title: Adventure game

text: Many puzzles in these games involve gathering and using items from their inventory. Players must apply lateral thinking techniques where they apply real-world extrinsic knowledge about objects in unexpected ways. For example, by putting a deflated inner tube on a cactus to create a slingshot, which requires a player to realize that an inner tube is stretchy. They may need to carry items in their inventory for a long duration before they prove useful, and thus it is normal for adventure games to test a player's memory where a challenge can only be overcome by recalling a piece of information from earlier in the game. There is seldom any time pressure for these puzzles, focusing more on the player's ability to reason than on quick-thinking.


title: Adventure game

text: Adventure games are single-player experiences that are largely story-driven. More than any other genre, adventure games depend upon their story and setting to create a compelling single-player experience. They are typically set in an immersive environment, often a fantasy world, and try to vary the setting from chapter to chapter to add novelty and interest to the experience. Comedy is a common theme, and games often script comedic responses when players attempt actions or combinations that are "ridiculous or impossible".


title: Adventure game

text: Since adventure games are driven by storytelling, character development usually follows literary conventions of personal and emotional growth, rather than new powers or abilities that affect gameplay. The player often embarks upon a quest, or is required to unravel a mystery or situation about which little is known. These types of mysterious stories allow designers to get around what Ernest W. Adams calls the "Problem of Amnesia", where the player controls the protagonist but must start the game without their knowledge and experience. Story-events typically unfold as the player completes new challenges or puzzles, but in order to make such storytelling less mechanical, new elements in the story may also be triggered by player movement.


title: Adventure game

text: Adventure games have strong storylines with significant dialog, and sometimes make effective use of recorded dialog or narration from voice actors. This genre of game is known for representing dialog as a conversation tree. Players are able to engage a non-player character by choosing a line of pre-written dialog from a menu, which triggers a response from the game character. These conversations are often designed as a tree structure, with players deciding between each branch of dialog to pursue. However, there are always a finite number of branches to pursue, and some adventure games devolve into selecting each option one-by-one. Conversing with characters can reveal clues about how to solve puzzles, including hints about what that character wanted before they would cooperate with the player. Other conversations will have far-reaching consequences, deciding to disclose a valuable secret that has been entrusted to the player. Characters may also be convinced to reveal their own secrets, either through conversation or by giving them something that will benefit them.


title: Adventure game

text: The primary goal in adventure games is the completion of the assigned quest. Early adventure games often had high scores and some, including "Zork" and some of its sequels, assigned the player a rank, a text description based on their score. High scores provide the player with a secondary goal, and serve as an indicator of progression. While high scores are now less common, external reward systems, such as Xbox Live's Achievements, perform a similar role.


title: Adventure game

text: The primary failure condition in adventure games, inherited from more action-oriented games, is player death. Without the clearly identified enemies of other genres, its inclusion in adventure games is controversial, and many developers now either avoid it or take extra steps to foreshadow death. Some early adventure games trapped the players in unwinnable situations without ending the game. Infocom's text adventure "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" has been criticized for a scenario where failing to pick up a pile of junk mail at the beginning of the game prevented the player, much later, from completing the game. The adventure games developed by LucasArts purposely avoided creating a dead-end situation for the player due to the negative reactions to such situations.


title: Adventure game

text: Text adventures convey the game's story through passages of text, revealed to the player in response to typed instructions. Early text adventures, "Colossal Cave Adventure", "Hugo's House of Horrors" and Scott Adams' games, used a simple verb-noun parser to interpret these instructions, allowing the player to interact with objects at a basic level, for example by typing "get key". Later text adventures, and modern interactive fiction, use natural language processing to enable more complex player commands like "take the key from the desk". Notable examples of advanced text adventures include most games developed by Infocom, including "Zork" and "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy". With the onset of graphic adventures, the text adventure fell to the wayside, though the medium remains popular as a means of writing interactive fiction (IF) particularly with the introduction of the Inform natural language platform for writing IF. Interactive fiction can still provide puzzle-based challenges like adventure games, but many modern IF works also explore alternative methods of narrative storytelling techniques unique to the interactive medium and may eschew complex puzzles associated with typical adventure games. Readers or players of IF may still need to determine how to interact appropriately with the narrative to progress and thus create a new type of challenge.


title: Adventure game

text: Graphic adventures are adventure games that use graphics to convey the environment to the player. Games under the graphic adventure banner may have a variety of input types, from text parsers to touch screen interfaces. Graphic adventure games will vary in how they present the avatar. Some games will utilize a first-person or third-person perspective where the camera follows the player's movements, whereas many adventure games use drawn or pre-rendered backgrounds, or a context-sensitive camera that is positioned to show off each location to the best effect.


title: Adventure game

text: Point-and-click adventure games are those where the player typically controls their character through a point and click interface using a computer mouse or similar pointing device, though additional control schemes may also be available. The player clicks to move their character around, interact with non-player characters, often initiating conversation trees with them, examine objects in the game's settings or with their character's item inventory. Many older point-and-click games include a list of on-screen verbs to describe specific actions in the manner of a text adventure, but newer games have used more context-sensitive user interface elements to reduce or eliminate this approach. Often, these games come down to collecting items for the character's inventory, and figuring when is the right time to use that item; the player would need to use clues from the visual elements of the game, descriptions of the various items, and dialogue from other characters to figure this out. Later games developed by Sierra On-Line, including the "King's Quest" games, and nearly all of the LucasArts adventure games, are point-and-click-based games.


title: Adventure game

text: Point-and-click adventure games can also be the medium in which interactive, cinematic video games comprise. They feature cutscenes interspersed by short snippets of interactive gameplay that tie in with the story. This sub-genre is most famously used by the defunct Telltale Games with their series such as "" and their adaptation of "The Walking Dead".


title: Adventure game

text: Escape the room games are a further specialization of point-and-click adventure games; these games are typically short and confined to a small space to explore, with almost no interaction with non-player characters. Most games of this type require the player to figure out how to escape a room using the limited resources within it and through the solving of logic puzzles. Other variants include games that require the player to manipulate a complex object to achieve a certain end in the fashion of a puzzle box. These games are often delivered in Adobe Flash format and are also popular on mobile devices. The genre is notable for inspiring real-world escape room challenges. Examples of the subgenre include "MOTAS" ("Mysteries of Time and Space"), "The Crimson Room", and "The Room".


title: Adventure game

text: Puzzle adventure games are adventure games that put a strong emphasis on logic puzzles. They typically emphasize self-contained puzzle challenges with logic puzzle toys or games. Completing each puzzle opens more of the game's world to explore, additional puzzles to solve, and can expand on the game's story. There are often few to none non-playable characters in such games, and lack the type of inventory puzzles that typical point-and-click adventure games have. Puzzle adventure games were popularized by "Myst" and "The 7th Guest". These both used mixed media consisting of pre-rendered images and movie clips, but since then, puzzle adventure games have taken advantage of modern game engines to present the games in full 3D settings, such as "The Talos Principle". "Myst" itself has been recreated in such a fashion in the title "realMyst". Other puzzle adventure games are casual adventure games made up of a series of puzzles used to explore and progress the story, exemplified by "The Witness" and the "Professor Layton" series of games.


title: Adventure game

text: Narrative adventure games are those that allow for branching narratives, with choices made by the player influencing events throughout the game. While these choices do not usually alter the overall direction and major plot elements of the game's story, they help personalize the story to the player's desire through the ability to choose these determinants – exceptions include "", where players' choices can bring to multiple completely different endings and characters' death. These games favor narrative storytelling over traditional gameplay, with gameplay present to help immerse the player into the game's story: gameplay may include working through conversation trees, solving puzzles, or the use of quick time events to aid in action sequences to keep the player involved in the story. Though narrative games are similar to interactive movies and visual novels in that they present pre-scripted scenes, the advancement of computing power can render pre-scripted scenes in real-time, thus providing for more depth of gameplay that is reactive to the player. Most Telltale Games titles, such as "The Walking Dead", are narrative games. Other examples include Sega AM2's "Shenmue" series, Konami's "Shadow of Memories", Quantic Dream's "Fahrenheit", "Heavy Rain" and "", Dontnod Entertainment's "Life Is Strange" series, and "Night in the Woods".


title: Adventure game

text: Walking simulators, or environmental narrative games, are narrative games that generally eschew any type of gameplay outside of movement and environmental interaction that allow players to experience their story through exploration and discovery. Walking simulators feature few or even no puzzles at all, and win/lose conditions may not exist. The simulators allow players to roam around the game environment and discover objects like books, audio logs, or other clues that develop the story, and may be augmented with dialogue with non-playable characters and cutscenes. These games allow for exploration of the game's world without any time limits or other forced constraints, an option usually not offered in more action-oriented games.


title: Adventure game

text: The term "walking simulator" had sometimes been used pejoratively as such games feature almost no traditional gameplay elements and only involved walking around. The term has become more accepted as games within the genre gained critical praise in the 2010s; other names have been proposed, like "environmental narrative games" or "interactive narratives", which emphasizes the importance of the narration and the fact the plot is told by interaction with ambient elements. Examples of walking simulators include "Gone Home", "Dear Esther", "Firewatch", "The Vanishing of Ethan Carter", "Proteus", "Jazzpunk", "The Stanley Parable", "Thirty Flights of Loving", and "What Remains of Edith Finch".


title: Adventure game

text: Walking simulators may have ties to the survival horror genre. Though most survival horror games do include combat and other actions the player can use to survive, some games like "Outlast" and "Paratopic" remove combat abilities, which leaves the player without any means to otherwise react to events. These games can be seen as walking simulators as they help to create an emotional response in their narrative by removing player agency to react to frightening events, combined with the ability to insert visual and audio cues designed to frighten the player.


title: Adventure game

text: The walking simulator genre is primarily one taken up by independent video game development. However, some triple-A examples have started to show trends toward walking simulators. "" and "" include a "Discovery Mode" that eliminates the game's combat and allows the players to explore the recreations of Ancient Egypt and Ancient Greece, respectively.


