Martin Ganteföhr

I must admit that I'm not exactly sure where things stand regarding Australia and New Zealand. I'm going to check that. As soon as I remember where I have parked my car last night.

Of course, we (and others) will never be able to please everyone -- at least not until I have seized power and have installed my totalitarian clone army regime. But until that happens, all feedback and critcism is highly appreciated.

It is the latter, of course. Many of the companies that create adventure games haven't been around for a terribly long time so far, and like with everything in life, things take their time. Nobody goes to bed a McDonald's service guy and wakes up a brilliant game designer, writer or programmer. When you look at the first games by Frogwares, Detalion, and others (even HoT, I like to think), there has been a lot of improvement. We all had to start from scratch with our companies - when HoT was founded to build MOTD, there were close to no AG developers around anymore, and the game was a living room production. This is all very different today. It takes time to learn the grammar and methodology of a game genre, and you need to know that grammar like the back of your hand before you can go and change or improve anything about it. We're expected to do both revive the good old days and be like Half Life 2. We might not want to do any of the two. But even if it sounds contradictory to you, I think the fundament for a promising future of adventure games has been layed with many of the (more or less recent) games that many of you don't like.

You know, I'm just an ordinary guy knocking on your door with a Santa Claus costume on. I don't think my beard will ever be as real as the real beard of the real Santa Claus of your childhood, and my voice will never sound as warm and friendly as the voice of your uncle the real Santa Claus. Still, I think the adventure games in recent years have gotten better and better. There is a lot of discussion going on on how make better adventure games, and there are a lot of teams now that I believe are to watch out for. Nothing will happen overnight, but the much-demanded "evolution" of adventure games is going on right now, I believe. And that's f***ing worth something.