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The first escape room opened in 2006 in Hungary and the game started its expansion in 2011.
The predecessors of the escape rooms were computer escape games, which appeared much earlier. Their story begins in 1980.
The predecessors were the walk around type “point and click” adventure games, the first of which appeared in 1980, Mystery House.
According to the story of the game, you have to find the hidden jewels in a Victorian house. To do this, we need to search the house and get to know the characters that pop up in the gameplay. In the meantime, however, we come across corpses, and it will become increasingly apparent that we need to find the killer in front of the jewelry so that we are not the next victim.
Looking at the screen above, this graphic no longer looks creepy today, but in its time, the game, which consisted of just 70 simple two-dimensional drawings, was a huge success. Mystery House was a huge success. Already the first edition sold more than 10,000 copies. It was not only an unexpected and breakthrough success, but also a fantastic record in its days.
The game was available on a 5.25 inches (big) floppy and we could play it on this cute Apple2:
The game creator couple Ken and Roberta Williams founded a company in 1982 that IBM bought for $ 700,000 a year later. (This equates to roughly $ 1,700,000 at today’s purchase value). The goal was to create a game that would amazingly demonstrate the multimedia capabilities of their upcoming PC.
The resulting Kings Quest was the first game that was able to display 16 colors (EGA) and we could to move in a 3 dimensional world with our character. Of course, quite differently than we would think on hearing this term today: the innovation was that we could walk in front of and behind the objects that appeared.
In the game you were Sir Graham, you had to find 3 hidden treasures and kill a witch at the request of the dying king. If we succeed, the throne will be ours in the end.
The success was huge, the game was highly popular and 7 sequels were also created, the last one in 1998. In these parts we can enrage the other witches, wizards, mages and put our hands on the throne of all kinds of fabulous kingdoms. Not only did the game and players conquer, Kings Quest paved the way for fantasy to the hearts of gamers.
The first two pioneers were followed by a series of games. As technology advanced, manufacturers surprised players with increasingly complex challenges. All this in an environment where both the graphics and the story have become increasingly sophisticated.
