107-563: Colossal Cave Adventure (also known as Adventure or ADVENT ) is a text-based adventure game , released in 1976 by developer Will Crowther for the PDP-10 mainframe computer . It was expanded upon in 1977 by Don Woods . In the game, the player explores a cave system rumored to be filled with treasure and gold. The game is composed of dozens of locations, and the player moves between these locations and interacts with objects in them by typing one- or two-word commands which are interpreted by
214-584: A PDP-10 housed in the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL) where he worked. Over the following decade the game gained in popularity, being ported to many operating systems , including personal-computer platform CP/M . The basic game structure invented by Crowther (and based in part on the example of the ELIZA text parser ) was carried forward by the designers of later adventure games. Marc Blank and
321-512: A basis for the gameplay, and there are many similarities between the locations in the game and those in Mammoth Cave, particularly its Bedquilt section. In 1975, Crowther released the game on the early ARPAnet system, of which BBN was a prime contractor. In the spring of 1976, he was contacted by Stanford researcher Don Woods , seeking his permission to enhance the game. Crowther agreed, and Woods developed several enhanced versions on
428-517: A bit pulled apart in various ways. In particular I was missing my kids. Also the caving had stopped, because that had become awkward, so I decided I would fool around and write a program that was a re-creation in fantasy of my caving, and also would be a game for the kids, and perhaps some aspects of the Dungeons and Dragons that I had been playing. My idea was that it would be a computer game that would not be intimidating to non-computer people, and that
535-402: A cave, which is itself depicting a massive cave system. The game is also a key plot point in an episode of the 2014 TV series Halt and Catch Fire , a period drama taking place in the early days of the personal computing revolution. In it, the chief software designer uses the game as a competency test to determine which programmers will remain on the team. As a tie-in, a fully playable version of
642-474: A caving compatriot of Crowther who played both versions when they were developed, Crowther was focused on creating the cave system as a setting for a game, while Woods was interested in making a game and not in replicating the feeling of caving. Woods's version, released in 1977, expanded Crowther's game to approximately 3,000 lines of code and 1,800 lines of data, growing to 140 map locations, 293 vocabulary words, and 53 objects. Woods also added access controls to
749-478: A collection containing most of Infocom's games, followed in 1996 by Classic Text Adventure Masterpieces of Infocom . After the decline of the commercial interactive fiction market in the 1990s, an online community eventually formed around the medium. In 1987, the Usenet newsgroup rec.arts.int-fiction was created, and was soon followed by rec.games.int-fiction . By custom, the topic of rec.arts.int-fiction
856-479: A divorce, he was looking for a way to connect with his two young children. Over the course of a few weekends, he wrote a text based cave exploration game that featured a sort of guide/narrator who spoke in full sentences and who understood simple two word commands that came close to natural English. Adventure was programmed in Fortran for the PDP-10 . Crowther's original version was an accurate simulation of part of
963-409: A file name of ADVENT; it was referred to as both Adventure and Colossal Cave Adventure , with the latter becoming the more common name over time. Most computer terminals at the time did not have monitors , and players would instead play the game over teleprinters connected to the mainframe. One person who discovered the game was Don Woods , a graduate student at Stanford University . Woods found
1070-623: A former Implementor at Infocom, started a new game company, Cascade Mountain Publishing, whose goals were to publish interactive fiction. Despite the Interactive Fiction community providing social and financial backing, Cascade Mountain Publishing went out of business in 2000. Other commercial endeavors include: Peter Nepstad's 1893: A World's Fair Mystery , several games by Howard Sherman published as Malinche Entertainment , The General Coffee Company's Future Boy!, Cypher ,
1177-546: A game, and caused a growth boom in the online interactive fiction community. Despite the lack of commercial support, the availability of high quality tools allowed enthusiasts of the genre to develop new high quality games. Competitions such as the annual Interactive Fiction Competition for short works, the Spring Thing for longer works, and the XYZZY Awards , further helped to improve the quality and complexity of
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#17327905384351284-640: A graphically enhanced cyberpunk game and various titles by Textfyre . Emily Short was commissioned to develop the game City of Secrets but the project fell through and she ended up releasing it herself. The games that won both the Interactive Fiction Competition and the XYZZY Awards are All Roads (2001), Slouching Towards Bedlam (2003), Vespers (2005), Lost Pig (2007), Violet (2008), Aotearoa (2010), Coloratura (2013), and The Wizard Sniffer (2017). The original Interactive fiction Colossal Cave Adventure
1391-638: A group of enthusiasts called the InfoTaskForce and the subsequent development of an interpreter for Z-Code story files. As a result, it became possible to play Infocom's work on modern computers. For years, amateurs with the IF community produced interactive fiction works of relatively limited scope using the Adventure Game Toolkit and similar tools. The breakthrough that allowed the interactive fiction community to truly prosper, however,