title: Adventure game

text: A is a hybrid of text and graphical adventure games, typically featuring text-based story and interactivity aided by static or sprite-based visuals. They resemble mixed-media novels or tableau vivant stage plays. Most visual novels typically feature dialogue trees, branching storylines, and multiple endings. The format has its primary origins in Japanese and other Asian video game markets, typically for personal computers and more recently on handheld consoles or mobile devices. The format did not gain much traction in Western markets, but started gaining more success since the late 2000s. A common type of visual novel are dating sims, which has the player attempt to improve a relationship with one or more other characters, such as "Hatoful Boyfriend".


title: Adventure game

text: Some adventure games have been presented as interactive movies; these are games where most of the graphics are either fully pre-rendered or use full motion video from live actors on a set, stored on a media that allows fast random access such as laserdisc or CD-ROM. The arcade versions of "Dragon's Lair" and "Space Ace" are canonical examples of such works. The game's software presented a scene, to which players responded by moving a joystick and pressing a button, and each choice prompted the game to play a new scene. The video may be augmented by additional computer graphics; "Under a Killing Moon" used a combination of full-motion video and 3D graphics. Because these games are limited by what has been pre-rendered or recorded, player interactivity is limited in these titles, and wrong choices or decisions may lead quickly to an ending scene.


title: Adventure game

text: There are a number of hybrid graphical adventure games, borrowing from two or more of the above classifications. The "Zero Escape" series wraps several escape-the-room puzzles within the context of a visual novel. The "Adventures of Sherlock Holmes" series has the player use point-and-click type interfaces to locate clues, and minigame-type mechanics to manipulate those clues to find more relevant information.


title: Adventure game

text: While most adventure games typically do not include any time-based interactivity by the player, action-adventure games are a hybrid of action games with adventure games that often require to the player to react quickly to events as they occur on screen. The action-adventure genre is broad, spanning many different subgenres, but typically these games utilize strong storytelling and puzzle-solving mechanics of adventure games among the action-oriented gameplay concepts. The foremost title in this genre was "Adventure", a graphic home console game developed based on the text-based "Colossal Cave Adventure", while the first "The Legend of Zelda" brought the action-adventure concept to a broader audience.


title: Adventure game

text: The origins of text adventure games is difficult to trace as records of computing around the 1970s were not as well documented. Text-based games had existed prior to 1976 that featured elements of exploring maps or solving puzzles, such as "Hunt the Wumpus" (1975), but lacked a narrative element, a feature essential for adventure games. "Colossal Cave Adventure" (1976), written by William Crowther and Don Woods, is widely considered to be the first game in the adventure genre, and a significant influence on the genre's early development, as well as influencing core games in other genres such as "Adventure" (1979) for the action-adventure video game and "Rogue" (1980) for roguelikes. Crowther was an employee at Bolt, Beranek and Newman, a Boston company involved with ARPANET routers, in the mid-1970s. As an avid caver and role-playing game enthusiast, he wrote a text adventure based on his own knowledge of the Mammoth Cave system in Kentucky. The program, which he named "Adventure", was written on the company's PDP-10 and used 300 kilobytes of memory. The program was disseminated through ARPANET, which led to Woods, working at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at Stanford at the time, to modify and expand the game, eventually becoming "Colossal Cave Adventure".


title: Adventure game

text: "Colossal Cave Adventure" set concepts and gameplay approaches that became staples of text adventures and interactive fiction. Following its release on ARPANET, numerous variations of "Colossal Cave Adventure" appeared throughout the late 1970s and early 1980s, with some of these later versions being re-christened "Colossal Adventure" or "Colossal Caves". These variations were enabled by the increase in microcomputing that allowed programmers to work on home computers rather than mainframe systems. The genre gained commercial success with titles designed for home computers. Scott Adams launched Adventure International to publish text adventures including an adaptation of "Colossal Cave Adventure", while a number of MIT students formed Infocom to bring their game "Zork" from mainframe to home computers and was a commercial success.


title: Adventure game

text: When personal computers gained the ability to display graphics, the text adventure genre began to wane, and by 1990 there were few if any commercial releases, though in the UK publisher Zenobi released many games that could be purchased via mail order during the first half of the 90s. Non-commercial text adventure games have been developed for many years within the genre of interactive fiction. Games are also being developed using the older term 'text adventure' with Adventuron, alongside some published titles for older 8-bit and 16-bit machines.


title: Adventure game

text: The first known graphical adventure game was "Mystery House" (1980), by Sierra On-Line, then at the time known as On-Line Systems. Designed by the company's co-founder Roberta Williams and programmed with the help of her husband Ken, the game featured static vector graphics atop a simple command line interface, building on the text adventure model. Roberta was directly inspired by "Colossal Cave Adventure" as well as the text adventure games that followed from it. Sierra continued to produce similar games under the title "Hi-Res Adventure". Vector graphics gave way to bitmap graphics which also enabled for simple animations to show the player-character moving in response to typed commands. Here, Sierra's "King's Quest" (1984), though not the first game of its type, is recognized as a commercially successful graphical adventure game, enabling Sierra to expand on more titles. Other examples of early games include Koei's "Danchi Tsuma no Yuwaku" (1982), "Sherwood Forest" (1982), The Hobbit (1982), Yuji Horii's "Portopia Serial Murder Case" (1983), "The Return of Heracles" (which faithfully portrayed Greek mythology) by Stuart Smith (1983), Dale Johnson's "Masquerade" (1983), Antonio Antiochia's "Transylvania" (1982, re-released in 1984), and "Adventure Construction Set" (1985), one of the early hits of Electronic Arts.


title: Adventure game

text: As computers gained the ability to use pointing devices and point-and-click interfaces, graphical adventure games moved away from including the text interface and simply provided appropriate commands the player could interact with on-screen. The first known game with such an interface was "Enchanted Scepters" (1984) from Silicon Beach Software, which used drop-down menus for the player to select actions from while using a text window to describe results of those actions. In 1985, ICOM Simulations released "Déjà Vu", the first of its MacVenture series, utilized a more complete point-and-click interface, including the ability to drag objects around on the current scene, and was a commercial success. LucasArts' "Maniac Mansion", released in 1987, used a novel "verb-object" interface, showing all possible commands the player could use to interact with the game along with the player's inventory, which became a staple of LucasArts' own adventure games and in the genre overall. The point-and-click system also worked well for game consoles, with games like Chunsoft's "Portopia Serial Murder Case" (1985) and Square's "Suishō no Dragon" (1986), both on the Nintendo Entertainment System using the controller input instead of text-based actions.


title: Adventure game

text: Graphical adventure games were considered to have spurred the gaming market for personal computers from 1985 through the next decade, as they were able to offer narratives and storytelling that could not readily be told by the state of graphical hardware at the time.


title: Adventure game

text: Graphical adventure games continued to improve with advances in graphic systems for home computers, providing more detailed and colorful scenes and characters. With the adoption of CD-ROM in the early 1990s, it became possible to include higher quality graphics, video, and audio in adventure games.


title: Adventure game

text: "Myst", released in 1993 by Cyan Worlds, is considered one of the genre's more influential titles. "Myst" included pre-rendered 3D graphics, video, and audio. "Myst" was an atypical game for the time, with no clear goals, little personal or object interaction, and a greater emphasis on exploration, and on scientific and mechanical puzzles. Part of the game's success was because it did not appear to be aimed at an adolescent male audience, but instead a mainstream adult audience. "Myst" held the record for computer game sales for seven years—it sold over nine million copies on all platforms, a feat not surpassed until the release of "The Sims" in 2000. In addition, "Myst" is considered to be the "killer app" that drove mainstream adoption of CD-ROM drives, as the game was one of the first to be distributed solely on CD-ROM, forgoing the option of floppy disks. "Myst"s successful use of mixed-media led to its own sequels, and other puzzle-based adventure games, using mixed-media such as "The 7th Guest". With many companies attempting to capitalize on the success of "Myst", a glut of similar games followed its release, which contributed towards the start of the decline of the adventure game market in 2000. Nevertheless, the American market research firm NPD FunWorld reported that adventure games were the best-selling genre of the 1990s, followed by strategy video games. Writer Mark H. Walker attributed this dominance in part to "Myst".


title: Adventure game

text: The 1990s also saw the release of many adventure games from countries that had experienced dormant or fledgling video gaming industries up until that point. These games were generally inspired by their Western counterparts and a few years behind in terms of technological and graphical advancements. In particular the fall of the Soviet Union saw countries such as Poland and Czechoslovakia release a string of popular adventure games including "Tajemnica Statuetki" (1993) and "The Secret of Monkey Island" parody "Tajemství Oslího ostrova" (1994), while in Russia a whole subgenre informally entitled "Russian quest" emerged following the success of "Red Comrades Save the Galaxy" (1998) and its sequels: those games often featured characters from Russian jokes, lowbrow humor, poor production values and "all the worst things brought by the national gaming industry". Israel had next to a non-existent video gaming industry due to a preference for those with useful skills such as programming to work for the Israeli army instead, nevertheless "Piposh" (1999) became extremely popular, to the point where 20 years later a reboot was released due to a grassroots fan movement.


title: Adventure game

text: Whereas once adventure games were one of the most popular genres for computer games, by the mid-1990s the market share started to drastically decline. The forementioned saturation of "Myst"-like games on the market led to little innovation in the field and a drop in consumer confidence in the genre. "Computer Gaming World" reported that a "respected designer" felt it was impossible to design new and more difficult adventure puzzles as fans demanded, because Scott Adams had already created them all in his early games. Another factor that led to the decline of the adventure game market was the advent of first-person shooters, such as "Doom" and "Half-Life". These games, taking further advantage of computer advancement, were able to offer strong, story-driven games within an action setting.


