https://theagat.co/
Has anyone heard about this? I’m curious what 80’s text adventure they’re going to choose; Zork seems too obvious. Maybe something from the Enchanter trilogy? Although they say the test only runs for 1 hour, so it must be something relatively simple.
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Dear lord, this font…
I hope they don’t plan to format the exam itself this way!
They say you have one hour to start, but four hours to complete the exam after that, so it can be somewhat harder. I’m intrigued, but I’m not sure if I’m “install spyware on my personal device” intrigued.
They also mention “pointing”, “clicking”, and “graphics” on the certificate, so I expect this to be a graphical adventure rather than a text one.
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Some insane attempt at Apple II text rendering, I guess?
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Oh thank heavens, I thought it was my new browser messing up. 
The idea doesn’t appeal to me, honestly; it seems about as relevant as “speedrunning an adventure game”. Sure, it can be done, and I understand some people enjoy it, but to me it’s anathema to the experience. It’s also similar to a test grading how well I read a book, or watch a film.
Games themselves, by virtue of their scoring system, already grade the player. According to their own metric. Plus, to grade someone on something like that there has to be consistency between the games and their puzzles and the way they communicate to the player and the feedback they give; that’s iffy enough for any group of games, but if we’re going to talk about oldies… really, it’s different to complete Zork than it is to complete Corruption than it is to complete an early Level 9 game than it is to complete Adventureland than it is to complete Zak McKraken. So you get a certificate that’s good for telling you how you did in one game. Again, any given game’s full-score title (like Dungeon Master or whatever) is as meaningful as this.
I don’t know. Sounds like turning fun into pressure and work, for little to no benefit.
It occurs, as I write this, that competitions are pretty standard for competitive games; whereas solo games have their own scoring method, which usually suffices as players will then go on to brag about their score and disclose whether they used any hints or not.
I get the feeling they don’t want to so much grade adventure players, as they want to expose players to older games and see how they do. Contrast modern puzzle and design expectations with those oldies’ and see how people react?
…actually, if I wanted to make a study to see how people reacted to old-school design, in a reasonably controlled environment and with access to their transcripts, I would probably come up with something similar to this test.
…
You know what’s the biggest adventure game aptitude test certificate usefulness? Being able to MacGyver your way through situations in real life, baby - and you don’t need a certificate to tell you you can do that!
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There are a lot of red flags here. 
Why would the people behind this legitimately need access to screen monitoring, webcam and microphone recording?
Why is there an unnecessary urgency to signing up?
Why is this a single event that is time critical?
Why would I want to turn something I love into a stressful, time-pressured test?
My only advice: AVOID, AVOID, AVOID!
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I wouldn’t get too uptight about this. The web site has been around for awhile and I’m sure their intentions are noble, but all the resources on their site suggest console video games, not computer video games, so I think this “test” will be based on a new arcade adventure game written in the style of a 1980s video game, not a text adventure game.
I could be wrong, of course, but you’ve only got to wait a week or so to find out. Anyway, I’ve got better things to do with my life.
You mean like, a modern game emulating design of the 80s? Does that ever work? It usually feels more like “they used to make the games hard and unfair, so this game is hard and unfair too” when someone tries to do that. And somehow they manage to be unfair to a level that, originally, designers wouldn’t have taken it.
Wish I could remember any actual examples right now. I’ve only got a bunch of impressions and quite a few “I’m sure I played stuff like this before”, so I’m not just going off of BioShock’s 1999 mode or whatever.
At any rate, your final sentence is spot on.
I used to play arcade games in the early 1980s. For me, the classic “arcade adventure” was Atari’s Gauntlet. Great game! The cooperative mode that allowed up to four simultaneous players was revolutionary.
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I think it’s a neat idea, but I’d want to run it in a VM rather than my own PC and that plus the extra play time would be a lot of work
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Wait, it was just Maniac Mansion?
That’s disappointing, MM is a fun game but it’s neither especially esoteric nor especially hard by the standards of its day. What it is is reasonably long - I feel like completing it workout a walkthrough isn’t that big a deal, but four hours is a ridiculously short period of time to try to work through it given all the character-swapping and NPCs that move around and everything (admittedly, I played it on the NES which I suspect was slower than the modern emulated version they used here).
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I played it on my Amiga in the early 90s ( I bought a budget re-release)… I thought it was much tougher that Lucasarts’ later adventures. In fact, I don’t remember getting very far in it. So, kudos to the two players who managed to complete it in four hours!
So many things not to like in that…
“A 0.24% pass rate makes the AGAT one of the most prestigious and rigorous exams in the world,” said Woe Industries proudly on Bluesky. “The SAT, MCAT and most forklift operator certifications lie prostrate at our feet.”
Like, being happy that almost no one passed their exam? Being proud of that? Thinking this gives them an “elite” benchmark? This mindset is so viscerally repellent to me. “We have done good by making it so hard that only .24% succeeded.” The metric of success is ensuring as many people as possible fail. Sheesh! These are not people that I want to see involved with gaming in any way, shape or form! Hopefully they never venture into education, either.
As for the winners: “Our two champs actually beat the game relatively fast, which does make us wonder if they just knew the game very well already,”
Well, duh. It’s a classic. Even if 99.76% of them didn’t know it, someone was bound to.
So hang on, you are proud of the fact that you made an exam “so rigorous" that the only two people to pass were the two who you suspect already had knowledge about it beforehand?
