There’s a good feeling when you earn an achievement in a game and see that fewer than 1% of players have also earned it. It makes you feel like you’ve got some real gamer cred, like you’re made of sterner stuff than almost everyone else playing.
A couple of gamers—and only a couple—are basking in that type of pride after last Saturday, when the first ever “Adventure Game Aptitude Test” was administered. Designed by developer Woe Industries, the AGAT challenged players to complete an ’80s adventure game without using a walkthrough. Players weren’t told what adventure game they’d be playing in advance, and they were monitored via webcam and microphone by a legitimate online proctoring software to determine if they were looking up hints on a second window, using their phones to cheat, or getting help from someone off-screen.
Over 800 participants had four hours to complete Lucasfilm Games 1987 graphic adventure Maniac Mansion, and… it was an absolute bloodbath. According to Woe Industries, there were 831 attempts (plus an additional 168 who began the test too late and were thus disqualified) and only two people actually passed the exam.
I asked Woe Industries for more statistics about the test, which began between 1 and 2 pm EST on Saturday. Hey, it’s a standardized test, you can’t just take it whenever the heck you want—but that rigid start time meant a lot of players weren’t free to spend four hours on a Saturday playing an old adventure game.
“While we had 831 attempts we also had about 4,500 people sign up for a reminder of the test date. We lost a few of those people due to the exam time,” Woe Industries said in an email. “This project was always going to be a push and pull between fun and restriction. Asking people to play this game under very unconventional and ridiculous circumstances to see what kind of gameplay that elicited from them. Maintaining a fixed start time was a big part of that. But if we ever do it again, maybe we’ll try to find a more universally accessible time.”
As for the winners: “Our two champs actually beat the game relatively fast, which does make us wonder if they just knew the game very well already,” the developer said. “But hey, no crime studying for a test. They didn’t know the game ahead of time, so they must have amazing memories.”
Woe Industries also noted that two additional students technically completed the exam, but were disqualified: “One for cheating and the other for starting the test well after our allowed start time. A tough decision, but we have to maintain AGAT’s rigorous standards. It wouldn’t be fair to everyone else.”
“As far as pass rate, we honestly weren’t sure if anyone would pass. We did a couple practice runs while building the site and, well, let’s just say we are definitely not AGAT certified gamers,” the developer said. “But we were hoping we’d get at least one winner, seeing as we’d already put together the diploma. So it was nice to see two winners with clean proctor logs.”