title: Adventure game

text: This slump in popularity led many publishers and developers to see adventure games as financially unfeasible in comparison. Notably, Sierra was sold to CUC International in 1998, and while still a separate studio, attempted to recreate an adventure game using 3D graphics, "", as well as "Gabriel Knight 3", both of which fared poorly; the studio was subsequently closed in 1999. Similarly, LucasArts released "Grim Fandango" in 1998 to many positive reviews but poor sales; it released one more adventure game, "Escape from Monkey Island" in 2000, but subsequently stopped development of "Sam & Max: Freelance Police" and had no further plans for adventure games. Many of those developers for LucasArts, including Grossman and Schafer, left the company during this time. Sierra developer Lori Ann Cole stated in 2003 her belief that the high cost of development hurt adventure games: "They are just too art intensive, and art is expensive to produce and to show. Some of the best of the Adventure Games were criticized they were just too short. Action-adventure or adventure role-playing games can get away with re-using a lot of the art, and stretching the game play."


title: Adventure game

text: Traditional adventure games became difficult to propose as new commercial titles. Gilbert wrote in 2005, "From first-hand experience, I can tell you that if you even utter the words 'adventure game' in a meeting with a publisher you can just pack up your spiffy concept art and leave. You'd get a better reaction by announcing that you have the plague." In 2012 Schafer said "If I were to go to a publisher right now and pitch an adventure game, they'd laugh in my face." Though most commercial adventure game publication had stopped in the United States by the early 2000s, the genre was still alive in Europe. Games such as "The Longest Journey" by Funcom as well as "Amerzone" and "Syberia", both conceived by Benoît Sokal and developed by Microïds, with rich classical elements of the genre still garnered high critical acclaims. Even in these cases, developers often had to distance themselves from the genre in some way. The Longest Journey was instead termed a "modern adventure" for publishing and marketing. Series marketed to female gamers, however, like the Nancy Drew Mystery Adventure Series prospered with over two dozen entries put out over the decade and 2.1 million copies of games in the franchise sold by 2006, enjoying great commercial and critical success while the genre was otherwise viewed as in decline.


title: Adventure game

text: Similar to the fate of interactive fiction, conventional graphical adventure games have continued to thrive in the amateur scene. This has been most prolific with the tool Adventure Game Studio (AGS). Some notable include those by Ben Croshaw (namely the "Chzo Mythos"), "Ben Jordan: Paranormal Investigator", "Time Gentlemen, Please!", "Soviet Unterzoegersdorf", "Metal Dead", and AGD Interactive's Sierra adventure remakes. Adobe Flash is also a popular tool known for adventures such as "MOTAS" and the escape the room genre entries.


title: Adventure game

text: Following the demise of the adventure genre in the early 2000s, a number of events have occurred that have led to a revitalization of the adventure game genre as commercially viable: the introduction of new computing and gaming hardware and software delivery formats, and the use of crowdfunding as a means of achieving funding.


title: Adventure game

text: The 2000s saw the growth of digital distribution and the arrival of smartphones and tablet computers, with touch-screen interfaces well-suited to point-and-click adventure games. The introduction of larger and more powerful touch screen devices like the iPad allowed for more detailed graphics, more precise controls, and a better sense of immersion and interactivity compared to personal computer or console versions. In gaming hardware, the handheld Nintendo DS and subsequent units included a touch-screen, and the Nintendo Wii console with its Wii Remote allowed players to control a cursor through motion control. These new platforms helped decrease the cost of bringing an adventure game to market, providing an avenue to re-release older, less graphically advanced games like "The Secret of Monkey Island", "King's Quest" and "Space Quest" and attracting a new audience to adventure games.


title: Adventure game

text: Further, the improvements in digital distribution led to the concept of episodic adventure games, delivering between three and five "chapters" of a full game over a course of several months via online storefronts, Steam, Xbox Live Marketplace, PlayStation Store, and Nintendo eShop. Modeled off the idea of televisions episodes, episodic adventure games break the story into several parts, giving players a chance to digest and discuss the current story with others before the next episode is available, and further can enhance the narrative by creating cliffhangers or other dramatic elements to be resolved in later episodes. The first major successful episodic adventure games were those of Telltale Games, a developer founded by former LucasArts employees following the cancellation of "Sam & Max: Freelance Police". Telltale found critical success in "The Walking Dead" series released in 2012, which won numerous game of the year awards, and eschewed traditional adventure game elements and puzzles for a strong story and character-driven game, forcing the player to make on-the-spot decisions that became determinants and affected not only elements in the current episode but future episodes and sequels. The game also eschewed the typical dialog tree with a more natural language progression, which created a more believable experience. Its success was considered a revitalization of the genre, and led Telltale to produce more licensed games driven by story rather than puzzles. However, Telltale Games suffered from mismanagement and excessive rapid growth from trying to release too many games at the same time, and in mid-2018, had undergone a majority studio closure, laying off most of its staff and selling off most of its assets. By the end of 2018, LCG Entertainment had acquired many of the former Telltale assets and relaunched a new Telltale Games to continue its adventure game history. Other former Telltale Games works such as "The Walking Dead" fell back to their original IP holders, such as Skybound Entertainment in the case of "The Walking Dead", who took over for publishing the games.


title: Adventure game

text: Meanwhile, another avenue for adventure game rebirth came from the discovery of the influence of crowdfunding. Tim Schafer had founded Double Fine Productions after leaving LucasArts in 2000. He had tried to find funding support for an adventure game, but publishers refused to consider his proposals for fear of the genre being unpopular. In 2012, Schafer turned to Kickstarter to raise $400,000 to develop an adventure game; the month-long campaign ended with over $3.4 million raised, making it, at the time, one of the largest Kickstarter projects, enabling Double Fine to expand the scope of their project and completing the game as "Broken Age", released over two parts in 2014 and 2015. The success led many other developers to consider the crowd funding approach, including those in the adventure game genre who saw the Double Fine Kickstarter as a sign that players wanted adventure games. Many sequels, remakes, and spiritual successors to classic adventure games emerged on Kickstarter, leading to a significant increase in traditional adventure game development during this time. Some of these include:


title: Adventure game

text: Due to differences in computer hardware, language, and culture, development of adventure games took a different course in Japan compared to Western markets. The most popular adventure game subgenres in Japan are visual novels and dating sims.


title: Adventure game

text: In the early 1980s, computer adventure games began gaining popularity in Japan. The country's computer market was largely dominated by NEC's 8-bit PC-8801 (1981) and 16-bit PC-9801 (1982) platforms, which could display 8 simultaneous colors and had a resolution of 640×400, higher than Western computers at the time, in order to accommodate Japanese text. This in turn influenced game design, as NEC PCs became known for adventure games with detailed color graphics, which eventually evolved into visual novels. NEC soon had several competitors such as the FM-7 (1982), the AV (1985) version of which could display more than 4,000 colors in addition to featuring FM synthesis sound. Its 16-bit successor, the FM Towns (1989), could display 24-bit color (16.8 million colors) and featured a CD-ROM drive.


title: Adventure game

text: The most famous early Japanese computer adventure game was the murder mystery game "The Portopia Serial Murder Case", developed by Yūji Horii (of "Dragon Quest" fame) and published by Enix. Its development began in 1981, and was released in 1983. The game was viewed in a first-person perspective, followed a first-person narrative, and featured color graphics. Originally released for the PC-6001, the player interacts with the game using a verb-noun parser which requires typing precise commands with the keyboard; finding the exact words to type is considered part of the riddles that must be solved. The game was non-linear, which includes exploring an open world, a branching dialogue conversation system where the story develops through entering commands and receiving responses from other characters, and making choices that determine the dialogues and order of events as well as alternative endings. It also features a phone that could be used to dial any number to contact several non-player characters. The game was well received in Japan for its well-told storyline and surprising twist ending, and for allowing multiple ways to achieve objectives. Hideo Kojima praised the game for its mystery, drama, humor, 3D dungeons, for providing a proper background and explanation behind the murderer's motives, and expanding the potential of video games. The game has also been compared to the later-released "Shadowgate" where the player must examine and collect objects, and find their true purpose later on. According to Square Enix, "Portopia" was "the first real detective adventure" game.


title: Adventure game

text: Japan's first domestic computer adventure games to be released were ASCII's "" (表参道アドベンチャー) and "Minami Aoyama Adventure" (南青山アドベンチャー), released for the PC-9801 in 1982. Another early Japanese adventure that same year was MicroCabin's "Mystery House", which was unrelated to (but inspired by) the On-Line Systems game of the same name. MicroCabin released a sequel, "Mystery House II", for the MSX that same year. The following year, the Japanese company Starcraft released an enhanced remake of On-Line Systems' "Mystery House" with more realistic art work and depiction of blood.


title: Adventure game

text: Due to a lack of content restrictions, some of Japan's earliest adventure games were also bishoujo games with "eroge" content. In 1982, Koei released "Night Life", the first commercial erotic computer game. It was a graphic adventure, with sexually explicit images. That same year, they released another "eroge" title, "Danchi Tsuma no Yuwaku" ("Seduction of the Condominium Wife"), which was an early adventure game with color graphics, owing to the eight-color palette of the NEC PC-8001 computer, and role-playing video game elements. It became a hit, helping Koei become a major software company. Other now-famous companies such as Enix, Square and Nihon Falcom also produced similar "eroge" in the early 1980s before they became famous for their mainstream role-playing games. In some of their early "eroge", the adult content is meaningfully integrated into a thoughtful and mature storyline, though others often used it as a flimsy excuse for pornography.


title: Adventure game

text: The command selection menu input system, where the player chooses from a menu list of commands either through keyboard shortcuts or scrolling down the menu, was introduced in 1983, and it largely replaced the verb-noun parser input method. The earliest known title to use the command selection menu system was the Japanese adventure game "Spy 007" (スパイ00.7), published in April 1983, and it was followed soon after by several other Japanese adventure games in 1983. These included the "eroge" title "Joshiryo Panic", authored by Tadashi Makimura and published by Enix for the FM-7 in June and slightly earlier for the FM-8; "Atami Onsen Adventure" (熱海温泉アドベンチャー), released by Basic System (ベーシックシステム) in July for the FM-7 and slightly earlier for the PC-8001; "Planet Mephius", released in July; and "Tri-Dantal" (トリダンタル), authored by Y. Takeshita and published by Pax Softnica for the FM-7 in August. The game that popularized the command selection system was the 1984 adventure game "" ("Okhotsk ni Kiyu: Hokkaido Chain Murders"), designed by Yuji Horii (his second mystery adventure game after "Portopia") and published by ASCII for the PC-8801 and PC-9801. Its replacement of the traditional verb-noun text parser interface with the command selection menu system led to the latter becoming a staple of adventure games as well as role-playing games (through Horii's 1986 hit "Dragon Quest" in the latter case).


