History VideoGame / TheEarlyYears

All of the games have been reproduced as they originally were as best they can on the Adventure Games Live system, and feature suitably self-deprecating commentary by Stoddard throughout. ''The Early Years'' comprises the most usable of the games, whilst ''More Early Years'' completes the collection with the less playable or incomplete ones and other archive material from Stoddard's childhood.

All of the games have been reproduced as they originally were as best they can on the Adventure Games Live system, and feature suitably self-deprecating commentary by Stoddard throughout. ''The Early Years'' comprises the most usable of the games, whilst ''More Early Years'' completes the collection with the less usable or incomplete ones and other archive material from Stoddard's childhood.

* '''Core Games:''' ''Adventure'', ''Gold Rush'', ''Trapped in Castle Bombadier'', ''Space-Man'', ''Spider Attack'', ''Save Crewshade!'', ''Camelot's Curse'', ''Trapped in Castle Bombadier 2'', ''Time Machine'', ''Vampire Hall'', ''Magical Journey'', ''The Quest of Kael''
* '''Bonus Games:''' ''Tower of Terror'', ''Granny's Garden'', ''Shibble'', ''The Spinning Stone'', ''Mini-Adventure'', ''Dragon!'', ''The Jewel of Montol'', ''Compu-Maze'', ''Forest'', ''Murder!''

* '''Core Games:''' ''The Haunted Inn'', ''Missing Dog'', ''Along River Tweek'', ''Sword of Voltar'', ''The Giant Flea'', ''King Solomon's Mines'', ''Quwelch'', ''Cave'', ''Scary House'', ''Mystic Magic'', ''The Hall of Kings'', ''Mephisto's Lost Treasure''
* '''Bonus Games (The Museum of the Unrealized):''' ''Granny's Garden 2'', ''Escape!'', ''Dragon's Fire'', ''The Quest of Sir Nashi'', ''Wine Glass''

* UnintentionallyUnwinnable: Several of the games were this, if not completely unplayable, in their original forms. Stoddard notes that ''Space-Man'' and ''Granny's Garden'' ask you where you want to go, but uses a TextParser interface with no indication of ''where'' you can go. He had to look at the source code to work out how the games were meant to work.

* '''Core Games:''' ''The Haunted Inn'', ''Missing Dog'', ''Along River Tweek'', ''Sword of Voltar'', ''The Giant Flea'', ''King Solomon's Mines'', ''Quwelch'', ''Cave'', ''Scary House'', ''Mystic Magic'', ''The Hall of Kings''

** The geography in several of the earliest-written games makes no sense and does not follow logically, described by Stoddard as "impossible geography", and perhaps best demonstrated by a location in ''The Spinning Stone'' which only has one exit despite the fact you can get to it from about a dozen other locations. [[AntiFrustrationFeatures Most of them are optional games for this reason.]]

* FakeDifficulty: Both games are awarded very low difficulty scores -- ''VideoGame/TheMysteryOfBracklyHall'' is the only Website/AdventureGamesLive game considered easier[[note]]not counting the tutorial game ''The Trainer''[[/note]] -- but people can find them challenging because of the childish, illogical natures of the puzzles, or because they are so broken and unplayable in their original form.

** Whenever a game would become UnwinnableByDesign or [[UnwinnableByMistake Mistake]], the game will kill you immediately so you can undo your last move (for example, if you eat one of your items in ''Space-Man''), or ignore the unwinnable state while mentioning that the game would have been unwinnable (if you lose Excalibur in ''Camelot's Curse'' before killing the giant warrior).

* GameBreakingBug: Many of the games had them in their original form, requiring fixes for the ''Adventure Games Live'' version -- perhaps most notably the very first puzzle of ''Trapped in Castle Bombardier 2'', where you can only escape the cell if you haven't found the item you use to escape.

* StunnedSilence: In ''Trapped in Castle Bombardier 2'', the correct way to defeat one of the lions is to [[spoiler:spit on it, which causes it to drown.]] Stoddard's reaction in the present-day commentary is this.

All of the games have been reproduced as they originally were as best they can on the Adventure Games Live system, and feature suitably self-deprecating commentary by Stoddard throughout. ''The Early Years'' comprises the most usable of the games, whilst ''More Early Years'' completes the collection with the less usable or incomplete ones.

''The Early Years'' (2005) and its sequel ''More Early Years'' (2007) are InteractiveFiction games hosted on [[http://www.rinkworks.com/adventure/ Adventure Games Live]]. Unlike the site's other games, however, they are collections of shorter games written by the site's creator, Sam Stoddard, as a child; the culmination of all these games was ''VideoGame/FantasyQuest'', the first game released on Adventure Games Live. All of the games have been reproduced as they originally were as best they can on the Adventure Games Live system, and feature suitably self-deprecating commentary by Stoddard throughout.

** Whenever a game would become UnwinnableByDesign or [[UnwinnableByMistake Mistake]], the game will kill you immediately so you can undo your last move (for example, if you eat one of your items in ''Space-Man''), or ignore the unwinnable state while mentioning that the game would have been unwinnable (if you lose Excalibur in ''Camelot's Curse'' before killing the giant warrior)

** Occasionally reaching InsaneTrollLogic levels, notably in the inexplicable solution to ''Space-Man'', where putting random items in a hole (based on a cryptic note you get on Pluto) and shooting them will make a pile of gold appear for no reason.

* AHumanByAnyOtherName: Haplay, the hero of many of these games, is a Gwuil, and not a human, according to the intro of ''Shibble'', but Gwuils are similar to humans. It's not explained what the difference is.

* AntiFrustrationFeatures: Although you wouldn't be able to undo the fatal moves in the original versions, you can in Adventure Games Live, which is especially welcome here due to how many of the puzzles have completely arbitrary solutions that require you to pick a choice from a list and hope it's the right one.

* MoonLogicPuzzle: Occasionally reaching InsaneTrollLogic levels, notably in the inexplicable solution to ''Space-Man''.

-->You are at the sun. You see: nothing.
-->''You know, I'm pretty sure that if I was on the surface of the Sun, whatever I'd be looking at would be of'' particular ''interest. But maybe I'd already realised that anyone standing on the surface of the Sun would already be blinded a skillion times over. But I'm guessing not.''