1498-456: A hidden "xyzzy" command, the results of which range from the straightforward to the humorous. Crowther stated that for its purpose in the game, "magic words should look queer, and yet somehow be pronounceable", leading him to select "xyzzy". Additionally, in the game there is a maze created by Crowther where each of ten room descriptions was exactly the same: "YOU ARE IN A MAZE OF TWISTY LITTLE PASSAGES, ALL ALIKE." The layout of this "all alike" maze
1605-508: A large number of platforms, and took standardized "story files" as input. In a non-technical sense, Infocom was responsible for developing the interactive style that would be emulated by many later interpreters. The Infocom parser was widely regarded as the best of its era. It accepted complex, complete sentence commands like "put the blue book on the writing desk" at a time when most of its competitors parsers were restricted to simple two word verb-noun combinations such as "put book". The parser
1712-525: A narrative work, the software programs ELIZA (1964–1966) and SHRDLU (1968–1970) can formally be considered early examples of interactive fiction, as both programs used natural language processing to take input from their user and respond in a virtual and conversational manner. ELIZA simulated a psychotherapist that appeared to provide human-like responses to the user's input, while SHRDLU employed an artificial intelligence that could move virtual objects around an environment and respond to questions asked about
1819-637: A pirate that roams the map and steals treasure from the player or objects that could exist in multiple states. He also introduced a scoring system within the game and added ten more treasures to collect in addition to the five in Crowther's original version. According to cavers who have played the game, much of Crowther's original version matches the Bedquilt section of Mammoth Cave with some passages removed for gameplay purposes, though Woods's additions do not as he had never been there. According to William Mann,
1926-400: A pit or being killed by the dwarves, but otherwise the game has no ending or goal beyond finding the treasures. The 1977 version of the game, upon which later versions were based, adds ten more treasures and more fantasy elements. It also adds a points system, whereby completing certain goals earns a predetermined number of points. The ultimate goal is to earn the maximum number of points—350, in
2033-490: A port for modern computers of Woods's 1995 version of the game as Open Adventure and released the source code under an open-source license with permission from Crowther and Woods. Commercial versions of the game were also released. Microsoft published a version titled Microsoft Adventure in 1979 for the Apple II Plus and TRS-80 computers, and again in 1981 for MS-DOS as a launch title for IBM PCs , one of
2140-434: A single player environment. Interactive fiction features two distinct modes of writing: the player input and the game output. As described above, player input is expected to be in simple command form ( imperative sentences ). A typical command may be: > PULL Lever The responses from the game are usually written from a second-person point of view , in present tense . This is because, unlike in most works of fiction,
2247-509: A small number of games for other systems. William Crowther (programmer) William Crowther (born 1936) is an American computer programmer , caver , and rock climber . He is the co-creator of Colossal Cave Adventure from 1975 onward, a seminal computer game that influenced the first decade of video game design and inspired the text adventure game genre . During the early 1970s, Crowther worked at defense contractor and internet-pioneer Bolt Beranek and Newman (BBN), where he
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#17327905384352354-446: A special version of the first three Zork titles together with plot-specific coins and other trinkets. This concept would be expanded as time went on, such that later game feelies would contain passwords, coded instructions, page numbers, or other information that would be required to successfully complete the game. Interactive fiction became a standard product for many software companies. By 1982 Softline wrote that "the demands of
2461-481: A text-based adventure game in Fortran on BBN's PDP-10 . He created it as a diversion his daughters Sandy and Laura could enjoy when they came to visit. Crowther wrote: I had been involved in a non-computer role-playing game called Dungeons and Dragons at the time, and also I had been actively exploring in caves - Mammoth Cave in Kentucky in particular. Suddenly, I got involved in a divorce, and that left me
2568-482: A text-based game in Fortran on BBN's PDP-10 mainframe, interfacing through a teletype printer, that they could play. He combined his memories and maps of the Mammoth Cave system, particularly a 1975 map of the Bedquilt area of the caves, including Colossal Cavern , with elements of the Dungeons & Dragons campaigns that he played with friends to design a game around exploring a cave for treasure. Crowther wanted
2675-399: A textual exchange and accept similar commands from players as do works of IF; however, since interactive fiction is single player, and MUDs, by definition, have multiple players, they differ enormously in gameplay styles. MUDs often focus gameplay on activities that involve communities of players, simulated political systems, in-game trading, and other gameplay mechanics that are not possible in
2782-662: A troll, elves, and a volcano, which some claim is based on Mount Doom , but Woods says was not. In early 1977, Adventure spread across ARPAnet , and has survived on the Internet to this day. The game has since been ported to many other operating systems , and was included with the floppy-disk distribution of Microsoft's MS-DOS 1.0 OS. Adventure is a cornerstone of the online IF community; there currently exist dozens of different independently programmed versions, with additional elements, such as new rooms or puzzles, and various scoring systems. The popularity of Adventure led to