title: Adventure game

text: A notable 1987 adventure game was Arsys Software's "Reviver: The Real-Time Adventure", which introduced a real-time persistent world, where time continues to elapse, day-night cycles adjust the brightness of the screen to indicate the time of day, and certain stores and non-player characters would only be available at certain times of the day. The game also gives players direct control over the player character.


title: Adventure game

text: In 1987, Jiro Ishii (later known for "" and "Time Travelers") released "Imitation City", an adventure game with a similar cyberpunk theme to Kojima's later hit "Snatcher".


title: Adventure game

text: Hideo Kojima (of "Metal Gear" fame) was inspired by "Portopia" to enter the video game industry, and produce his own adventure games. After completing the stealth game "Metal Gear", his first graphic adventure was released by Konami the following year: "Snatcher" (1988), an ambitious cyberpunk detective novel graphic adventure that was highly regarded at the time for pushing the boundaries of video game storytelling, cinematic cut scenes, and mature content. It also featured a post-apocalyptic science fiction setting, an amnesiac protagonist, and some light gun shooter segments. It was praised for its graphics, soundtrack, high quality writing comparable to a novel, voice acting comparable to a film or radio drama, and in-game computer database with optional documents that flesh out the game world.


title: Adventure game

text: Interactive movie games are considered a subgenre of adventure games. This subgenre has origins in Japanese interactive movie arcade games.


title: Adventure game

text: The first interactive movie laserdisc video game was Sega's "Astron Belt", unveiled in 1982 and released in 1983, though it was more of a shooter game presented as an action movie using full motion video. A more story-driven interactive movie game was "Bega's Battle", released in 1983, which combined shooting stages with interactive anime cutscenes, where player input had an effect on the game's branching storyline. "Time Gal" (1985), in addition to featuring quick time events, added a time-stopping feature where specific moments in the game involve Reika stopping time; during these moments, players are presented with a list of three options and have seven seconds to choose one.


title: Adventure game

text: A notable adventure game released in 1983 was "Planet Mephius", authored by Eiji Yokoyama and published by T&E Soft for the FM-7 in July 1983. In addition to being one of the earliest titles to use a command menu system, its key innovation was the introduction of a point-and-click interface to the genre, utilizing a cursor to interact with objects displayed on the screen. A similar point-and-click cursor interface was later used in the adventure game "Wingman", released for the PC-8801 in 1984.


title: Adventure game

text: The NES version of "Portopia Serial Murder Case" was released in 1985 and became a major hit in Japan, where it sold over 700,000 copies. With no keyboard, the NES version, developed by Chunsoft, replaced the verb-noun parser of the original with a command selection menu list, which included fourteen set commands selectable with the gamepad. It also featured a cursor that can be moved on the screen using the D-pad to look for clues and hotspots, like a point-and-click interface. Horii's second adventure game "Hokkaido Chain Murders" was later also ported to the NES in 1987. Yuji Horii's third mystery adventure game "Karuizawa Yūkai Annai" ("The Karuizawa Kidnapping Guide") was released for the PC-8801 in early 1985 and for the FM-7 in June that same year. It utilized the command menu system and point-and-click cursor interface of both "Portopia Serial Murder Case" and "Hokkaido Chain Murders", in addition to introducing its own innovation: an overhead map. This gave the player direct control over the player character, who can be moved around in a top-down view to explore the area.


title: Adventure game

text: In 1986, Square released the science fiction adventure game "Suishō no Dragon" for the NES console. The game featured several innovations, including the use of animation in many of the scenes rather than still images, and an interface resembling that of a point-and-click interface for a console, like "Portopia", but making use of visual icons rather than text-based ones to represent various actions. Like the NES version of "Portopia", it featured a cursor that could be moved around the screen using the D-pad to examine the scenery, though the cursor in "Suishō no Dragon" was also used to click on the action icons. That same year saw the release of "J.B. Harold Murder Club", a point-and-click graphic adventure, for the PC-98. It featured character interaction as the major gameplay element and has a similar type of multiple phrase response to more recent titles such as the adventures "Shenmue" and "Shadow of Memories" as well as the role-playing game "". The TurboGrafx-CD port of "J.B. Harold Murder Club" was one of the first Japanese adventure games released in the United States. The "J.B. Harold" series went on to sell 20 million copies on various platforms as of 2011.


title: Adventure game

text: Haruhiko Shono's adventure games "" (1991), "L-Zone" (1992) and "Gadget: Invention, Travel, & Adventure" (1993) used pre-rendered 3D computer graphics, predating "Myst". The plot of "Gadget" also anticipated the films "Dark City" (1998) and "The Matrix" (1999), and influenced filmmaker Guillermo del Toro. "Cosmology of Kyoto" (1993) is a nonlinear adventure game that emphasizes open world exploration in a large city.


title: Adventure game

text: Following "", Kojima produced his next graphic adventure, "Policenauts" (1994), a point-and-click adventure notable for being an early example of extensive voice recording in video games. It also featured a hard science fiction setting, a theme revolving around space exploration, a plot inspired by the ancient Japanese tale of "Urashima Taro", and some occasional full-motion video cut scenes. The gameplay was largely similar to "Snatcher", but with the addition of a point-and-click interface and some first-person shooter segments. "Policenauts" also introduced summary screens, which act to refresh the player's memory of the plot upon reloading a save, an element Kojima later used in "Metal Gear Solid".


title: Adventure game

text: In 1995, Human Entertainment's "" for the SNES console was a hybrid between a point-and-click graphic adventure and a survival horror game, revolving around survival against a deadly stalker known as Scissorman that chased players throughout the game.


title: Adventure game

text: Following the NES version of "Portopia" in 1985, and "Suishō no Dragon" in 1986, more adventure games followed on consoles from 1987.


title: Adventure game

text: Sega's "", released in 1987, was an adventure game with some platform game segments. The adventure game segments were puzzle-oriented and played in a side-scrolling view where the player has direct control over the character. Originally based on the "Anmitsu Hime" anime, an edited version based on "Alex Kidd" was later released in 1989 as "Alex Kidd in High-Tech World". "The Goonies II", also released in 1987, was a first-person adventure game with some side-scrolling action game segments. The game featured a non-linear open world environment similar to "Metroid".


title: Adventure game

text: The 1994 Sega CD version of "Snatcher" was for a long time the only major visual novel game to be released in America, where it, despite a Mature rating limiting its accessibility, gained a cult following.


title: Adventure game

text: The 1996 PlayStation version of "Policenauts" could read the memory card and give some easter egg dialogues if a save file of Konami's dating sim "Tokimeki Memorial" is present, a technique Kojima later used in "Metal Gear Solid".


title: Adventure game

text: A distinct form of Japanese adventure game that eventually emerged is the visual novel, a genre that was largely rooted in "Portopia Serial Murder Case", but gradually became more streamlined and uses many conventions that are distinct from Western adventures. They are almost universally first-person, and driven primarily by dialog. They also tend to use menu-based interactions and navigation, with point and click implementations that are quite different from Western adventure games. Inventory-based puzzles of the sort that form the basis of classic Western adventures, are quite rare. Logic puzzles like those found in "Myst" are likewise unusual. Because of this, Japanese visual novels tend to be streamlined, and often quite easy, relying more on storytelling than challenge to keep players interested.


title: Adventure game

text: "Mirrors", released by Soft Studio Wing for the PC-8801 and FM Towns computers in 1990, featured a branching narrative, multiple endings, and audio CD music.


title: Adventure game

text: From the early 1990s, Chunsoft, the developer for the NES version of "Portopia", began producing a series of acclaimed visual novels known as the "Sound Novels" series, which include "Otogirisō" (1992), "Kamaitachi no Yoru" (1994), "Machi" (1998), "" (2008), and "" (2010).


title: Adventure game

text: C's Ware's "EVE Burst Error" (1995) allowed the player to switch between both protagonists at any time during the game. "EVE Burst Error" often requires the player to have both protagonists co-operate with each other at various points during the game, with choices in one scenario affecting the other.


title: Adventure game

text: ELF's "" (1996) featured a science fiction plot revolving around time travel and parallel universes. The player travels between parallel worlds using a Reflector device, which employs a limited number of stones to mark a certain position as a returning location, so that if the player decides to retrace their steps, they can go to an alternate universe to the time they have used a Reflector stone. The game also implemented an original system called ADMS, or Automatic Diverge Mapping System, which displays a screen that the player can check at any time to see the direction in which they are heading along the branching plot lines.


title: Adventure game

text: From 1997 to 1999, Kojima developed the three "Tokimeki Memorial Drama Series" titles, which were adaptations of "Tokimeki Memorial" in a visual novel adventure game format.


title: Adventure game

text: Chunsoft sound novels such as "Machi" (1998) and "" (2008) allow the player to alternate between the perspectives of several or more different characters, making choices with one character that have consequences for other characters. "428" in particular features up to 85 different possible endings.


title: Adventure game

text: From the 1990s, a number of Japanese adventure games began using a 3D third-person direct control format, particularly on consoles like the PlayStation, Dreamcast and PlayStation 2. Examples include "" (1993), Human Entertainment's "Mizzurna Falls" (1998), Sega's "Shenmue" series (1999–2002), Konami's "Shadow of Memories" (2001), and Irem's "Disaster Report" series (2002–2009). Cing's "Glass Rose" (2003) for the PS2 uses a point-and-click interface with 3D graphics.