And, shall we remember, these games were not designed to be finished like this. I am re-enjoying AMFV currently, and I chuckled a bit when I saw on the manual “It’ll take you a few days to complete”. Yeah, I thought, if I hadn’t already finished it like two or three times already, playing on fast modern devices. But I have indeed fallen into a slower, more apreciative playing style, because it’s just too pleasurable to explore Rockvil and just do things, and enjoy the minimalist but functional way it’s implemented.
Finishing MM in 2, 3, 4, 5 hours is meaningless. The game was not designed for that. When adventure games are made to be hard, they are made to be played over a period of time, so that you can have your “aha!” moments; so that you can rest, mull it over, and have ideas. Heck, it’s a game designed to be replayed multiple times! That alone makes it one of the worst choices. Something more linear would have been vastly better.
These people make me cringe; this is zero indication of what adventure gaming is and/or needs. This has zero value. Absolutely. These are people to avoid in anyhthing they touch related to gaming.
…wow, they managed to make me angry.
…ok, it’s not actually that hard to achieve.
…these days, with the world as it is, I’m angry often. 
EDIT - If anything, the people who should be ecstatic at this result are Ron Gilbert and Gary Winnick. People failed to win their game under 4 hours? Fantastic, because they designed it not to be beaten that quickly! Although, what about all the other metrics? How far did each player get? How many players softlocked themselves out of victory without knowing (in MM it’s not impossible, though not as badly as in some Sierra games)? How many people solved the hardest puzzles (a hard thing to identify in itself, MM is pretty fluid)? These are the real metrics of difficulty.
Not to mention, does it not matter which endings those two players got? The “final Dave ending” would be the one to shoot for, possibly, but any of the others are just as valid, really. Different paths, different choices, different ultimate length and complexity. (EDIT - Countering my own argument on reflection, since the mast majority failed to get ANY ending, this may be beside the point… but it’s something that the exam-givers still have to take into consideration)
I gaze upon this experiment in contempt…
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For what it’s worth, I don’t think this is in any way a useful metric, but I also don’t think it’s intended to be, either. I took their statement as entirely tongue-in-cheek—this feels more like a publicity stunt by an indie studio that wants to get attention than an actual test of skill. There was no prize for winning, after all.
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Yeah, you’re exactly right, I was just hoping they’d pull out like an hour-long section of Acheton or something actually funny like that.
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Yeah, I can see that… still, you know, it doesn’t make me think good things of them even as designers, in the sense that, if this is something that they value, then I don’t see that equating to good games. In fact, I see that equating to The World’s Most Annoying Game.
It’s simply not something that inspires confidence in me. I did not know this studio, but now I do - and I know I’d rather avoid them if I see it again.
Anyway, even as a joke, it rubs me entirely the wrong way, for the reasons I described. Let’s just say I was clearly not among the intended recipients of the joke, and as a result I did my own Victor Meldrew impression.
Plus, what’s the outcome of the joke? 798 people probably came away hating MM, if not the genre. I am knowingly speculating and hyperbolizing; all I’ve got on this is their comment on most people giving in to frustration. For all I know, 70% (another number I pulled out of my hat) loved it and will seek out these games. I would love to think so. I don’t know. If that is the case, then yes, I admit it was a win.
…I kinda doubt it, though.
EDIT - Hey, come to think of it, THAT’s something that could be really important. Reach out to ALL the participants, asked about what their previous experience with adventure games were, and whether or not they would be likely to try more games like this from now on. In fact, ask whether they would be likely to try and finish MM on their own. Even better, tell them there’s a sequel and ask whether they have tried it, or are interested in trying it.
That could still be done. That could be useful.
Disclaimer - It has often been pointed out to me I tend to take little things far too seriously. Fortunately or unfortunately, I don’t necessarily think this is a problem; but it’s best if whomever I am speaking to is aware of this characteristic. For my part, I try not to let it go too far.
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Now I’m almost disappointed I didn’t know about this, because I actually just watched a YouTube video on Maniac Mansion not that long ago and I could’ve Slumdog Millionaire’d my way to an award nobody cares about eternal internet glory.
Well except for the part about having to install their webcam monitoring spyware or whatever. Yuck. I guess I’m a little impressed they found 800 people willing to do that!
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To add to this, it’s worth remembering 80s adventures were personal computing descendants of 70s mainframe adventures which understood play as something that happened over lived time and involved others. You were pooling small timeslots booked on mainframes humming along a whole complex in the great evolving work in hours lit only be the college de vivre to try out lines and report back to fill lazy conversations in a world still blessed by long afternoons. The difficulty was generative of imaginative play only occasionally punctuated by actual computation intended to unfold over a spring bittersweet to the recollection. Staring screenlocked at some solo speedrun aced solely to prove your elite Cumberbatchian cringe fundamentally misunderstands the social experiences which difficulty empowers, difficulty is the great invocation to collective endeavor, yet we’re thinking of it as some way to differentiate yourself as an apex predator as if there isn’t this immense sadness in difficulties in isolation, once I read Season of Anomy by Wole Soyinka, something of enormous spiritual importance was being told to me and I had absolutely no idea what, was completely at a loss, I needed help, but there was no help nor will there ever be, least of all from the academy, so I just accepted there is a solution I don’t deserve to a problem I cannot pertain, which was also printed out on a certificate to be hung up on the wall, there it is up there in the beyond my reach, sometimes I hear it whisper without making out the words, so all things considered I’d prefer the forklift certification to theirs to get up there and, well nothing really not tear it down, more let it know I could get up there, if I wanted, and I will.
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Wasn’t Spellbreaker initially released through a similar speed competition? I recall an article in NZT or TSL about the event; it ended with one team discovering close to the end that they’d made a mistake in an earlier puzzle (I assume it’s the copy protection puzzle) and watching another team finish the event.