2889-563: A version in 1982 for the Nascom that includes an entire extra section where the player saves elves from flooding caves, as well as later versions that include pictures of the areas. A 3D remake of the game, under the title Colossal Cave , was released by Cygnus Entertainment as its first title in on January 19, 2023, for Windows , macOS , Linux , Nintendo Switch , PlayStation 5 , Xbox Series X , and Meta Quest 2 . Designed by Ken and Roberta Williams , co-founders of Sierra Entertainment ,
2996-566: A wider variety of sentences. For instance one might type "open the large door, then go west", or "go to the hall". With the Z-machine, Infocom was able to release most of their games for most popular home computers of the time simultaneously, including Apple II , Atari 8-bit computers , IBM PC compatibles , Amstrad CPC / PCW (one disc worked on both machines), Commodore 64 , Commodore Plus/4 , Commodore 128 , Kaypro CP/M , TI-99/4A , Macintosh , Atari ST , Amiga , and TRS-80 . During
3103-506: Is a text-based adventure game wherein the player explores a mysterious cave that is rumored to be filled with treasure and gold. The player must explore the cave system and solve puzzles by using items that they find to obtain the treasures and leave the cave. The player types in one- or two-word commands to move their character through the cave system, interact with objects in the cave, pick up items to put into their inventory, and perform other actions. The allowable commands are contextual to
3210-399: Is believed to have originated with Deadline (1982), the third Infocom title after Zork I and II . When writing this game, it was not possible to include all of the information in the limited (80KB) disk space, so Infocom created the first feelies for this game; extra items that gave more information than could be included within the digital game itself. These included police interviews,
3317-638: Is for this reason that game designers and programmers can be referred to as an implementer , often shortened to "Imp", rather than a writer. In early 1979, the game was completed. Ten members of the MIT Dynamics Modelling Group went on to join Infocom when it was incorporated later that year. In order to make its games as portable as possible, Infocom developed the Z-machine , a custom virtual machine that could be implemented on
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3424-566: Is interactive fiction authorship and programming, while rec.games.int-fiction encompasses topics related to playing interactive fiction games, such as hint requests and game reviews. As of late 2011, discussions between writers have mostly moved from rec.arts.int-fiction to the Interactive Fiction Community Forum. One of the most important early developments was the reverse-engineering of Infocom's Z-Code format and Z-Machine virtual machine in 1987 by
3531-484: Is usually provided by the player in the form of simple sentences such as "get key" or "go east", which are interpreted by a text parser . Parsers may vary in sophistication; the first text adventure parsers could only handle two-word sentences in the form of verb-noun pairs. Later parsers, such as those built on ZIL ( Zork Implementation Language ), could understand complete sentences. Later parsers could handle increasing levels of complexity parsing sentences such as "open
3638-607: The BSD Operating Systems distributions, or as part of the "bsdgames" package under most Linux distributions, under the command name "adventure". Bob Supnik of Digital Equipment Corporation also ported the game in Fortran to the PDP-11 minicomputer in mid-1977, spreading it to other minicomputer systems. Afterwards, numerous other ports were made of the game to different languages and systems, sometimes identified by
3745-747: The Inform interactive fiction language Graham Nelson , "for the five years to 1982 almost every game created was another 'Advent'". Several of these games were the initial releases of companies that would go on to become key innovators for the early adventure game genre. These included Zork (1977)—which began development within a month of the release of Woods's version—first by the team of Dave Lebling , Marc Blank , Tim Anderson , and Bruce Daniels at MIT and later by Infocom ; Adventureland (1978) by Scott Adams of Adventure International ; and Mystery House (1980) by Roberta and Ken Williams of On-Line Systems . The 1980 Atari 2600 video game Adventure
3852-526: The International Center for the History of Electronic Games . The game is the first well-known example of interactive fiction and established conventions that have since become standard in interactive fiction titles, such as the use of shortened cardinal directions for commands like "e" for "east", as well as inspiring the contents of the fiction titles themselves. The game is the namesake and
3959-618: The Mammoth and Flint Ridge cave systems. Pat played a key role in the September 9, 1972 expedition that finally made the connection . Indeed, even during his time working at BBN, his colleagues noticed that Crowther spent a fair amount of time doing chin-ups in doorframes, which apparently helped him concentrate. As a member of the MIT Outing Club during the late 1950s and early 1960s, Crowther also played an important role in
4066-434: The Z-machine . As the games were text based and used variants of the same Z-machine interpreter, the interpreter only had to be ported to a computer once, rather than once each game. Each game file included a sophisticated parser which allowed the user to type complex instructions to the game. Unlike earlier works of interactive fiction which only understood commands of the form 'verb noun', Infocom's parser could understand
4173-572: The 1977 version—which involves finding all the treasures in the game and safely leaving the cave. Colossal Cave Adventure was originally created by William Crowther in 1975 and 1976. Crowther and his ex-wife Patricia were both programmers and cavers and had extensively explored Mammoth Cave in Kentucky , the longest cave system in the world, in the early 1970s as part of the Cave Research Foundation . In 1972, Patricia led
