I believe that this idea never took of for a few reasons, and I believe these reasons outline why arcades and consoles became the predominant platforms for action games, whereas puzzles and visual novels were mostly confined to home computers. Thanks go to Alex Spriggs, who made these key observations in his blog. Here Alex basically said that puzzle games (like Kings Quest) 'often contain only dominant playing strategy, without variation from that strategy or any room for error'. In Japan this style of game design was therefore most likely seen as inferior to what they were making for arcades at the time, which were real-time action games in dynamic play fields.
Best course of action?
One genre that proved to be a bridge between action and adventure games were RPGs though. These, like adventure games emphasized turn based interactions with the environment rather than the real-time interaction almost always seen in action games. For this we can conclude that RPGs are a genre firmly rooted in adventure games, but with interfaces that were designed primarily around consoles.
I hope this goes to show that there are fundamental differences then between the design philosophies of Adventure/RPG and Action games, and these differences usually show themselves most clearly in the control schemes and mechanics of these games. Business models aside these differences would be enough to make both genres largely incompatible with the arcade platform.
