After playing Colossal Cave Adventure, Roberta Williams looked for similar games and, when none were to be found, she decided to write her own with husband Ken Williams doing the coding. She added simple static line drawings, creating the first graphical adventure, Mystery House, with a plot based on Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None. Her next game, The Wizard and the Princess: Adventure in Serenia, added fill color to the graphics.

With King's Quest I, Sierra brought animated graphics to the genre. The characters could be moved behind and in front of the objects in the scenery, which was drawn with perspective, giving the illusion of 3-D space. While Sierra would soon become the best-known developer of adventure games, the first release of King's Quest was a commercial failure. It became successful only after a long series of re-releases and improvements. Once King's Quest took off, Sierra branched into several franchises, including Space Quest, Police Quest, and Quest for Glory.

Paralleling Sierra's rise in adventure games was Lucasfilm Games, a competing company making similar games. Lucasfilm Games was able to tap into the franchises of its parent company, Lucasfilm, and produced a line of adventure games based around Indiana Jones. While it is likely best known for The Secret of Monkey Island, Lucasfilm produced many other popular and important adventure games, including Sam and Max, Day of the Tentacle, and Loom. Maniac Mansion was the first game to remove typing text entirely from the adventure, and their Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion (SCUMM) was built to allow a point-and-click interface.

By 1990, Lucasfilm and Sierra had distinctly different adventure game philosophies. Sierra games contained many instant-death hazards, ranging from the obvious to the unexpected. Worse, avoiding those hazards was by no means a guarantee of success, as several Sierra games were notorious for situations where the player could simply miss a critical item, rendering the game unwinnable.