That’s a lot! Myst was a bizarre outlier.
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Yeah, considering the install bases and economics of the day, million-sellers were major, major hits. It’s just that Myst was successful on a whole different level, and got attention from folks who otherwise couldn’t name a second adventure game (or even a second video game, maybe?)
My one hesitation about wholeheartedly saying yeah, it’s Myst, is that it’s fairly old at this point and the various sequels and remasters don’t feel to me like they’ve expanded the audience substantially vs. maintaining it - and then you do have things like Monkey Island getting a promotion in Sea of Thieves, which I think has millions of players still, as well as the new game getting way more reviews and write ups in the mainstream gaming press. My point being, so few people play straight adventures these days, “fame” is probably more to do with ancillary promotions and vibes than actual sales.
The other weirdness with Myst is, how many people who’ve heard of it would recognize it as an adventure game (due to lack of familiarity with genres, or retro-casting more modern genre labels like Room-style puzzler)? It could be that it’s a more famous game than any other adventure game, without actually being the most famous adventure game.
Anyway those are the potential points of pushback, but at the end of the day, yeah, it’s Myst.
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Myst definitely has the name recognition. Kim Kardashian is more famous than Bruce Springsteen, I guess. 
Was Day of the Tentacle as popular as Maniac Mansion? DotT was certainly the better game.
I remember renting Shadowgate and really enjoying it. It seemed a bit short though.
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for an IF creator, I think the best mean of weighing what is one’s most famous text/graphic adventure/interactive fiction is one’s quotes in own work/WIP.
From this perspective, the indisputable winners for me are Zork and Curses.
This led me to question Zarf, prior of Myst what was your most famous, exciting IF/Adventure ? by the metre/yard stick noted above, must be Infidel
Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.
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That’s just asking me my favorite adventure game, which is not a question I’ve ever found very interesting or answerable.
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My immediate response to ‘most famous adventure game’ was Zork of course. It was a commercial brand name even if obscure to some generations. I might venture that there are people who may conflate Zork with Colossal Cave and not realize they are different games. I played CC first in grade school in an educational setting, and Zork in my brain was “more of this.”
But it’s very likely there’s a more famous “adventure” game outside IF. King’s Quest likely - people forget the original had a sort-of two-word parser since Roberta Williams is one of us.
There’s probably people who’d also say the Atari 2600 “Adventure” with the t-sword and the key and a multiple-screen map and the seahorse dragon.
Another contender might be The Cave of Time or all of the branded Choose Your Own Adventure as a series.
Famous enough they’ve been parodied by Cracked!
Myst is probably a good choice also. When CD-ROM drives were just getting started, many PC systems included it with that as a pack-in, possibly along with Microsoft Encarta and/or The 7th Guest. My very first full-voiced CD-ROM game was Day of the Tentacle.
[Edit to add:] If you want to consider recently famous to current generation, Bandersnatch was on many people’s radars due to it being on Netflix.
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I think the scale of these things has to be taken into consideration. Zork I had an incredible amout of pop-culture visibility in the 1980s. King’s Quest would later have a similar visibility, though probably not the same culture cachet. Myst was the original Mac killer app IMO. A huge game that Windows people were genuinely jealous of for a while (I was one of them). In each successive case, the possible install base was larger… significantly so, I believe.
If we aren’t defining things by their interfaces (we don’t seem to be), then I think The Last of Us is a quite popular narrative-heavy game (its genre is the elusive “action adventure”). The series in total has sales of over 37 million units. There are comic books, an HBO series, and two tabletop games in development.
Resident Evil (and its remake) was mostly an optimization problem, and it had a huge pop culture impact. Another “action adventure” game. Lifetime franchise sales total well over 100 million. There have been many adaptations in various media over the years.
E: I’ll metion The Legend of Zelda, for similar reasons.
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You just gave me hardcore flashbacks with this. I had to google it. I didn’t even realize I remembered it until I saw it just now. I remember blowing the cartridge and dying repeatedly from the dragon thing.
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If we’re going to go down through stuff descended from IF, you could arguably call JRPGs a version of an Adventure game. The mainline Final Fantasy games in particular are highly narrative heavy and have a huge cultural impact.
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Infocom games were of course already legendary at the time, but one thing that felt really big when I first heard about it (in what must have been either 1985 or 1986) was Deja Vu on the Macintosh, by ICOM Simulations. Point-and-click adventure games was something quite new - Maniac Mansion wasn’t released until 1987 - and apart from being technically impressive it was also a pretty good game, I thought.
In retrospect, I guess it was an evolutionary dead end. You can still see the influence of Maniac Mansion in some modern point-and-click adventures, but I don’t know if anyone tried to emulate the Macventure look and feel.
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I actually tried to emulate MacVenture look’n’feel with Hypercard. I estimated, back then, that was feasible. (hence my strong interest in Decker, albeit I don’t have experimented much, at least for now)
Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.
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Duck. The dragons famously look like ducks. I’ve played Adventure probably more than any other game in my entire life. I even found the easter egg due to a dream I had, I swear. 
There is a very rare (and probably little known) situation in that game where the player is carrying the bat when they get eaten by a dragon followed by the bat grabbing the dragon in such a way that it allows the player to steer the chimeric mess they have become through walls and all over the map, allowing them to see how the various rooms fit together.
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Interesting fact: The floppy disk version, while lacking full voice, does have a copy-protection puzzle missing from the CD-ROM version. You have to put salad ingredients together in the right proportion to make Ed’s super battery.
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Interesting! One of the reasons that Monkey Island 2 is my favorite game is I played it in the easier mode, then played in full on (mega-monkey?) mode and it was delightful how puzzles not only had more steps and elements, but there were additional plot points and jokes to justify and reward re-playing the longer version of the game after playing the easy mode. There was even a point where the game calls you out for trying to either solve the puzzle the easy way or using knowledge you weren’t supposed to have based on an easy-mode play through.
[For probably the two people who don’t know about this:] If you loved Maniac Mansion and haven’t experienced Thimbleweed Park, get it NAO. It is a 2017 SCUMM game that feels like a classic you missed, but without any technical nor publisher-mandated limits. This game has so many layers of frosting since it was crowdfunded.
For example, there is a bookstore housing “close to 300” individual books and each pixelated cover can be hovered to reveal a unique title. (They actually solicited suggestions for this from the fan community - I submitted a couple and I believe at least one of mine is in the game!) Later in the story there is another library with vast bookshelves covering multiple screens and Kickstarter supporters actually got to author the content. There is an achievement for reading 100 books.
(While checking these links, I realized even the DLC is fun; one of the main characters has such a potty mouth that he rarely has a voiced line that isn’t censor-beeped. You can pay .99 to remove the censoring to let him swear merrily through the entire game! This was another fan-community request, though IMHO it’s funnier with the censoring - which I believe was their comedic intention.)
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You should check this out if you’re jonesing for old graphical parser games: Tech Preview: 3D Experience for Sierra-style AGI Graphics (Jaw-dropping Demo Video)
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Why the hell is that not a finished product?! Take my money, like right friggin’ now!
That is a thing of beauty. WOW! Thanks so much for sharing that.
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They did release an open source version of the engine and there’s an entire game written in it named Enclosure 3-D.
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Dude, I’ve never remotely even heard of “Secret Of Monkey Island”!
Now, Colossal Cave, a.ka. Adventure, is a very strong contender, particularly as it is famous for that immortal line, You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
Nonetheless, I think the most famous text adventure game of all time, would have to be Zork I, with its iconic starting location, West of House. 
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Oh yes, which version, 3.5, or 4?
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