I made some really simple and short games in Adventure Maker back in 2000-2001, and it has been over 20 years since I've seen my first game actually running. I actually submitted it as a school project and blew my 8th grade teacher's mind back then because they didn't know kids could just download a program, draw some pictures, borrow some sound effects from some games and then create a game of their own. 🤣

I have a copy of Adventure Maker 2.7 beta 4 with a file date of April 2001, but when I last tried to load my game in that version it was broken and missing all of the interaction hot spots.

I managed to find a text file containing my registration email, with a file date of May 2000. In that file, it mentions the "new" version being 2.05, so it's very likely that that is the version I started with.

Somehow in all these years it never occurred to me that a slightly older version of the program may work properly with my game. I had always assumed that I'd broken it at some point by opening it with the wrong version... which may still be the case, and would be sad, but realistically it was a point and click adventure game with like 10 scenes. Not much to it, and I still have all the graphics and sound effects, just not the game itself.

If anyone can find any older versions of Adventure Maker that predate 2.7 beta 4, it would be worth a shot. Based on the other file names there's a good chance that version 2.05 would be called am205.exe, but I found nothing when searching for that online.

As a hilarious side note, a later game I made with Adventure Maker and actually built an installer for in 2001 installs just fine and works perfectly in Windows 10 (aside from midi playback, which would have worked if I'd hooked up my Roland UM-One). How's that for compatibility? It didn't even need any weird old runtimes installed.

EDIT: This is the oldest archived page I can find for their website, and it refers to version 2.7 as being "old". Yet I purchased and started using the program long before that was released.
https://web.archive.org/web/20021004203103/ht … m/downloads.htm
I guess, 2.7 is technically older than 2.7 beta 4, so I guess I can try it, but as far as I can tell the program was massively revamped with 2.7, to the point that no previous versions are referred to on the website at all.

... I also just realized their forums are still up and running. Wow. Maybe I should ask there. 😮 Scratch that. Signups are disabled due to forum problems, so I can't ask there unless I can just email someone.