To Infinity And Beyond: Artix Entertainment's Adam Bohn Talks 20 Years Of AdventureQuest
«My main goal was to get 100 people to play three times.»
I'm standing at a small booth off the beaten path at PAX East 2023, the cacophony of trailers and demos blaring all around me. In front of me is Adam Bohn, the head of Artix Entertainment and creator of the AdventureQuest series of MMORPGs. His energy is infectious, his passion for his creation palpable. This is our first time meeting, so he's giving us the rundown of his history in games, which, considering his original creation AdventureQuest recently celebrated its 20th anniversary, is a storied one.
«I figured, if you only played once, you didn't like it, you quit. If you played twice, maybe you liked it, or maybe you launched the game by accident. If you played three times though? You're in, you're officially an AdventureQuest player!»
The philosophy makes sense; so many games consider every single person who has ever logged into a game a «player,» which has a tendency to inflate the actual number of consistent players keeping up with the game. What doesn't make sense, what truly boggles the mind, is how Bohn and his team have updated an AdventureQuest game – be it the original AdventureQuest Worlds, or AdventureQuest 3D – once a week, every week, for over 20 years .
«Through hurricanes, sickness, holidays, no breaks, for 20 years, those core games have been updated every single week,» he says. «Our approach is like Saturday Night Live or South Park; whatever's going on in the world, we toss it in. Remember Left Shark at the Super Bowl? One of my proudest achievements is getting Left Shark in-game just 15 minutes after it appeared on-stage…and then 12 hours later, it was renamed for legal reasons.»
When we asked how difficult it was to establish that
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