title: Adventure game

text: The success of "Resident Evil" in 1996 was followed by the release of the survival horror graphic adventures "Clock Tower (Clock Tower 2)" and "" for the PlayStation. The "Clock Tower" games proved to be hits, capitalizing on the success of "Resident Evil", though both games stayed true to the graphic-adventure gameplay of the original "Clock Tower" rather than following the lead of "Resident Evil".


title: Adventure game

text: Sega's ambitious "Shenmue" (1999) attempted to redefine the adventure game genre with its realistic 3D graphics, third-person perspective, direct character control interface, sandbox open-world gameplay, quick time events, and fighting game elements. Its creator Yu Suzuki originally touted it as a new kind of adventure game, "FREE" ("Full Reactive Eyes Entertainment"), offering an unparalleled level of player freedom, giving them full reign to explore expansive interactive city environments with its own day-night cycles and changing weather, and interact with fully voiced non-player characters going about their daily routines. Despite being a commercial failure, the game was critically acclaimed and has remained influential.


title: Adventure game

text: In recent years, Japanese visual novel games have been released in the West more frequently, particularly on the Nintendo DS handheld following the success of mystery-solving titles such as Capcom's "Ace Attorney" series (which began on the Game Boy Advance in 2001), Cing's "" series (beginning in 2006), and Level-5's "Professor Layton" series (beginning in 2007). English fan translations of visual novels such as Square's "" (a 1996 side story to the "Chrono" series of role-playing video games) and Key's "Clannad" (2004) have also been made available in recent years.


title: Adventure game

text: The Nintendo DS in particular helped spark a resurgence in the genre's popularity through the introduction of otherwise unknown Japanese adventure games, typically visual novels localized for Western audiences. In 2005, Capcom re-released the courtroom-based visual novel game "", originally a 2001 Game Boy Advance game released only in Japan, for the Nintendo DS in both Asian and Western markets. The game and its sequels proved popular with Western audiences, and are credited for revitalizing the adventure game genre. Following on "Ace Attorney"s success, Level-5 and Nintendo published the "Professor Layton" series worldwide starting in 2007. Both have since become some of the best-selling adventure game franchises, with "Ace Attorney" selling more than 4 million units worldwide and "Professor Layton" selling nearly 12 million units worldwide. Other successful Japanese adventure games for the DS in Western markets include Cing's "" (2005) and "" (2006). and Chunsoft's "Zero Escape" series, which includes "Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors" and "".


title: Adventure game

text: Online distribution has also helped lower the costs of bringing niche Japanese titles to consumers, which has enabled another outlet for visual novels and dating sims to be localized and released for Western markets. Localization and distribution can be performed by small teams, removing financial barriers to bringing these games, often released as dōjin soft or hobbyist titles, to Western countries. A noted example of this is "Hatoful Boyfriend", a comedy dating sim in which the player attempts to date pigeons in a high school setting. The game was originally released in Japan in 2011, but received significant attention on its remake and localization in 2014, in part due to its humorous concept, and its distribution was supported by Western publisher Devolver Digital.


title: Adventure game

text: Most text adventure games are readily accessible on modern computers due to the use of a small number of standard virtual machines (such as the Z engine) used to drive these games at their original release which have been recreated in more portable versions. A popular text adventure interpreter is Frotz, which can play all the old Infocom text adventures. Some modern text adventure games can even be played on very old computer systems. Text adventure games are also suitable for personal digital assistants, because they have very small computer system requirements. Other text adventure games are fully playable via web browsers.


title: Adventure game

text: On the other hand, many graphical adventure games cannot run on modern operating systems. Early adventure games were developed for home computers that are not in use today. Emulators and virtual machines are available for modern computers that allow these old games to be played on the latest operating systems, though players must have access to the game's assets themselves to legally play them. One open-source software project called ScummVM provides a free engine for the LucasArts adventure games, the SCUMM-derived engine for Humongous Entertainment adventure games, early Sierra titles, Revolution Software 2D adventures, Coktel Vision adventure games and a few more assorted 2D adventures. ResidualVM is a sister project to ScummVM, aimed to emulate 3D-based adventure games such as "Grim Fandango" and "Myst III: Exile". Another called VDMSound can emulate the old sound-cards which many of the games require.


title: Adventure game

text: One of the most popular emulators, DOSBox, is designed to emulate an IBM PC compatible computer running DOS, the native operating system of most older adventure games. Many companies, like Sierra Entertainment, have included DOSBox in their rereleases of older titles.


title: Final Destination 2

text: Final Destination 2 is a 2003 American supernatural horror film directed by David R. Ellis. The screenplay was written by J. Mackye Gruber and Eric Bress, based on a story by Gruber, Bress, and series creator Jeffrey Reddick. It is the sequel to the 2000 film "Final Destination" and the second installment of the "Final Destination" film series. The film stars Ali Larter, A. J. Cook, and Michael Landes.


title: Final Destination 2

text: After the financial success of "Final Destination", New Line Cinema contacted Reddick regarding plans for a sequel. Since the original film's crew was unavailable, New Line replaced most of the production team. Filming took place in Vancouver and Okanagan Lake. "Final Destination 2" was released on January 31, 2003, and on DVD on July 22, 2003, which includes commentaries, deleted scenes, documentaries, and videos.


title: Final Destination 2

text: The film received negative reviews from critics. Negative reviews assessed the film as a "silly and illogical" work that "begins with the same flawed premise" of its predecessor, while positive reviews called the film "a real jolter for horror fans" that "recognizes the close relationship between fright and laughter" and "surprisingly good fun for the current crop of horror films". The film grossed $46million domestically and $43million overseas, earning $90million internationally, making it the lowest-grossing film in the "Final Destination" franchise. It was also nominated for four awards, including the Saturn Award for Best Horror Film. A third film, "Final Destination 3", was released in February 2006.


title: Final Destination 2

text: In 2001, one year after the explosion of Flight 180, college student Kimberly Corman is heading to Daytona Beach, Florida, for spring break with her friends, Shaina McKlank, Dano Estevez, and Frankie Whitman. While waiting on the entrance ramp to U.S. Route 23, she has a premonition of a deadly pile-up caused by a logging truck. She stalls her car on the entrance ramp, preventing several people from entering the highway, including lottery winner Evan Lewis, mother Nora Carpenter and her fifteen-year-old son Tim, businesswoman Kat Jennings, stoner Rory Peters, pregnant Isabella Hudson, high school teacher Eugene Dix, and Deputy Marshal Thomas Burke. While Burke questions Kimberly, the pile-up occurs, but Shaina, Dano, and Frankie are killed by a car carrier after Burke saves Kimberly at the last second.


title: Final Destination 2

text: After the survivors are questioned at the police station, Evan is fatally impaled by a fire escape ladder while attempting to escape from a fire in his apartment. Aware of Death's presence, Kimberly seeks help from Clear Rivers, the last survivor of Flight 180 who committed herself to a psychiatric ward for protection after Alex Browning was killed by a falling brick. When Kimberly informs Clear that Evan was the first of the highway survivors to die, unlike in her premonition, Clear realizes that the survivors are dying in reverse order. Meanwhile, Tim is crushed by a windowpane while leaving the dentist with his mother. Clear decides to help and introduces Kimberly and Burke to William Bludworth, who tells them that only new life can defeat Death. Believing that the birth of Isabella's baby would disrupt Death's plan, Burke sends fellow marshal Steve Adams to take her into custody while he gathers the other survivors in his apartment. When Nora decides to leave, a chain of accidents results in her head becoming trapped in an elevator, decapitating her.


title: Final Destination 2

text: The survivors take Kat's SUV to track down Isabella, who has gone into labor, prompting Adams to rush her to the hospital. Along the way, the survivors realize that the demises of the Flight 180 survivors affected all of their lives even before the highway pile-up by saving them from prior deaths, which inverted the sequence of the concurring accident. The SUV then suffers a blowout, causing them to swerve into a stack of PVC pipes in a farm that penetrate the car and injure Eugene. Rescue workers arrive and assist the farm owners, the Gibbons family, with rescuing the others while Eugene is hospitalized. Using the Jaws of Life, Kat's rescuer accidentally activates her airbag, causing her head to be impaled on a pipe protruding from her headrest. Her cigarette falls onto a gasoline leak from a news van that explodes, launching a barbed wire fence into the air that dismembers Rory.


title: Final Destination 2

text: Guided by a vision of a doctor named Kalarjian who Kimberly believes will euthanize Isabella; she, Clear, and Burke rush to a hospital to save her but while Isabella and her baby are safe, Kimberly sees through her premonition that Isabella was never meant to die in the pile-up at all. At the same time, an explosion from an oxygen leak in Eugene's ward kills both Clear and Eugene. Kimberly realizes that the vision from the hospital was hers, deducing from an article of a survivor creating "new life" to defeat Death. To ensure Burke's safety, she drives into a lake to drown herself, but Burke saves her and she is revived by Dr. Kalarjian.


title: Final Destination 2

text: Later, Kimberly and Burke have a picnic with the Gibbons and Kimberly's father. The Gibbons explain that their son Brian was nearly hit by a news van on the day of the accident, but Rory saved him. As Kimberly and Burke realize the implications, Brian is suddenly killed in an explosion caused by a malfunctioning barbecue grill.


title: Final Destination 2

text: The first film, "Final Destination", was conceived by writers Jeffrey Reddick, James Wong, and Glen Morgan from "Flight 180", a spec script intended for use in "The X-Files". The film premiered across the United States and Canada on March 17, 2000, grossing $10,015,822 on its opening weekend and an overall gross of $112,880,294 internationally. The film's success inspired New Line Cinema then-President of Production Toby Emmerich to approach Reddick for a sequel, to which he responded positively. Reddick asserted that he "wanted to expand on the mythology and not just tell the same story over again." Unfortunately, Wong and Morgan weren't available for production since they had already signed on their respective projects "The One" and "Willard". Instead, New Line hired second unit director and stunt coordinator David R. Ellis as director and writing partners Eric Bress and J. Mackye Gruber as co-writers.


