Colossal Cave Adventure

Overview

"YOU ARE STANDING AT THE END OF A ROAD BEFORE A SMALL BRICK BUILDING." With that line, printed on the paper of a teletype terminal, generations of programmers entered the first famous world made of words. Colossal Cave Adventure, usually just Adventure, was written in Fortran by Will Crowther in 1975–76 on a PDP-10 at the Cambridge, Massachusetts, firm Bolt, Beranek and Newman, and expanded in 1977 by Don Woods at Stanford. The player types one- or two-word commands such as GET LAMP or GO NORTH, and the program answers like a wry storyteller, describing caves full of treasure, dwarves with axes, a snake, a bridge of crystal and, in Woods's version, a dragon.

It is the namesake of the adventure game, the first well-known work of interactive fiction, and a direct ancestor of the text adventure, the Roguelikes and the MUD.

Origins

Crowther and his then-wife Patricia were programmers and serious cavers who, with the Cave Research Foundation, mapped Kentucky's Mammoth Cave; in 1972 Patricia led the expedition that connected Mammoth Cave to the Flint Ridge system. They typed survey notes into a terminal at home and produced some of the earliest computer-drawn cave maps. After their divorce in 1975, Crowther stopped caving. Missing his two daughters and with more time on his hands, he began a game they could play, combining his memories and maps of the Bedquilt section, including the real Colossal Cavern, with elements of the Dungeons & Dragons campaigns he played with friends.

He wanted the game to be unintimidating for non-technical players, so instead of menus he wrote a simple parser that gave, as he put it, "the illusion anyway that you'd typed in English commands." The first version was about 700 lines of code and 700 lines of data: 66 rooms, 193 vocabulary words, five treasures. He showed it to colleagues early in 1976, considered it finished, and went on a month's vacation. Crowther's day job at BBN was building the ARPANET, and while he was away the game spread across it to universities and companies.

Don Woods, a Stanford graduate student, found it on a machine at Stanford's medical school in 1977 and wanted to expand it. He tracked Crowther down by sending mail to "crowther" at every ARPANET host. From March to May 1977 he grew the game to roughly 3,000 lines of code: 140 locations, 293 words, 53 objects, a pirate who steals treasure, more fantasy, ten more treasures and a score out of 350. He also added controls so administrators could block play during working hours.

How it plays

The player explores, collects treasures, solves puzzles with found objects, and tries to escape with everything. Commands must fit context; GET LAMP only works where there is a lamp. Death comes from pits, dwarves and carelessness. Famous details became folklore: the magic word XYZZY, which Crowther added at his sister's request so testers could skip the early section; the maze where every room reads "YOU ARE IN A MAZE OF TWISTY LITTLE PASSAGES, ALL ALIKE"; and the lamp that must be carried into the dark. The narration's conversational humor, historians note, resembles the voice of a tabletop Dungeon Master.

Reception & impact

On the networks of the late 1970s it was ubiquitous. Columnist Jerry Pournelle claimed that two weeks' work was lost whenever it arrived at a computer installation. RAND researcher James Gillogly ported it to C for Unix in 1977, and it shipped with BSD Unix as the command "adventure." Commercial versions followed: Microsoft Adventure (1979), one of the programs available at the IBM PC's launch in 1981; Apple's Apple Adventure! (1980); and Level 9's British Colossal Adventure (1982). Crowther and Woods received money only for The Software Toolworks' endorsed edition. By 1982, "adventure" had become the generic name for the genre.

Its offspring shaped decades of games. Within weeks of Woods's release, a group at MIT began Zork. Roberta Williams played it on a teletype and later on an Apple II, then wrote Mystery House (1980), the start of the company behind King's Quest. Michael Toy and Glenn Wichman cited it as an inspiration for Rogue, and through Zork's Fortran port, Dungeon, it reached Roy Trubshaw, who named MUD after it. Matt Barton, in Dungeons and Desktops, counts it among the precursors of the computer RPG for creating a virtual world with monsters and simple combat.

Legacy

Adventure was inducted into the World Video Game Hall of Fame in 2019. Its phrases live on: XYZZY as a hidden command in countless programs, "twisty little passages" in hacker slang and in the title of Nick Montfort's 2003 history of interactive fiction, and "get lamp" in the title of a 2010 documentary. Crowther's own version, long thought lost, was recovered in 2005; in 2017 Eric S. Raymond released Open Adventure, a modern port of Woods's final 1995 edition, with both authors' permission. In January 2023, Ken and Roberta Williams released Colossal Cave, a full 3D remake built by a team of about thirty, returning the favor to the game that started their careers.