IT’S NOT JUST A PLATFORM GAME, IT’S AN ADVENTURE: The European Invention of the Action-Adventure Game 1983-1990

Was the action-adventure game was invented in Europe? This presentation argues that much of 1980s European home computer game history was an extended development of an action-adventure tradition predating later games such as Nintendo’s Metroid. Both home computer and European video game history is often forgotten (Navarro-Remesal and Pérez-Latorre 2021, 15) and this presentation aims to recover the particularly central history of the action-adventure game.