Adventure Game Studio was created by British programmer Chris Jones. AGS was originally released in 1997 as an MS-DOS program entitled "Adventure Creator". Jones was inspired by the apparent simplicity of Sierra On-Line's adventure game interface, specifically as showcased in Space Quest IV: Roger Wilco and the Time Rippers. The first version of Adventure Creator allowed users to create only low-resolution, keyboard-controlled games. Initially only small tests and demo games were created with AGS, and most of the more ambitious projects were cancelled. As a result of the lack of completed games and engine features, the user base was small, but the community grew slowly. Game developers started requesting more features so that they could create more complex games. Gradually, as these requests were implemented, AGS became a more capable toolkit and it was finally possible to create high-quality games with it. After a long period of slow activity, Lassi Quest was released as the first complete AGS game in late 1999. It was not until Ben Croshaw's Rob Blanc and Philip Reed's Larry Vales games had been released in 2000-2001 that the engine gained widespread popularity. There is now an active community containing thousands of members, and a large output of completed games of all sizes. AGS itself continues to be added to and improved upon, with the release of version 3.0 in January 2008 including a complete rewrite of the editor using the.NET Framework and an update to the game engine to support 3D hardware acceleration. On 26 October 2010, Chris Jones released the source code for the editor under the terms of the Artistic License, version 2. On 27 April 2011, the runtime engine code was released under the same licence. In 2015, a small group of community developers keep maintaining and improving the engine and IDE, and started to implement cross-platform capabilities as well as support for more modern screen resolutions.
The AGS community is based on the AGS Forum, the AGS Internet Relay Chat channel and Discord channel. There are real-world meetings of the community each year, known as "Mittens". There is also an ongoing blog covering the latest goings-on in AGS development, games and community. The community runs several competitions to create games, art, writing and music.
The AGS Awards were founded in 2001 and are awarded annually to the best indie point-and-click adventure games of the year. Categories for the awards may vary year from year but overall include Best Game, Best Writing, Best Animation, Best Voice Acting, Best Puzzles, Best Background Art, Best Gameplay and Best Music. The AGS Awards are an important barometer for indie adventure games, serving as a springboard for new talent. Some winners have become immensely popular and commercially successful.
Reception and usage
Games based on AGS
Thousands of games have been produced using AGS, some of them being of professional quality, such as professional games like the ones mentioned below. There are several non-professional yet full-length acclaimed games such as Heroine's Quest. Wadjet Eye Games is an indie game developer that has created most of its commercial titles using AGS, such as the Blackwell series of games. They also publish AGS games by other developers, such as Primordia by Wormwood Studios, Resonance by XII Games, and Gemini Rue by Joshua Nuernberger. Development teams AGD Interactive and Infamous Adventures have remade and updated King's Quest and other Sierra releases. LucasFan Games have done the same with LucasArts adventure games.
