I didn’t realize it until someone said something in the basically dead AdventureGamers.com discord, but apparently the forums for the site are gone after being around for 25+ years. I haven’t posted there in a very long time, but it used to be a place I hung out a lot about 20 years ago when the genre was struggling commercially and in a very weird place. The site itself is still up and posting, I suppose they just decided the forums weren’t worth the cost anymore. The last time I checked, maybe about a year ago, it was still active. It certainly wasn’t as busy as it was a decade or two ago, but people were still posting there and doing their community playthroughs. It was definitely more active than the AdventureGamers discord and it doesn’t sound like the mods were aware that it was going to happen because they were in the middle of holding a vote for their next community playthrough.

It was a weird place since it happened to be a very weird time for the genre. I had moved there from the Just Adventure forums (also gone), which were getting a bit too grognardy for me. My memories of the adventure game community at the time were that a lot of hope and pressure was placed on every notable game as “The One” that would make the genre commercially big again. So stuff like Broken Sword 3, a game that I think is perfectly fine, getting so much hype behind it because it was one of the bigger releases. I guess this is ignoring stuff like Professor Layton and the Ace Attorney series, which were far more popular but just didn’t seem to get as much attention in the community from what I recall? There was a massive thread at one point because The Moment of Silence, a game that was hyped up at that point and one that I ultimately didn’t care for, got a negative review in PC Gamer and attitude at the time was that critics just “hated” adventure games and that’s why they were getting negative reviews. This was ignoring that some of the better ones got better scores but that would destroy the narrative. Anyway, one or two critics had jumped in to try to explain things and it just turned into a lot of arguing before the thread was locked because it was a ridiculous argument in the first place.

Ultimately I ended up moving on to the Idle Thumbs forums because I don’t stay at communities longer than 5-10 years but the forums kept going until now, so it’s a little sad to see it gone. It’s a weird time for forums since people seem to mostly use Discord now, but that’s a company that controls everything and no one can see what any Discord community looks like until they join it, so that isn’t great either. The other community I was very active on during this time was the Shacknews chatty, where I recently learned that also imploded in the last year (possibly from management decisions, not sure) and looks to be essentially dead now. Oh well. At least Paper Cult Club, a ttrpg forum, launched this year and has been nice.