4280-456: The 1990s Interactive fiction was mainly written with C-like languages, such as TADS 2 and Inform 6. A number of systems for writing interactive fiction now exist. The most popular remain Inform , TADS , or ADRIFT , but they diverged in their approach to IF-writing during the 2000s, giving today's IF writers an objective choice. By 2006 IFComp , most games were written for Inform, with a strong minority of games for TADS and ADRIFT, followed by
4387-728: The Apple II. SwordThrust and Eamon were simple two-word parser games with many role-playing elements not available in other interactive fiction. While SwordThrust published seven different titles, it was vastly overshadowed by the non-commercial Eamon system which allowed private authors to publish their own titles in the series. By March 1984, there were 48 titles published for the Eamon system (and over 270 titles in total as of March 2013). In Italy, interactive fiction games were mainly published and distributed through various magazines in included tapes. The largest number of games were published in
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4494-560: The Club de Aventuras AD (CAAD), the main Spanish speaking community around interactive fiction in the world, was founded, and after the end of Aventuras AD in 1992, the CAAD continued on its own, first with their own magazine, and then with the advent of Internet, with the launch of an active internet community that still produces interactive non commercial fiction nowadays. Legend Entertainment
4601-546: The Galaxy and A Mind Forever Voyaging . In June 1977, Marc Blank , Bruce K. Daniels, Tim Anderson , and Dave Lebling began writing the mainframe version of Zork (also known as Dungeon ), at the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science . The game was programmed in a computer language called MDL , a variant of LISP . The term Implementer was the self-given name of the creators of the text adventure series Zork. It
4708-403: The Interactive Fiction community in general decries the use of mazes entirely, claiming that mazes have become arbitrary 'puzzles for the sake of puzzles' and that they can, in the hands of inexperienced designers, become immensely frustrating for players to navigate. Interactive fiction shares much in common with Multi-User Dungeons ('MUDs'). MUDs, which became popular in the mid-1980s, rely on
4815-485: The code to his version alongside the compiled executable. Woods's 1977 version became the more recognizable and widespread version of Colossal Cave Adventure , in part due to its wider code availability, as it led to several other variants of the game being produced. Both Crowther's and Woods's version were designed to run on the PDP-10 and used features unique to DECSYSTEMS-10 Fortran IV on that architecture, meaning that
4922-518: The coroner's findings, letters, crime scene evidence and photos of the murder scene. These materials were very difficult for others to copy or otherwise reproduce, and many included information that was essential to completing the game. Seeing the potential benefits of both aiding game-play immersion and providing a measure of creative copy-protection, in addition to acting as a deterrent to software piracy, Infocom and later other companies began creating feelies for numerous titles. In 1987, Infocom released
5029-559: The development of rock climbing in the Shawangunks in New York State . He began climbing there in the 1950s and continues to climb. He made the first ascent of several classic routes including Arrow, Hawk, Moonlight, and Senté. Some of these routes sparked controversy because protection bolts were placed on rappel, a new tactic that Crowther and several others began to use at the time. The community reaction to this technique
5136-564: The early 1980s Edu-Ware also produced interactive fiction for the Apple II as designated by the "if" graphic that was displayed on startup. Their titles included the Prisoner and Empire series ( Empire I: World Builders , Empire II: Interstellar Sharks , Empire III: Armageddon ). In 1981, CE Software published SwordThrust as a commercial successor to the Eamon gaming system for
5243-458: The environment's shape. The development of effective natural language processing would become an essential part of interactive fiction development. Around 1975, Will Crowther , a programmer and an amateur caver, wrote the first text adventure game, Adventure (originally called ADVENT because a filename could only be six characters long in the operating system he was using, and later named Colossal Cave Adventure ). Having just gone through
5350-502: The expedition that found a connection between Mammoth Cave and the larger Flint Ridge Cave System. In addition to caving, the pair produced vector map surveys of the cave: they transcribed the survey data of the cave from "muddy little books" into a teleprinter terminal in their house, which could send and print messages from programs running on the central computer and was connected to a PDP-1 mainframe computer at Bolt, Beranek and Newman (BBN) where William Crowther worked. This data
5457-405: The few software programs and the only game at launch. The Software Toolworks released The Original Adventure for IBM PCs in 1981; endorsed by Crowther and Woods in exchange for a nominal payment, it was the only version for which they received any money. Level 9 Computing released multiple versions of the game for different computer platforms under the name Colossal Adventure , beginning with
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#17327905384355564-613: The first commercial adventure game. In 1979 he founded Adventure International, the first commercial publisher of interactive fiction. That same year, Dog Star Adventure was published in source code form in SoftSide , spawning legions of similar games in BASIC . The largest company producing works of interactive fiction was Infocom , which created the Zork series and many other titles, among them Trinity , The Hitchhiker's Guide to