title: Final Destination 2

text: "Second unit is like an extension of directing, you're doing big action sequences on film and it was just something I was going after. Once I got the offer from New Line and we got a good script, it was kind of a natural transition," Ellis professed. "I wanted our film to be able to stand alone but I watched "Final Destination" to see what they did that was so successful. I tried to use some of that while trying to keep a stand-alone feel for our movie. I kind of took what worked and tried to improve on it," Ellis added. "We wanted to take what the first film did effectively, and add levels and layers that would come out through the characters. When we first started writing this, we were trying to think, 'How can we make Death just a total badass?' and to be perfectly honest, the first crack we ever took at this script had to be reined in!" Bress uncovered. On the other hand, producers Craig Perry and Warren Zide from Zide/Perry Productions also returned and helped on financing the film, with Perry stating, "We could have made no other movies and the first one still would have been a satisfying experience. But when we were given the opportunity to make a sequel, we jumped at it."


title: Final Destination 2

text: One of the prior film's main characters, Alex Browning (Devon Sawa), was killed off-screen in the film. Rumors indicated that Sawa had a contract dispute with New Line concerning the deduction of his salary; however, Perry resolved the issue with the statement that "it had everything to do with narrative, and nothing to do with money or Devon's unwillingness to come back." Despite this, New Line reinstated Ali Larter to reprise her character as Clear Rivers. "When New Line asked me to come back, I thought it was great. They showed me the script and let me have some input, and it was really terrific," Larter revealed. Larter indicated that Clear "[has] gotten to a hardened place and tucked herself inside because she has felt so much pain in her life. By having herself committed to a mental hospital, she has created a safehouse so that Death can't get her." Tony Todd also resumed his character as mortician William Bludworth. "It's the same character that we saw before that the audience loved," Ellis expressed.


title: Final Destination 2

text: The role of Kimberly Corman was given to Canadian actress A. J. Cook, who previously starred in the 1999 film "The Virgin Suicides". Cook described her role as "a very strong girl, very determined because her mother died a year earlier, right in front of her eyes, so she had to grow up quick." Ellis described her role as "a girl who can have some fun cause they're going on a trip and they're gonna have a good time, yet someone who can stand up to Clear, to come and challenge Clear on a race, and to bother with Clear." Cook added that "it's rare to find one strong female lead in a horror film, not to mention two [Larter]." Ellis and Perry were amazed by her sensitivity and vulnerability in her performance, and she was hired instantly. "[We] were at the beginning of what's going to be a long successful career for her," Perry cited.


title: Final Destination 2

text: Michael Landes, who appeared in the TV series "", was cast as Thomas Burke. Landes defined him as "a real nice, decent guy who comes across this huge car accident [and] who is very intrigued to begin with" and as "the guy who bumps into the girl and he goes nuts as her protector." Ellis pointed out that he "just wanted to find someone who's young and who can relate to these kids. It wasn't an older guy, but still strong enough and yet sensitive. [Landes] brought this really good balance to his part." Landes was cast a day after his audition, which caused flight schedule problems on his departure two days after and cancellation of his appointments.


title: Final Destination 2

text: Former "Living Single" star Terrence C. Carson was hired as Eugene Dix. Carson identified his role as "a very by-the-book type of person but soon has a change of heart as the corpses begin to pile up." The crew was enticed of Carson's casting, with Bress mentioning how his "originally envisioned Woody Allen-type of character has got ten more times life than it ever had. It's got ten times the personality, this charisma that T.C. brings to it...he's just such a great presence." Similarly, Perry was astonished by how Carson "can take the most absurd lines and deliver them in such grammatized form with his eyes and his deep rich speaking voice." Jonathan Cherry, who recently emerged in the 2003 film "House of the Dead", was appointed as Rory Peters. Cherry characterized Rory as "a very opposite of me whose arc goes from, 'I don't really care at all', to 'Oh my God, this is really happening!'"


title: Final Destination 2

text: In the script, Bress said that Rory was his favorite character to write since "he's great comic relief, he's got a drug problem, he's funny, and he's all that." Bress bragged that "Cherry is awesome, awesome casting cause he's just so funny and the way he delivers his lines. It's like 'Oh yeah. That's good! That's better!'" "What I think was surprising on him was that from all of the humor he's involved and his sort of itchiness that he has with Kat, there is some moments where he reveals how vulnerable he really is and so the shield comes down and right in there you're really becoming sympathetic to Rory. You like him at first cause he's the funny guy, but then you care about him because you realize that there's a place that humor comes from that we all share," Perry appended.


title: Final Destination 2

text: "Blackwoods" actress Keegan Connor Tracy played Kat Jennings. Tracy claimed that "[Kat] doesn't really buy it at first, but pretty soon even her cynical attitude can't ignore the truth of the situation they're all in." Perry defined the role as "someone who is really so self-absorbed that without being overly malicious is incredibly rude and insensitive to the feelings of all those around her." Her casting was assessed by Perry as "full of energy" and "embodies the self-aware nervous energy of Kat. [Tracy] created a character that you kind of dislike intensely but you don't dislike so much that you don't understand why she is the way she is." Rounding up the cast are Lynda Boyd (Rachel Todd in "You, Me and the Kids") as widow Nora Carpenter and James Kirk (Kyle Morgan in "Once Upon a Christmas") as her son Tim Carpenter, David Paetkau (Hunter Kerrigan in "Just Deal") as gambler Evan Lewis, Justina Machado (Vanessa Diaz in "Six Feet Under") as pregnant Isabella Hudson, and Noel Fisher (Todd Tolanski of "") as farmer Brian Gibbons. Novice actors Sarah Carter, Alejandro Rae, and Shaun Sipos were hired as Kimberly's friends Shaina McKlank, Dano Estevez, and Frankie Whitman correspondingly. Andrew Airlie portrayed Kimberly's father Michael Corman, while Enid-Raye Adams appeared as Dr. Ellen Kalarjian.


title: Final Destination 2

text: Like the first film, the film was shot in and around Vancouver Island. "We know the area, we know the people up there and let's be honest, there's an enormous economic incentive to shoot there. We were very fortunate to get [unit production manager] Justis Greene, who's been working as a line producer up there for 30 years and who was able to get us the best crew working in town right now. It was advantageous to us on so many levels, that it was just the right place to go for this movie," Perry stated as the reason for the film's production in British Columbia. British Columbia Highway 19 was utilized as Route 23. The Plaza of Nations was used as a stand-in for Ellis Medical Complex, the site of Tim's death.


title: Final Destination 2

text: The farm and lake scenes were filmed in Campbell River and Okanagan Lake respectively, though it is depicted in Greenwood Lake, New York. "We shot part of it at the lake where it was 37° cold, which is beyond an ice cream headache. And the second stuff we shot in a big huge tank where we filmed all the underwater sequence, that was in a 93° pool," Landes clarified. Cook and Landes performed their own stunts in both sequences. "My biggest fear is being trapped in a car underwater. So it was kind of cool to face my fear and all that," Cook divulged. "We took a couple of lessons with a scuba guide to be comfortable being underwater and breathing off the regulator," Landes enunciated.


title: Final Destination 2

text: To avoid confusion with Larter and Carter, Cook was required to dye her hair brown for the role. "I like being a chameleon. It opens you up for so much more in this work. You don't get typecast," Cook professed. Landes also denied plots regarding Thomas and Kimberly's relationship. "It's kind of a protected relationship, more like a brother/sister thing than a love interest. They didn't want to go there, I guess. They did go that way in an earlier draft of the script but they didn't want it to seem like the cop is like lascivious or something. So what they have now, hopefully, is a little bit of chemistry and you get the idea that through tragedy something good will come. So it ends in an optimistic way, that maybe they can be together but there's no real love story," Landes articulated.


title: Final Destination 2

text: Digital Dimension took charge of the visual effects of the film. CG supervisor Jason Crosby pointed out that their studio was mainly selected for the highway sequence after the crew realized real logs only bounced about an inch off the road when dropped from a logging truck. "They were concerned about how they would make the shot happen, not knowing if CG would work. The timing was great because we had just finished a test shot of our CG logs bouncing on the freeway. We sent a tape to Vancouver and after seeing it the crew was convinced that any of the log shots could be done with CG," Crosby indicated. "It began with R&D on the log dynamics. Scripts were written to help manage the dynamic simulations with real world numbers for gravity, density, etc. The results were remarkably similar to the original logs shot in Vancouver, a testament to the accuracy of the software and the data we had collected, however the logs still lacked the 'jumping through windshields killer instinct' we were looking for. By tweaking the parameters, we coaxed the logs into a much livelier role."


title: Final Destination 2

text: Senior technical director James Coulter added creative 3D tracking on shots with fast pans, motion blur, and filters such as dust, mist, slabs of bark, broken chains, and other debris. Digital artist Edmund Kozin manipulated high resolution photos which were carefully stitched together to achieve realistic texture amongst the 22 CG logs of the film. Hair shaders were also used for splintering and frayed wood looks for the logs. Physics such as speed and height of the logging truck, length and width of the logs, type of wood and density of a Douglas-fir were also considered.


title: Final Destination 2

text: In spite of this, there are no CG cars incorporated in the actual film. "It was a possibility in the beginning so we did some dynamics tests using the logs as rigid bodies to hit cars with soft body deformers on them, but when they were done shooting they didn't end up needing any CG cars," Crosby avowed. Lifecasts of the actors were also used for all of the death scenes, including the highway setting. Landes experienced claustrophobia during the procedure. Fake blood was also used, but CG blood was also shown.


title: Final Destination 2

text: Like its predecessor, no official album accompanied the motion picture; however, there are ten songs featured in the film itself and two music videos embedded in its subsequent home release. Two singles of The Sounds, "Dance with Me" and "Rock 'n Roll", were promoted on Kimberly's car stereo. Besides these, the music video of "Seven Days a Week" accompanied the film's DVD. "Middle of Nowhere" by The Blank Theory was both heard on Evan's car radio and inserted in the DVD along with its music video. "Rocky Mountain High" by John Denver was covered twice in the end credits by Pete Snell and Jude Christodal. Christodal also performed "My Name is Death" during Brian's death and the end credits. Other songs integrated were "Highway to Hell" by AC/DC (on Kimberly's car AV), "Jon F. Hennessy" by FT (on Rory's vehicle audio), "Vitamin" by Incubus (during Evan's house fire) and "I Got You" by (hed) Planet Earth (during Rory's party).


