The prototypical computer
adventure game, first designed by Will Crowther on the PDP-10
in the mid-1970s as an attempt at computer-refereed fantasy gaming,
and expanded into a puzzle-oriented game by Don Woods at Stanford
in 1976. (Woods had been one of the authors of
INTERCAL.) Now better known as Adventure, but the TOPS-10
operating system permitted only six-letter filenames. See also
vadding, Zork, and Infocom.
This game defined the terse, dryly humorous style since expected in
text adventure games, and popularized several tag lines that have
become fixtures of hacker-speak: "A huge green fierce snake bars
the way!" "I see no X here" (for some noun X). "You are in a
maze of twisty little passages, all alike." "You are in a little
maze of twisty passages, all different." The `magic words'
xyzzy and plugh also derive from this game.
Crowther, by the way, participated in the exploration of the
Mammoth & Flint Ridge cave system; it actually has a
`Colossal Cave' and a `Bedquilt' as in the game, and the `Y2' that
also turns up is cavers' jargon for a map reference to a secondary
entrance.
ADVENT sources are available for FTP at
ftp://ftp.wustl.edu/doc/misc/if-archive/games/sou
There's a version implemented as a set of web scripts at
http://tjwww.stanford.edu/adventure/.