5671-533: The first commercial work of interactive fiction produced outside the U.S. was the dungeon crawl game of Acheton , produced in Cambridge, England, and first commercially released by Acornsoft (later expanded and reissued by Topologika ). Other leading companies in the UK were Magnetic Scrolls and Level 9 Computing . Also worthy of mention are Delta 4 , Melbourne House , and the homebrew company Zenobi . In
5778-484: The first networks of computers and a precursor to the Internet, and the PDP-10 mainframe was part of that network. During his vacation, others found the game and it was distributed widely across the network to computers at other companies and universities, which surprised Crowther on his return. The game did not have an explicit title in it, simply stating "WELCOME TO ADVENTURE!!" as a part of the opening message and having
5885-422: The first well-known example of an adventure game , as it combined the interactivity of computer programs with the storytelling of literature or role-playing games such as Dungeons & Dragons , despite its lack of linear plot. The only text adventure game known to precede it is Wander from 1974, which did not have the spread or influence of Adventure . Colossal Cave Adventure was immensely popular among
5992-462: The form of Interactive narratives or Interactive narrations . These works can also be understood as a form of video game , either in the form of an adventure game or role-playing game . In common usage, the term refers to text adventures , a type of adventure game where the entire interface can be " text-only ", however, graphical text adventure games, where the text is accompanied by graphics (still images, animations or video) still fall under
6099-543: The foundations of the interactive fiction, adventure, roguelike , and action-adventure genres. It also influenced the creation of the MUD and computer role-playing game genres. It has been noted as one of the most influential video games, and in 2019 was inducted into the World Video Game Hall of Fame by The Strong and the International Center for the History of Electronic Games . Colossal Cave Adventure
6206-399: The game and decided to design one of their own, but with graphics. Adventure International was founded by Scott Adams (not to be confused with the creator of Dilbert ). In 1978, Adams wrote Adventureland , which was loosely patterned after the (original) Colossal Cave Adventure . He took out a small ad in a computer magazine in order to promote and sell Adventureland , thus creating
6313-414: The game augmented with player hints and artwork revealed when certain locations are visited was made available on the show's official website. Interactive fiction Interactive fiction ( IF ) is software simulating environments in which players use text commands to control characters and influence the environment. Works in this form can be understood as literary narratives , either in
6420-400: The game have gone on to have a lasting impact in programming and video games. " Xyzzy " is a magic word that teleports the player between two locations ("inside building" and the "debris room"). It was added by Crowther at a request by his sister when play-testing the game to skip the early section of the game. As an in-joke tribute to Adventure , many later games and computer programs include
6527-548: The game on a PDP-10 at the Stanford Medical School and wanted to expand upon the game. He contacted Crowther to gain access to the source code by emailing "crowther" at every domain that existed on the ARPANET. Woods built upon Crowther's code, introducing more high fantasy -related elements such as a dragon. He changed the puzzles, adding new elements and complexities, and added new puzzles and features such as
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#17327905384356634-470: The game to be accessible and not intimidating to non-technical players such as his children, and so developed a natural language input system to control the game so that it would be "a thing that gave you the illusion anyway that you'd typed in English commands and it did what you said". Crowther later commented that this approach allowed the game to appeal to both non-programmers and programmers alike, as in
6741-429: The game was complete, in early 1976, Crowther showed it off to his co-workers at BBN for feedback, and then considered his work on the game finished, leaving the compiled game on the mainframe before taking a month off for vacation. According to one of Crowther's then-coworkers in 2007, "once it was working, Will wasn't very interested in perfecting or expanding it." Crowther's work at BBN was in developing ARPANET , one of
6848-491: The game was started as a hobby project by the pair during the COVID-19 pandemic, before being expanded into a full commercial product by a team of thirty. It was intended by lead designer Roberta to be a recreation of how playing the game felt like to her in 1979. Colossal Cave Adventure is considered one of the most influential video games. In 2019, it was inducted into the World Video Game Hall of Fame by The Strong and
6955-500: The game's natural language input system. The program acts as a narrator , describing the player's location and the results of the player's attempted actions. It is the first well-known example of interactive fiction, as well as the first well-known adventure game , for which it was also the namesake . The original game, written in 1975 and 1976, was based on Crowther's maps and experiences caving in Mammoth Cave in Kentucky,
7062-524: The game, allowing mainframe administrators to restrict the game from running during business hours. Woods began working on the game in March 1977; by May his version was complete enough to release, and was soon attracting attention around the United States. Woods continued releasing updated editions in Fortran until 1995. Crowther later said that Woods's bringing fantasy elements earlier into the gameplay