title: Final Destination 2

text: Final Destination 2: Original Motion Picture Score was the promotional film score conducted by Daytime Emmy-winning composer Shirley Walker. Though it was not officially released, it was made available alongside "Willard: The Original Motion Picture Score" on September 30, 2003.


title: Final Destination 2

text: The score received positive reviews among commentators. Robert Koehler of "Variety" applauded that "Shirley Walker's score displays a thorough understanding of horror jolts." Pete Roberts of "DVDActive" admired the score as "top notch." Anthony Horan of "DVD.net Australia" told readers to "crank up the volume and prepare for a sonic feast". Nonetheless, Chris Carle of "IGN Movies" noted that "while the score is nothing you'll remember, it gets the job done."


title: Final Destination 2

text: The film premiered in 2,834 theaters across the United States and Canada on January 31, 2003, earning $16,017,141 in its opening weekend with an average of $5,651 per theater. "Final Destination 2" placed at #2 in the United States box office in its opening weekend, only $200,000 short behind the thriller film "The Recruit", which debuted on the same day, starred Al Pacino and Colin Farrell, and cleared $16,302,063 domestically. The film dropped to #5 in the next weekend and descended to #7 in its third weekend during Washington's Birthday. The film dropped out of the top-ten list in its fourth weekend until its last screening in 42 theaters in its sixteenth weekend, grossing $27,585 and placing in #65. "Final Destination 2" grossed $46,961,214 in the United States and Canada on its total screening and produced $43,465,191 in other territories, having an overall gross of $90,426,405 internationally, making it the lowest-grossing film in the franchise.


title: Final Destination 2

text: In comparison with its precursor, "Final Destination" ranked #3 on its opening weekend with net worth of $10,015,822, which is $6million less than the first weekend of "Final Destination 2" at #2. The previous film received $53,302,314 domestically throughout its 22-week run, $6.4million more than its sequel's gross all through its 16-week presentation. "Final Destination" amassed $59,549,147 in other countries and $112,802,314 overall, getting $16million and $22million more than "Final Destination 2" in that order.


title: Final Destination 2

text: The film was released on DVD on July 22, 2003, as part of New Line's Infinifilm series. The DVD includes bonus features including an audio commentary, six deleted scenes, three documentaries, two music videos, three trailers, interactive menus and subtitles. The audio commentary presents Ellis, Perry, Bress, and Gruber providing information about the making of the film and their intentions overall. Deleted scenes are a cross-examination with Isabella's husband Marcus Hudson (Roger Cross), a conversation between Eugene and Nora, a car chase concerning Kimberly's reckless driving, and Eugene's meeting with Death at the hospital, and extended versions of Kimberly's interrogation at the police station and the encounter with Bludworth. The first documentary labelled "Bits & Pieces: Bringing Life To Death" runs for 30 minutes and recalls the history of splatter film, on top of accounts in relation to the visual effects of the film. The second documentary entitled "Cheating Death: Beyond and Back" progresses for 18 minutes and brings out people recounting their own real-life experiences with death. "The Terror Gauge", the third documentary, is a test screening system of the film in which viewers are subjected to biofeedback and neurological examination under neurophysiologist Dr. Victoria Ibric. Other featurettes of the DVD include the interactive game "Choose Your Fate", the music videos of "Middle of Nowhere" by The Blank Theory and "Seven Days a Week" by The Sounds, the theatrical trailers of this film and its antecedent, in addition to informative trivia provided throughout the featurettes.


title: Final Destination 2

text: On Rotten Tomatoes the film has an approval rating of 48% based on 111 reviews, with an average rating of 5/10. The site's critics consensus reads: "This sequel is little more than an excuse to stage elaborate, gory scenes of characters getting killed off." On Metacritic, it has a weighted average score of 38 out of 100 based on 25 critics, indicating "generally unfavorable reviews". In 2010, Nick Hyman of "Metacritic" included "Final Destination 2" in the website's editorial "15 Movies the Critics Got Wrong", denoting that "the elaborate suspense/action set pieces from the first two films are more impressive than most". Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "B+" on an A+ to F scale.


title: Final Destination 2

text: Negative evaluations condemned the film's plot, acting, and screenplay. Roger Ebert of "Chicago Sun-Times" wrote that "perhaps movies are like history, and repeat themselves, first as tragedy, then as farce". James Berardinelli of "ReelViews" stressed that "the movie mandates complete gullibility and vacuous attention in order to work on any level". Claudia Puig of "USA Today" complained that "there is an audience for a movie in which innocent people suffer hideous accidental deaths is troubling enough, but a group of creative people chose to direct their energies on this repulsive spectacle [which] simply provokes disgust". Justine Elias of "The Village Voice" asserted that "this risible thriller is merely a sadistic series of misread premonitions and vile murders". David Grove of "Film Threat" stated that "[he] wasn't much scared by anything in "Final Destination 2" which is silly and illogical". Jeff Vice of "Deseret News" censured to "not even get into the awful script or the numbingly awful performances", while Bruce Fretts of "Entertainment Weekly" stated "everything else about the film is also deadly".


title: Final Destination 2

text: Some critics praised the film's comedic theme. A. O. Scott of "The New York Times" imparted "it's not as cheekily knowing as the "Scream movies" or as trashily Grand Guignol as the "Evil Dead franchise", but like those pictures it recognizes the close relationship between fright and laughter, and dispenses both with a free, unpretentious hand". C. W. Nevius of "San Francisco Chronicle" conveyed its "funnier than the original". Maitland McDonagh of "TV Guide" pronounced "if this is your idea of fun, step right up". William Arnold of "Seattle Post-Intelligencer" found it as "a series of Grand Guignol skits played for mean-spirited laughs". Marc Savlov of "Austin Chronicle" admired how "it is surprisingly good fun for the current crop of horror films, reasonably well-plotted and full of jaw-dropping, white-knuckle scares. That said, it's most definitely not for the squeamish nor the easily offended." Nev Pierce of "BBC" saw that "it's simple, but effective", whereas Sheila Norman-Culp of "The Atlanta Journal-Constitution" proclaimed that "what "Final Destination" did for the fear of flying, "Final Destination 2" does for the fear of driving".


title: Final Destination 2

text: Amongst the cast ensemble, Carson, Cherry, Cook, Landes, Larter, and Todd were prominent amidst the analysis for their performances as Eugene, Rory, Kimberly, Thomas, Clear, and Bludworth respectively. Koehler of "Variety" said that "Carson as skeptical Eugene energizes what had been a rote conception on the page"; "Cherry offered some dry comic balance"; Larter was "casted little light"; Todd was squandered by his "single, distinctly flat scene"; and "the generally awful thesping, led by Cook, whose blurry grasp of emotions betrays Ellis' apparent disinterest in his actors". Grove of "Film Threat" panned Cook, uttering that "she's no great actress, but she's a real looker" and teased that "since when did a horror movie suffer from having two dumb blondes as leads", the other actress being Larter, who "spends the whole movie looking miserable with her frigid acting". Dustin Putman of "TheMovieBoy.com" commented how "Cook is serviceable as the premonition-fueled Kimberly, but doesn't evoke enough emotion in the scenes following the brutal deaths of her close friends." Robin Clifford of "Reeling Reviews" stated that "Cook was strident as the catalyst that sparks events with her premonitions of disaster and her fervent desire to cheat the Reaper" whereas Larter was "giving the smart-ass edge her character needs", while Brett Gallman of "Oh, The Horror!" claimed that Larter "is again the bright spot", along with Cook and Landes who were "serviceable as leads" and Todd "whose purpose has still yet to be revealed in the franchise".


title: Final Destination 2

text: In January 2022, Stephen Rosenberg of MovieWeb ranked the franchise's films from worst to best. Rosenberg highlighted "Final Destination 2" as the best installment of the franchise, citing the opening sequence as, "memorable in the entire horror genre, let alone the franchise" and praised Todd's performance.


title: Final Destination 2

text: Like its predecessor, the film was nominated for the Saturn Award for Best Horror Film in 2004, as well as Choice Movie - Horror/Thriller in the 2003 Teen Choice Awards; likewise, the awards lost to "28 Days Later" and "The Ring", respectively. In the 4th Golden Trailer Awards, it was voted for the Golden Fleece, but lost to the surfer film "Blue Crush". Furthermore, the "Collision on Highway 23" was nominated for Best Action Sequence at the MTV Movie Awards in 2003, but lost it to the "Battle for Helm's Deep" of the fantasy film "", another New Line film.


title: Final Destination 2

text: The highway scene was regarded by Grove of "Film Threat" as "a monument to smashed cars, flying objects and scorched metal" and Garth Franklin of "Dark Horizons" as "utterly spectacular." Anne Billson of "Guardian.co.uk" exclaimed it as "one of the most terrifying sequences I've ever seen, all the more effective for being grounded in reality; few drivers haven't felt that anxious twinge as the badly secured load on the lorry in front of them starts to wobble."


title: Final Destination 2

text: The Route 23 pile-up scene was number 1 in the lists of best car crashes or disaster scenes by "Screen Junkies", "Made Man", "Unreality Magazine", "All Left Turns", "Chillopedia", "Filmstalker", "io9", "UGO Entertainment", "Filmcritic.com", and "New York Magazine". "Filmsite" enlisted all fatalities in its "Best Film Deaths Scenes". The demise of Kirk's character entered these listings of the most shocking deaths on film: George Wales of "Total Film" (#28), James Eldred of "Bullz-Eye.com" (#20), and Jeff Otto of "Bloody Disgusting" (#9).


