>>1878112
>This guy gets it.
I glossed over a critical point though. The stories and scenarios in adventure games tended to be much more complex, even from a basic game like the original King's Quests, than most other game genres because of how they operated mechanically. Most puzzle solutions weren't handled by the baseline mechanics, but were scripted events with unique sprite animations. Whereas in most games you'd - say, have a jump button that works regardless of where you are in the game, in an adventure game a jump would likely be a scripted event. You could jump across a gap the developers intended you to jump across, but you couldn't - say, jump from a balcony. So long as the player stayed on the rails of the narrative, it allowed developers unmatched freedom to set up scenarios which played out automatically without the player's input beyond the initial prompt. I guess you could see those as some of the first forms of in-engine cutscenes - and they were the highlights of the game. Nobody was excited about being able to walk left and right around a screen and browse the inventory - they were excited to see what would happen if they figured out the puzzle.
This is also what allowed comedy games to flourish in the Adventure game genre - where it fell flat in other games - because developers were able to tightly control scripted scenarios in order to get the timing necessary for good comedy right. You didn't have to worry about the player choosing to fuck off and trying to get outside of the map for a half hour between the setup and the punchline. Once the event was prompted, the game engine took control and played out the script the developers wanted from start to finish
Modern cutscenes are basically the same thing - except triggered automatically, rather than by user-prompt, and showcase scenarios that either can't be done in-engine by the player, or to give the players a cinematic treat to spice up the playthrough, or both.