7169-446: The games. Modern games go much further than the original "Adventure" style, improving upon Infocom games, which relied extensively on puzzle solving, and to a lesser extent on communication with non player characters, to include experimentation with writing and story-telling techniques. While the majority of modern interactive fiction that is developed is distributed for free, there are some commercial endeavors. In 1998, Michael Berlyn ,
7276-468: The genre, then faded and remains still today a topic of interest for a small group of fans and less known developers, celebrated on Web sites and in related newsgroups. In Spain, interactive fiction was considered a minority genre, and was not very successful. The first Spanish interactive fiction commercially released was Yenght in 1983, by Dinamic Software , for the ZX Spectrum. Later on, in 1987,
7383-467: The globe searching for clues. In addition to inspiring adventure games, as described by Matt Barton in Dungeons and Desktops: The History of Computer Role-Playing Games , Colossal Cave Adventure demonstrated the "creation of a virtual world and the means to explore it", and the inclusion of monsters and simplified combat. For this, it is considered a precursor of computer role-playing games , though it
7490-430: The history of interactive fiction Twisty Little Passages was named after the "all alike" maze, and the 2010 documentary on the history of text adventure games Get Lamp is named for the command to get one of the first objects the player encounters and must carry to solve the game. The 2013 game Kentucky Route Zero ' s third act draws direct inspiration from the game, showing a computer simulation set up inside of
7597-610: The last game ever created by Legend was Unreal II: The Awakening (2003) – the well-known first-person shooter action game using the Unreal Engine for both impressive graphics and realistic physics. In 2004, Legend Entertainment was acquired by Atari , who published Unreal II and released for both Microsoft Windows and Microsoft's Xbox. Many other companies such as Level 9 Computing, Magnetic Scrolls, Delta 4 and Zenobi had closed by 1992. In 1991 and 1992, Activision released The Lost Treasures of Infocom in two volumes,
7704-502: The latter case, it gave programmers a challenge of how to make "an obstinate system" perform in a manner they wanted it to. This approach was also developed to allow the game to be played on a teletype printer, rather than rely on user interface elements used in programs designed for monitors. The initial version of the game was about 700 lines of code, plus another 700 lines of data such as descriptions for 66 rooms, navigational messages, 193 vocabulary words, and miscellaneous messages. Once
7811-399: The leading company producing text-only adventure games on the Apple II with sophisticated parsers and writing, and still advertising its lack of graphics as a virtue. The company was bought by Activision in 1986 after the failure of Cornerstone , Infocom's database software program, and stopped producing text adventures a few years later. Soon after Telaium/Trillium also closed. Probably
7918-423: The location, or room, the player is in; for example, "get lamp" only has an effect if there is a lamp present. There are dozens of rooms, each of which has a name such as "Debris Room" and a description, and may contain objects or obstacles. The program acts as a narrator, describing to the player their location in the cave and the results of certain actions. If it does not understand the player's commands, it asks for
8025-409: The longest cave system in the world; further, it was intended, in part, to be accessible to non-technical players, such as his two daughters. Woods's version expanded the game in size and increased the number of fantasy elements present in it, such as a dragon and magic spells. Both versions, typically played over teleprinters connected to mainframe computers, were spread around the nascent ARPANET ,
8132-481: The main character is closely associated with the player, and the events are seen to be happening as the player plays. While older text adventures often identified the protagonist with the player directly, newer games tend to have specific, well-defined protagonists with separate identities from the player. The classic essay "Crimes Against Mimesis" discusses, among other IF issues, the nature of "You" in interactive fiction. A typical response might look something like this,
8239-500: The market are weighted heavily toward hi-res graphics" in games like Sierra's The Wizard and the Princess and its imitators. Such graphic adventures became the dominant form of the genre on computers with graphics, like the Apple II. By 1982 Adventure International began releasing versions of its games with graphics. The company went bankrupt in 1985. Synapse Software and Acornsoft were also closed in 1985, leaving Infocom as
8346-571: The number of points available in the game. There were enough ports and variants and alternate takes of the game by 1982 that an article in Your Computer described the entire set of games wherein the player enters short commands to move between set locations as " Adventure games", and provided code for the ZX81 computer for an "Adventure-writing kit" program that could be used to generate a game with that gameplay. In 2017, Eric S. Raymond created
8453-413: The oldest types of computer games and form a subset of the adventure genre. The player uses text input to control the game, and the game state is relayed to the player via text output. Interactive fiction usually relies on reading from a screen and on typing input, although text-to-speech synthesizers allow blind and visually impaired users to play interactive fiction titles as audio games . Input
8560-407: The player in the position of an observer, rather than a direct participant. In some 'experimental' IF, the concept of self-identification is eliminated, and the player instead takes the role of an inanimate object, a force of nature, or an abstract concept; experimental IF usually pushes the limits of the concept and challenges many assumptions about the medium. Though neither program was developed as
