Adventure International - History

History

After the success of their first game Adventureland, games followed rapidly, with Adventure International (or "AI") releasing about two games a year. Initially the games were drawn from the founders' imaginations, with themes ranging from fantasy to horror and sometimes science fiction. Some of the later games were written by Scott Adams with other collaborators (such as Philip Case). Adventure International marked the start of many development careers, including Russ Wetmore (author or Preppie! and Homepak), and Jonathan Taylor (founder of Voxeo). Adventure International's games became known for quality, with a reputation only exceeded in the field at the time by Infocom.

Fourteen games later, Adventure International began to release games drawn from film and fiction. The extremely rare Buckaroo Banzai game, developed with Phillip Case, was based on the film The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the Eighth Dimension (1984). Other games came from a more well known source: Marvel Comics. Adventure International released three Questprobe games based on the Marvel characters: The Incredible Hulk, Spider-Man and Torch and the Thing.

By the end of 1982, game tastes were changing. The traditional text-based adventure game market had moved to graphical based adventures. Games like The Hobbit had increased expectations of such games, and although Adventure International games included graphics of a sort, they were significantly inferior to contemporary offerings at the time and the company was rapidly losing market share. At its peak in late 1983 to early 1984 Adventure International employed approximately 50 individuals, and published titles from over 300 independent programmer/authors.

Adventure International was located in the Sabal Point subdivision of Longwood - at 155 Sabal Palm Drive, Longwood, FL near the east side of Sabal Point Elementary School. Adventure International also had a retail store front located in Sweetwater Oaks at 966 Fox Valley Dr, Longwood, FL near the west side of Sabal Point Elementary School. Both were in zip code 32750 (now 32779). Scott and Alexis Adams also lived in Sabal Point at 454 Timber Ridge Drive, Longwood, FL. The house still retains some of its tower and castle look.

Adventure International went bankrupt in 1985. The copyrights for its games reverted to the bank and eventually back to Scott Adams who released them as shareware.

In Europe the "Adventure International" name was a trading name of Adventure Soft and other games were released under the name that were not from Adventure International in the USA.