Raise your hand if you've ever downloaded an adventure game off the internet. I'm not talking about freebies here, but one of those retail games that was long ago cleared out of the bargain bin and these days can only be found for a king's ransom on eBay. You know, abandonware.

Funny, I don't see any hands. Yet we've all done it at one point or another, maybe without even realizing that abandonware is illegal. Illegal but not immoral, some would argue. With games this old, who's getting hurt? Do we honestly expect the powers that be to make decades old games available to us ever again?

Enter GameTap, a new service that's doing just that. GameTap is a web-based gaming "channel" backed by the Turner Broadcasting System, the conglomerate behind several cable TV stations including CNN, TNT, and the Cartoon Network. It works sort of like pay-per-view, except GameTap is subscription based. For $14.95 (US) a month, you get unlimited access to all the games in GameTap's database, which range from (almost) new releases to some that date all the way back to the early '80s. Right now there are almost 400 games available, with more added every week, as well as TV-like MediaPlex segments about games and the gaming industry that rotate regularly. Of the genres represented on GameTap, action games are by far the largest segment, but my interest was piqued when I saw that a few of Sierra's classics are available, too. Could GameTap be a safe haven for old-school adventure gamers amidst all the arguments about abandonware's legality and morality? I signed up for a few months to find out.

When you register for GameTap, a 25MB application is installed on your computer. This communicates with GameTap's database to provide access to the games via your broadband connection. (Dial-up use is not supported.) When you launch this application, you need to log in with a username and password. This allows multiple people in the same household to use GameTap with their own customized options, and also enables you to use GameTap on more than one computer. The games themselves are not installed on your machine. You play through GameTap's interface, using an emulator that runs not only Windows games, but games originally designed for DOS and many consoles seamlessly on your modern PC. This emulator runs older games exactly as they would have run on an old computer—"out of the box," with no fiddling.

GameTap's system requirements are fairly benign. Windows XP or 2000 is required, as well as an 800MHz processor, 256MB of memory, a 3D-capable 32MB video card, and DirectX 8. It's important to note, though, that not all games are supported under these minimum requirements. As an example, Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness requires a 128MB video card, and mine is only 64MB. When I tried to launch this game, a window popped up telling me that my computer might not be good enough, but giving me the option to run it anyway. The game still worked.

The adventure section is the third largest of GameTap's genres (after action is classic arcade). In spite of this, the adventure pickings are pretty slim. Of the 46 games currently in this category, only about 15 are what I'd call adventures. Among these are the first three Myst games (with URU reportedly coming soon), four games from the Space Quest series, The Adventures of Willy Beamish, and a slew of Infocom text adventures such as PlanetFall and the original Zork trilogy.



The inclusion of these games should be heartening to adventure fans, particularly because new titles are being added at a steady clip. However, the way the games are classified into genres is not particularly adventure-friendly. You really need to know what you're looking for. Besides the games I mentioned, the rest of the so-called adventure section is comprised of action/adventures. Some are more recent, such as Beyond Good & Evil and Tomb Raider, but most are relics of the Atari, Commodore 64, and Sega Genesis systems. (One of these, a weird little maze game from 1980, happens to be entitled Adventure, and GameTap's description mistakenly attributes the "launch of the entire adventure genre" to it. Don't be fooled; it's not the Adventure text game that served as the catalyst of the genre.) I wasted a lot of time clicking through the offerings, viewing screenshots, and sometimes even launching a game to play a few minutes before I had a good sense of whether my choice was really an adventure game, or something else that GameTap had arbitrarily decided to call one.

This process was made more cumbersome by GameTap's flashy but awkward interface. As you can see in the screenshots, GameTap has a futuristic thing going on, with games in a particular genre arranged in a ring that you need to scroll through with your mouse or arrow keys to find what you want. You can select favorites, which is nice because then you only have to scroll through those games you've picked out, but it's still time-consuming. GameTap does have a search feature, but unless you already know a game is in the system, it's not particularly useful. The interface is marginally easier to navigate with a gamepad, but not by much.

When you launch a game, your computer has to communicate with GameTap for a while before it's ready to play. With oldies this is a quick process; the Space Quest games only take about 15 seconds. But loading a more graphics-intensive game for the first time can take a bit longer—up to 15 minutes, for me. Video advertisements play while a game is loading, primarily for games that are currently available or coming soon. I was glad to be able to minimize the software and ignore these ads. I didn't really mind them being there, especially the funny ones that showed Pac Man puppet shows and fake outtakes from Pitfall, but for $14.95 a month, it's nice not to be force-fed.