8667-467: The player to retype their actions. The program's replies are typically in a humorous, conversational tone, much as a Dungeon Master would use in leading players in a tabletop role-playing game . The original 1976 version of the game contains five treasures which can be collected. Although it is based on a real cave system, it contains a few fantasy elements such as a crystal bridge, magic words, and axe-wielding dwarves . The player can die by falling into
8774-444: The popular platforms at the time, including CP/M (not known for gaming or strong graphics capabilities). The number of interactive fiction works is increasing steadily as new ones are produced by an online community, using freely available development systems. The term can also be used to refer to literary works that are not read in a linear fashion, known as gamebooks , where the reader is instead given choices at different points in
8881-496: The precursor to the Internet , which Crowther was involved in developing. Colossal Cave Adventure was one of the first teletype games and was massively popular in the computer community of the late 1970s, with numerous ports and modified versions being created based on Woods's source code. It directly inspired the creation of numerous games, including Zork (1977), Adventureland (1978), Mystery House (1980), Rogue (1980), and Adventure (1980), which went on to be
8988-436: The program could not be easily moved to other systems, even those that could run Fortran programs. One of the first efforts to port the code to other languages or systems was by RAND Corporation researcher James Gillogly in 1977. Gillogly, with agreement from Crowther and Woods, spent several weeks porting the code to the C programming language to run on the more generic Unix architecture. It can still be found as part of
9095-429: The real life Mammoth Cave , but also included fantasy elements (such as axe-wielding dwarves and a magic bridge). Stanford University graduate student Don Woods discovered Adventure while working at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory , and in 1977 obtained and expanded Crowther's source code (with Crowther's permission). Woods's changes were reminiscent of the writings of J. R. R. Tolkien , and included
9202-710: The red box with the green key then go north". This level of complexity is the standard for works of interactive fiction today. Despite their lack of graphics, text adventures include a physical dimension where players move between rooms. Many text adventure games boasted their total number of rooms to indicate how much gameplay they offered. These games are unique in that they may create an illogical space , where going north from area A takes you to area B, but going south from area B did not take you back to area A. This can create mazes that do not behave as players expect, and thus players must maintain their own map. These illogical spaces are much more rare in today's era of 3D gaming, and
9309-470: The response to "look in tea chest" at the start of Curses : "That was the first place you tried, hours and hours ago now, and there's nothing there but that boring old book. You pick it up anyway, bored as you are." Many text adventures, particularly those designed for humour (such as Zork , The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy , and Leather Goddesses of Phobos ), address the player with an informal tone, sometimes including sarcastic remarks (see
9416-589: The same company produced an interactive fiction about Don Quijote . After several other attempts, the company Aventuras AD , emerged from Dinamic, became the main interactive fiction publisher in Spain, including titles like a Spanish adaptation of Colossal Cave Adventure , an adaptation of the Spanish comic El Jabato , and mainly the Ci-U-Than trilogy, composed by La diosa de Cozumel (1990), Los templos sagrados (1991) and Chichen Itzá (1992). During this period,
9523-404: The small computer-using population of the time. Historian Alexander Smith described it as "ubiquitous" on computer networks by the end of 1977, alongside Star Trek and Lunar Lander , and Walter Bright , creator of Empire (1977), recalled that Adventure "caused a sensation". Computer game programmers of the time were greatly inspired by the game; according to game designer and creator of
9630-523: The team that created the Zork adventures cite Adventure as the title that inspired them to create their game. They later founded Infocom and published a series of popular text adventures. The location of the game in Colossal Cave was not a coincidence. Crowther and his first wife Pat were active and dedicated cavers in the 1960s and early 1970s—both were part of many expeditions to connect
9737-448: The text adventure category if the main way to interact with the game is by typing text. Some users of the term distinguish between interactive fiction, known as "Puzzle-free", that focuses on narrative, and "text adventures" that focus on puzzles . Due to their text-only nature, they sidestepped the problem of writing for widely divergent graphics architectures. This feature meant that interactive fiction games were easily ported across all
9844-581: The text; these decisions determine the flow and outcome of the story. The most famous example of this form of printed fiction is the Choose Your Own Adventure book series, and the collaborative " addventure " format has also been described as a form of interactive fiction. The term "interactive fiction" is sometimes used also to refer to visual novels , a type of interactive narrative software popular in Japan. Text adventures are one of
9951-426: The transcript from Curses , above, for an example). The late Douglas Adams, in designing the IF version of his 'Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy', created a unique solution to the final puzzle of the game: the game requires the one solitary item that the player didn't choose at the outset of play. Some IF works dispense with second-person narrative entirely, opting for a first-person perspective ('I') or even placing
