Hang around the messageboards for most amateur adventure game design software and you’ll find a lot of new designers releasing their first games. Of these, a depressingly large amount will have a title with some variation of ‘ESCAPE FROM MY HOUSE’, with sprite rips from other games for characters and line drawings for backgrounds, so that the whole mess looks like Roger Wilco is taking a walk through a 2-year-old’s colouring book. This phenomenon exists because of people who like the idea of designing their own adventure games but don’t have a story to tell. And if you don’t have a story to tell, you’re not making an adventure game so much as you are blowing your nose on your computer screen.