The first genre gaming evolved into after Pong's arcade twitch-ery was the story-based game known simply as “adventure”—named after mid-70s computer program Adventure. After initially spreading over the Arpanet, the interactive fiction genre went mainstream with text-adventures like 1980's Zork before settling into the mid-80s to mid-90s graphic point-and-click golden era with titles like 1985's hard-boiled detective yarn Déjà Vu and a bunch of Lucas titles, including the Monkey Island franchise.

This genre’s mouse-oriented gameplay simply wasn’t a great fit for consoles, so adventure gaming began to decline once gaming migrated away from computers. That is, until the Wii’s remote pointer helped bring adventure gaming into now-gen living rooms.

Of course, the genre was already undergoing a revival on PCs thanks to Telltale Games, an outfit founded by ex-LucasArts employees who had worked on some of adventure gaming’s all-time greats, including the original The Secret of Monkey Island.

Telltale kicked off their digitally-distributed, episodic adventure games with a 2005 adaptation of Jeff Smith’s kiddie comic epic Bone and a revival of LucasArt’s snark-noir classic Sam & Max. (In fact, Telltale itself came to be after LucasArts cancelled a proposed Sam & Max game a couple years earlier). They’ve since put out Strong Bad's Cool Game for Attractive People and Wallace & Gromit's Grand Adventures, but arguably their most anticipated game yet is their latest revival Tales of Monkey Island.

This five-part episodic game, beginning with "Launch of the Screaming Narwhal" downloadable via PC or Wii, features Caribbean swashbuckler Guybrush Threepwood once again battling evil undead pirate LeChuck and rescuing governor Elaine Marley. It boast “brainstorming” input from series creator Ron Gilbert and is being helmed by the original game’s co-designer Dave Grossman, now Telltale’s design director.

The other main contributor of the original two titles is cult fave Tim Schafer, but if you’re hankering for some of his input fear not as the original, 20-year-old Secret of Monkey Island game has been upgraded in a "Special Edition" with new HD hand-painted backgrounds and character designs (as well as a rerecorded score and new voice work) and is available on both Xbox Live Arcade, PC and the iPhone App Store. Purists can even revert back to the original floppy disc-era with 256 colours and a MIDI score.

Adventure gaming may not ever return to its former place of prominence—at one point Myst sold over six million copies, and was recently ported to iPhone—but as a more thoughtful, less-frenetic alternative to modern shoot-and-kill games, sometimes its nice to just sit back, point and click.