10058-526: The two magazines Viking and Explorer, with versions for the main 8-bit home computers ( ZX Spectrum , Commodore 64 , and MSX ). The software house producing those games was Brainstorm Enterprise, and the most prolific IF author was Bonaventura Di Bello , who produced 70 games in the Italian language. The wave of interactive fiction in Italy lasted for a couple of years thanks to the various magazines promoting
10165-460: The wide success of interactive fiction during the late 1970s, when home computers had little, if any, graphics capability. Many elements of the original game have survived into the present, such as the command ' xyzzy ', which is now included as an Easter Egg in modern games, such as Microsoft Minesweeper . Adventure was also directly responsible for the founding of Sierra Online (later Sierra Entertainment ); Ken and Roberta Williams played
10272-400: Was actively upgraded with new features like undo and error correction, and later games would 'understand' multiple sentence input: 'pick up the gem and put it in my bag. take the newspaper clipping out of my bag then burn it with the book of matches'. Several companies offered optional commercial feelies (physical props associated with a game). The tradition of 'feelies' (and the term itself)
10379-410: Was an attempt to create a graphical version of Colossal Cave Adventure , and itself became the first known example of an action-adventure game and introduced the fantasy genre to video game consoles. Carmen Sandiego , an early educational game series begun in 1985, was inspired by transforming the idea of moving around the caverns of Colossal Cave Adventure looking for treasure into moving around
10486-669: Was an important part of the evolution of climbing ethics in the Shawangunks and beyond. Crowther worked at Xerox PARC from 1976 to 1983. During this period he met and married Nancy Sanders Burnes in 1980 in Palo Alto, California . The two of them did a lot of rock climbing with friends in Yosemite and elsewhere. In 1983 he left Xerox and went back to Bolt Beranek and Newman in Cambridge, Massachusetts . He became active with
10593-458: Was an improvement to his version, though Crowther's daughters also recall him telling them when they were frustrated at puzzles in the game that it was one of Woods's additions, not his. Crowther did not distribute the source code to his version to anyone else, and it was later believed to be lost until it was rediscovered on an archive of Woods's student account at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in 2005. Woods, however, distributed
10700-490: Was fixed, so the player would have to figure out how to map the maze. The phrase "you are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike" has become memorialized and popularized in the hacker culture , where "passages" may be replaced with a different word , as the situation warrants. This phrase came to signify a situation when whatever action is taken does not change the result. Colossal Cave Adventure has continued to be referenced by media for decades since. The 2003 book on
10807-534: Was founded by Bob Bates and Mike Verdu in 1989. It started out from the ashes of Infocom. The text adventures produced by Legend Entertainment used (high-resolution) graphics as well as sound. Some of their titles include Eric the Unready , the Spellcasting series and Gateway (based on Frederik Pohl 's novels). The last text adventure created by Legend Entertainment was Gateway II (1992), while
10914-400: Was lacking several elements of the genre. Glenn Wichman and Michael Toy name the game as an influence for their game Rogue in 1980, which went on to become the namesake of the roguelike genre. Colossal Cave Adventure also inspired the development of online multiplayer games like MUDs , the precursors of the modern-day massively multiplayer online role-playing game . Two phrases from
11021-425: Was one of the reasons why I made it so that the player directs the game with natural language input, instead of more standardized commands. My kids thought it was a lot of fun. In Colossal Cave , or more simply called Adventure , the player moves around an imaginary cave system by entering simple, two-word commands and reading text describing the result. Crowther used his extensive knowledge of cave exploration as
11128-570: Was part of the original small ARPAnet development team. His implementation of a distributed distance vector routing system for the ARPAnet was an important early step in the evolution of the Internet . Crowther met and married Pat Crowther while studying at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology , where he received a B.S. in physics in 1958. Following his divorce from his wife, Crowther used his spare time to develop
11235-437: Was programmed in Fortran , originally developed by IBM . Adventure's parsers could only handle two-word sentences in the form of verb-noun pairs. Infocom 's games of 1979–88, such as Zork , were written using a LISP -like programming language called ZIL (Zork Implementation Language or Zork Interactive Language; it was referred to as both) that compiled into a byte code able to run on a standardized virtual machine called
11342-407: Was the creation and distribution of two sophisticated development systems. In 1987, Michael J. Roberts released TADS , a programming language designed to produce works of interactive fiction. In 1993, Graham Nelson released Inform , a programming language and set of libraries which compiled to a Z-Code story file. Each of these systems allowed anyone with sufficient time and dedication to create
11449-606: Was then fed into a program developed by the pair that generated plotting commands onto punched tape , which were then fed into a Honeywell 316 minicomputer attached to a Calcomp drum plotter at BBN to print paper maps. These maps were some of the earliest computer-drawn maps of caves. In 1975, after he and Patricia divorced, William Crowther stopped caving with the Cave Research Foundation. Driven by what he later described as an increase in spare time combined with missing his two daughters, he began working on
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