Elf Adventure

After leaving The Learning Company, which he founded in 1980 after leaving Atari, programmer Warren Robinett decided to create a sequel to his smash hit Adventure. He dubbed this new game Elf Adventure. According to Robinett: 'The plan was: make some creatures with faces, showing their emotions. Create some ways of pleasing them or pissing them off, thereby changing their emotions. Have their emotions modulate their behaviors. Each Elf would have its own emotional state, so different individual elves could be in different states. Set up the game so that it was impossible to win the game without befriending at least some of the Elves. If it was easy to befriend them all, it would be too easy. For the main game, you would have to figure out which Elves to befriend. After working on it for about three months, I stopped when I realized that Atari and the videogame industry was collapsing.'