Wadjet Eye Games: The Studio That Kept the Adventure Alive

When the big studios abandoned the point-and-click adventure, a designer in New York picked it up and refused to put it down. Dave Gilbert founded Wadjet Eye Games in 2006, built adventures the old way, in pixel art with real writing and real characters, and proved there was still a hungry audience for them. The Blackwell games followed a reluctant medium and her sardonic ghost partner across the city. Unavowed became one of the finest adventures of its decade. And as a publisher, Wadjet Eye gave a home to a whole generation of indie adventures that had nowhere else to go.

This is the studio's run: the Blackwell saga, the games it made, the games it published, and the stubborn belief that a good story and a mouse cursor are all you need. Here is the map.

Keeping the adventure alive, one pixel at a time

Wadjet Eye's method was almost defiantly old-fashioned: hand-drawn pixel backgrounds, hand-written dialogue, full voice acting on tiny budgets, and stories about grown-up things. Dave Gilbert used the Adventure Game Studio engine that hobbyists had kept alive through the genre's dark years, and turned it into a real, sustainable business. In doing so he became the bridge between the classic era of Sierra and LucasArts and a new generation who had never stopped loving the form.