![]() ![]() A big fan of Tolkien, he introduced additional fantasy elements, such as elves and a troll. The version that is best known today was the result of a collaboration with Don Woods, a graduate student who discovered the game on a computer at Stanford University and made significant expansions and improvements, with Crowther's blessing. Crowther was a caver, who applied his experience in Mammoth Cave (in Kentucky) to create a game that he could enjoy with his young daughters.Ĭrowther had explored the Mammoth Cave in the early 1970s, and created a vector map based on surveys of parts of the real cave, but the text game is a completely separate entity, created during the 1975-76 academic year and featuring fantasy elements such as axe-throwing dwarves and a magic bridge. Will Crowther was a programmer at Bolt, Beranek & Newman, which developed the ARPANET (the forerunner of the Internet). Crowther reproduced portions of the real cave so faithfully that cavers who have played the game can easily navigate through familiar sections in the Bedquilt region on their first visit. The Colossal Cave subnetwork has many entrances, one of which is known as Bedquilt. It was originally designed by Will Crowther, a programmer and keen caver, who based the layout on part of the Mammoth Cave system in Kentucky. ![]() You'll be adventuring in no time.Colossal Cave Adventure (also known as ADVENT, Colossal Cave, or Adventure) (Crowther, 1976 Crowther & Woods, 1977) was the first computer adventure game. There are a few other commands, but keep things as simple as possible and use single words. Try one-word commands like "In," "Exit," "Get," "Drop" to interact. Type the first letter of compass directions to move: N, S, E, W. If you've never played Colossal Cave Adventure, here are a few command tips to get you started: You can play for a few minutes and simply stop responding, and then come back hours or days later and pick up right where you left off, for as long as Swenson keeps the server running. Near as I can tell, the original code didn't display in all-caps like the Colossal Cave Python bot, but playing it via text is a genuinely cool experience. A SMALL STREAM FLOWS OUT OF THE BUILDING AND DOWN A GULLY. YOU ARE STANDING AT THE END OF A ROAD BEFORE A SMALL BRICK BUILDING. (ERRORS, SUGGESTIONS, COMPLAINTS TO CROWTHER) SOMEWHERE NEARBY IS COLOSSAL CAVE, WHERE OTHERS HAVE FOUND FORTUNES IN TREASURE AND GOLD, THOUGH IT IS RUMORED THAT SOME WHO ENTER ARE NEVER SEEN AGAIN. WELCOME TO ADVENTURE!! WOULD YOU LIKE INSTRUCTIONS? If you text +1 (669) 238-3683, the server will respond after a few seconds with the opening spiel of Colossal Cave Adventure: Like, well, responding by SMS.Īrt from the ZX Spectrum version of Adventure. It was only designed to work for this one piece of software, not all FORTRAN IV code, but it does that job, along with adding some modern touches. Swenson's interpreter ended up being more complicated than the original code it was designed to interpret, but efficiency isn't really the goal with a fun project like this one. Then he talks about simulating "loading the tape drive" for the PDP-10, which is of course just a text file now. Swenson talked about what it was like to deal with the 36-bit code at about the 11 minute mark, which is probably my favorite part of the presentation. ![]() And even if there was one, we don't have a PDP-10 to run it on." "You can't actually take FORTRAN IV and compile it these days. "It was a fun challenge to get this to work at all," he said in the talk. Notably, FORTRAN IV predated the standard of 8 bits in a byte. Specifically, Swenson was dealing with FORTRAN IV code, common in supercomputers of the day but unused for decades now. ![]() Other parts of Swenson's talk are a bit easier to follow, and there's something really cool in translating a game as old as Colossal Cave into a more modern programming language. ![]()
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