangs who live like the last nomads and are tough and aggressive is the death of their way of life. With the success of the villain (one of the least interesting in LucasArts, but also one of the easiest to hate) in his plan to turn a brand of motorbikes into a factory of mini-family caravans, the romantic idea of the bikers is replaced by a world of consumption and complacency. It is the ultimate death of the West. Unsurprisingly, the inspiration for the game came from wondering what there was today similar to the pirates of yesteryear, just as The Secret of Monkey Island came from wondering what world one could explore that was as immediately recognisable as fantasy or science fiction but hadn’t been used by Sierra. That’s what it’s all about, inhabiting those spaces. Unlike role-playing games, which put us at the controls of a character-vehicle and ask us to make decisions, adventure games give us a puppet, with its own personality and circumstances, and it is we who, for a moment, can see through its eyes.
At the end of the experience, when you talk to someone about adventure games, you rarely talk about the puzzles or the mechanics. You talk specifically about the story, the characters, the exotic locations it has taken you to, a particular moment. Full Throttle is probably the shortest and simplest adventure game for the average LucasArts player, and perhaps the most overlooked, but as a narrative work it is concise and satisfying. It is only natural that adventure games had their (apparent, but not really) decline just as 3D graphics became the default option, and so many of the ideas of these adventures have actually evolved in another direction, into games such as what we now call “walking sims”, but I’m afraid we’ll leave that for a future article.
If you like these and other blog posts and want them to continue, please consider donating via https://ko-fi.com/henriquelage or contributing as a Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/henriquelage where you can get early access to the texts and vote for upcoming posts.