title: Text messaging

text: Text messaging, or texting, is the act of composing and sending electronic messages, typically consisting of alphabetic and numeric characters, between two or more users of mobile devices, desktops/laptops, or another type of compatible computer. Text messages may be sent over a cellular network, or may also be sent via an Internet connection.


title: Text messaging

text: The term originally referred to messages sent using the Short Message Service (SMS). It has grown beyond alphanumeric text to include multimedia messages using the Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS) containing digital images, videos, and sound content, as well as ideograms known as emoji (happy faces, sad faces, and other icons), and instant messenger applications (usually the term is used when on mobile devices).


title: Text messaging

text: Text messages are used for personal, family, business and social purposes. Governmental and non-governmental organizations use text messaging for communication between colleagues. In the 2010s, the sending of short informal messages became an accepted part of many cultures, as happened earlier with emailing. This makes texting a quick and easy way to communicate with friends, family and colleagues, including in contexts where a call would be impolite or inappropriate (e.g., calling very late at night or when one knows the other person is busy with family or work activities). Like e-mail and voicemail and unlike calls (in which the caller hopes to speak directly with the recipient), texting does not require the caller and recipient to both be free at the same moment; this permits communication even between busy individuals. Text messages can also be used to interact with automated systems, for example, to order products or services from e-commerce websites, or to participate in online contests. Advertisers and service providers use direct text marketing to send messages to mobile users about promotions, payment due dates, and other notifications instead of using postal mail, email, or voicemail.


title: Text messaging

text: The service is referred to by different colloquialisms depending on the region. It may simply be referred to as a "text" in North America, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, and the Philippines, an "SMS" in most of mainland Europe, or an "MMS" or "SMS" in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia. The sender of a text message is commonly referred to as a "texter".


title: Text messaging

text: The electrical telegraph systems, developed in the early 19th century, used electrical signals to send text messages. In the late 19th century, the wireless telegraphy was developed using radio waves.


title: Text messaging

text: The University of Hawaii began using radio to send digital information as early as 1971, using ALOHAnet. Friedhelm Hillebrand conceptualised SMS in 1984 while working for Deutsche Telekom. Sitting at a typewriter at home, Hillebrand typed out random sentences and counted every letter, number, punctuation, and space. Almost every time, the messages contained fewer than 160 characters, thus giving the basis for the limit one could type via text messaging. With Bernard Ghillebaert of France Télécom, he developed a proposal for the GSM (Groupe Spécial Mobile) meeting in February 1985 in Oslo. The first technical solution evolved in a GSM subgroup under the leadership of Finn Trosby. It was further developed under the leadership of Kevin Holley and Ian Harris (see Short Message Service). SMS forms an integral part of Signalling System No. 7 (SS7). Under SS7, it is a "state" with a 160 character data, coded in the ITU-T "T.56" text format, that has a "sequence lead in" to determine different language codes and may have special character codes that permit, for example, sending simple graphs as text. This was part of ISDN (Integrated Services Digital Network) and since GSM is based on this, it made its way to the mobile phone. Messages could be sent and received on ISDN phones, and these can send SMS to any GSM phone. The possibility of doing something is one thing, implementing it another, but systems existed from 1988 that sent SMS messages to mobile phones (compare ND-NOTIS).


title: Text messaging

text: SMS messaging was used for the first time on 3 December 1992, at the Three Tuns Public House in Reading, Berkshire when Neil Papworth, a 22-year-old test engineer for Sema Group in the UK (now Airwide Solutions), used a personal computer to send the text message "Merry Christmas" via the Vodafone network to the phone of Richard Jarvis, who was at a party in Newbury, Berkshire, which had been organized to celebrate the event. Modern SMS text messaging is usually messaging from one mobile phone to another. Finnish Radiolinja became the first network to offer a commercial person-to-person SMS text messaging service in 1994. When Radiolinja's domestic competitor, Telecom Finland (now part of TeliaSonera) also launched SMS text messaging in 1995 and the two networks offered cross-network SMS functionality, Finland became the first nation where SMS text messaging was offered on a competitive as well as on a commercial basis. GSM was allowed in the United States and the radio frequencies were blocked and awarded to US "Carriers" to use US technology. Hence there is no "development" in the US in mobile messaging service. The GSM in the US had to use a frequency allocated for private communication services (PCS) – what the ITU frequency régime had blocked for DECT – Digital Enhanced Cordless Telecommunications – 1000-feet range picocell, but survived. American Personal Communications (APC), the first GSM carrier in America, provided the first text-messaging service in the United States. Sprint Telecommunications Venture, a partnership of Sprint Corp. and three large cable-TV companies, owned 49 percent of APC. The Sprint venture was the largest single buyer at a government-run spectrum auction that raised $7.7 billion in 2005 for PCS licenses. APC operated under the brand name of Sprint Spectrum and launched its service on 15 November 1995, in Washington, D.C. and in Baltimore, Maryland. Vice President Al Gore in Washington, D.C. made the initial phone-call to launch the network, calling Mayor Kurt Schmoke in Baltimore.


title: Text messaging

text: Initial growth of text messaging worldwide was slow, with customers in 1995 sending on average only 0.4 messages per GSM customer per month. One factor in the slow take-up of SMS was that operators were slow to set up charging systems, especially for prepaid subscribers, and to eliminate billing fraud, which was possible by changing SMSC settings on individual handsets to use the SMSCs of other operators. Over time, this issue was eliminated by switch billing instead of billing at the SMSC and by new features within SMSCs to allow blocking of foreign mobile users sending messages through it. SMS is available on a wide range of networks, including 3G networks. However, not all text-messaging systems use SMS; some notable alternate implementations of the concept include J-Phone's SkyMail and NTT Docomo's Short Mail, both in Japan. E-mail messaging from phones, as popularized by NTT Docomo's i-mode and the RIM BlackBerry, also typically use standard mail protocols such as SMTP over TCP/IP. text messaging was the most widely used mobile data service, with 74% of all mobile phone users worldwide, or 2.4 billion out of 3.3 billion phone subscribers, at the end of 2007 being active users of the Short Message Service. In countries such as Finland, Sweden, and Norway, over 85% of the population use SMS. The European average is about 80%, and North America is rapidly catching up with over 60% active users of SMS . The largest average usage of the service by mobile phone subscribers occurs in the Philippines, with an average of 27 texts sent per day per subscriber.


title: Text messaging

text: Text messaging is most often used between private mobile phone users, as a substitute for voice calls in situations where voice communication is impossible or undesirable (e.g., during a school class or a work meeting). Texting is also used to communicate very brief messages, such as informing someone that you will be late or reminding a friend or colleague about a meeting. As with e-mail, informality and brevity have become an accepted part of text messaging. Some text messages such as SMS can also be used for the remote control of home appliances. It is widely used in domotics systems. Some amateurs have also built their own systems to control (some of) their appliances via SMS. Other methods such as group messaging, which was patented in 2012 by the GM of Andrew Ferry, Devin Peterson, Justin Cowart, Ian Ainsworth, Patrick Messinger, Jacob Delk, Jack Grande, Austin Hughes, Brendan Blake, and Brooks Brasher are used to involve more than two people into a text messaging conversation. A Flash SMS is a type of text message that appears directly on the main screen without user interaction and is not automatically stored in the inbox. It can be useful in cases such as an emergency (e.g., fire alarm) or confidentiality (e.g., one-time password).


title: Text messaging

text: Short message services are developing very rapidly throughout the world. SMS is particularly popular in Europe, Asia (excluding Japan; see below), United States, Australia, and New Zealand and is also gaining influence in Africa. Popularity has grown to a sufficient extent that the term "texting" (used as a verb meaning the act of mobile phone users sending short messages back and forth) has entered the common lexicon. Young Asians consider SMS as the most popular mobile phone application. Fifty percent of American teens send fifty text messages or more per day, making it their most frequent form of communication. In China, SMS is very popular and has brought service providers significant profit (18 billion short messages were sent in 2001).


title: Text messaging

text: It is a very influential and powerful tool in the Philippines, where the average user sends 10–12 text messages a day. The Philippines alone sends on average over 1 billion text messages a day, more than the annual average SMS volume of the countries in Europe, and even China and India. SMS is hugely popular in India, where youngsters often exchange many text messages, and companies provide alerts, infotainment, news, cricket scores updates, railway/airline booking, mobile billing, and banking services on SMS.


title: Text messaging

text: Similarly, in 2008, text messaging played a primary role in the implication of former Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick in an SMS sex scandal. Short messages are particularly popular among young urbanites. In many markets, the service is comparatively cheap. For example, in Australia, a message typically costs between A$0.20 and $0.25 to send (some prepaid services charge $0.01 between their own phones), compared with a voice call, which costs somewhere between $0.40 and $2.00 per minute (commonly charged in half-minute blocks). The service is enormously profitable to the service providers. At a typical length of only 190 bytes (including protocol overhead), more than 350 of these messages per minute can be transmitted at the same data rate as a usual voice call (9 kbit/s). There are also free SMS services available, which are often sponsored, that allow sending and receiving SMS from a PC connected to the Internet. Mobile service providers in New Zealand, such as Vodafone and Telecom NZ, provide up to 2000 SMS messages for NZ$10 per month. Users on these plans send on average 1500 SMS messages every month. Text messaging has become so popular that advertising agencies and advertisers are now jumping into the text messaging business. Services that provide bulk text message sending are also becoming a popular way for clubs, associations, and advertisers to reach a group of opt-in subscribers quickly.


title: Text messaging

text: Research suggests that Internet-based mobile messaging will have grown to equal the popularity of SMS in 2013, with nearly 10 trillion messages being sent through each technology. Services such as Facebook Messenger, Snapchat, WhatsApp and Viber have led to a decline in the use of SMS in parts of the world.


title: Text messaging

text: Of many texting trends, a system known as microblogging has surfaced, which consists of a miniaturized blog, inspired mainly by people's tendency to jot down informal thoughts and post them online. They consist of websites like Twitter and its Chinese equivalent Weibo (微博). As of 2016, both of these websites were popular.