Graphically, where it all began
It never occurred to me until just now that Adventure was possibly the first true graphic adventure game. I believe the original Magnavox Odyssey from 1972 had some tv-screen overlay for a game called Haunted House but merely involved navigating the path on the screen and your character-blip rounded out the in-game "graphics". Games that followed on the heels of Adventure were typically computer & text-based, and you had to imagine your surroundings for the most part and issue commands such as >Climb down rope< or >kill vampire with stake< to proceed. Sound in those games was typically non-existent, making Atari's Adventure really stand out.
Atari negated that text-based interface-to-come, and did so right out of the box. The text adventure was easily much more expansive as it essentially was an interactive book that required constant use of your imagination and memory to proceed and succeed, but almost always came up short if what you were looking for was more fast-paced graphic and aural stimulation. Sure, Adventure, even by the weak standards of the late 70s/early 80s was horrible graphically and the sound fared only slightly better, but it got the job done and the developer [Robin somethingorother - you could see their name in one empty room once you delivered the Grail to the Gold castle, if memory serves] did a fine job with what he or she had to work with back then. For a graphic adventure, the game is somewhat expansive with many castles and mazes to negotiate so perhaps this is why the graphics and sound suffered so much as computer memory was *incredibly* expensive during that time and a good deal of your $40 or $50 cartridge's price was for the expense of the memory in your 4k cartridge. In retrospect, you certainly got your money's worth in the Adventure cartridge in mere consideration of the size of your play area and the amount of time it took to beat the game and also in its replay value.
About the only true excitement this game could muster, however, would be in one of the dark mazes where you could only see about two inches in all directions from your character block and the speedy red dragon was hot on your heels, trying to swallow you [the red dragon was the fastest, wasn't he? Or was it the gold dragon? Hmmm...]. For all intents and purposes, that was rather intense gaming. As an aside, why is the red bad guy always the fastest [consider Pac-anything]? What is the correlation? Were they descendants of Corvettes, perhaps? And what's with that #!(*#$!! bridge? Who can run around while carrying a bridge that's easily 20 times your size? Ever get stuck in a wall while crossing the bridge and have to reset the game? Yeah, me too! :) Ok, back to reality...
Adventure is a must-have for any retro-gamer or someone interested in the history or nostalgia of the video game world. Easily in the 2600's Top-10 list of best games for that console.
For more information, I highly recommend www.classicgaming.com/museum for much more info than you could ever hope to find regarding the people, the systems, and the games that started it all.