Colossal Cave Adventure
Opening screen of Will Crowther's original version, before Don Woods expanded it.
Developer	William Crowther and Don Woods
Publisher	CRL
Designer	William Crowther and Don Woods
Released	1976 (Crowther); 1977 (Woods)
Genre	Adventure game
Mode(s)	Single player
Platform(s)	Many (initially PDP-10)
Input methods	Keyboard

Colossal Cave Adventure (also known as ADVENT, Colossal Cave, or Adventure) (Crowther, 1976; Crowther & Woods, 1977) was the first computer adventure game. 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.^[1] The Colossal Cave subnetwork has many entrances, one of which is known as Bedquilt. 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.^[2] Adventure is a 1980 video game for the Atari 2600 video game console and is considered the first action-adventure game. ... This is an article about the computer and video game genre. ... Image File history File links No higher resolution available. ... A video game developer is a software developer (a business or an individual) that creates video games. ... William (Willie or Will) Crowther is a computer programmer and caver. ... Don Woods is a perennial hacker and computer programmer. ... A game designer is a person who designs games. ... William (Willie or Will) Crowther is a computer programmer and caver. ... Don Woods is a perennial hacker and computer programmer. ... See also: 1975 in video gaming, other events of 1976, 1977 in video gaming, history of video games Events Exidy releases the controversial Death Race arcade game. ... Notable events of 1977 in computer and video games. ... Video games are categorized into genres based on their gameplay. ... This is an article about the computer and video game genre. ... In computer games and video games, single-player refers to the variant of a particular game where input from only one player is expected throughout the course of the gaming session. ... In computing, a platform describes some sort of framework, either in hardware or software, which allows software to run. ... The PDP-10 was a computer manufactured by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) from the late 1960s on; the name stands for Programmed Data Processor model 10. It was the machine that made time-sharing common; it looms large in hacker folklore because of its adoption in the 1970s by many... A 104-key PC US English QWERTY keyboard layout The Dvorak Simplified Keyboard layout A standard Hebrew keyboard showing both Hebrew and QWERTY. A computer keyboard is a peripheral partially modelled after the typewriter keyboard. ... This is an article about the computer and video game genre. ... William (Willie or Will) Crowther is a computer programmer and caver. ... A programmer or software developer is someone who programs computers, that is, one who writes computer software. ... sport of exploring caves. ... Mammoth Cave National Park is a U.S. National Park in central Kentucky, encompassing portions of Mammoth Cave, the most elongated cave system known in the world. ... Official language(s) English[1] Capital Frankfort Largest city Louisville Area  Ranked 37th  - Total 40,444 sq mi (104,749 km²)  - Width 140 miles (225 km)  - Length 379 miles (610 km)  - % water 1. ...

History

Will Crowther was a programmer at Bolt, Beranek & Newman, which developed the ARPANET (the forerunner of the Internet). 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.^[3] William (Willie or Will) Crowther is a computer programmer and caver. ... A programmer or software developer is someone who programs computers, that is, one who writes computer software. ... BBN Technologies (originally Bolt Beranek and Newman) is a high technology company that provides research and development services. ... ARPANET logical map, March 1977. ... sport of exploring caves. ... Mammoth Cave National Park is a U.S. National Park in central Kentucky, encompassing portions of Mammoth Cave, the most elongated cave system known in the world. ... Official language(s) English[1] Capital Frankfort Largest city Louisville Area  Ranked 37th  - Total 40,444 sq mi (104,749 km²)  - Width 140 miles (225 km)  - Length 379 miles (610 km)  - % water 1. ...

Crowther 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 ^[4] and featuring fantasy elements such as axe-throwing dwarves and a magic bridge. This article is about the mythical creature. ...

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^[5] and made significant expansions and improvements, with Crowther's blessing. A big fan of Tolkien, he introduced additional fantasy elements, such as elves and a troll. Don Woods is a perennial hacker and computer programmer. ... Stanford redirects here. ... J. R. R. Tolkien in 1916, wearing his British Army uniform in a photograph from the middle years of WW1. ... For other uses, see Elf (disambiguation). ... For other uses, see Troll (disambiguation). ...

To this day, students at Stanford University must re-implement the game as an assignment in the first computer programming course. Stanford redirects here. ... Programming redirects here. ...

Adventure was the first game to feature objects that could be picked up, used, and dropped (and that could be carried by an NPC).^[6] An NPC from the video game The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. ...

Technology

Crowther's original game consisted of about 700 lines of Fortran code, with about another 700 lines of data, written for BBN's PDP-10. (See the original source code) The program required almost 300 KB of main memory in order to run, a significant amount at that time.^{[citation needed]} Fortran (previously FORTRAN[1]) is a general-purpose[2], procedural,[3] imperative programming language that is especially suited to numeric computation and scientific computing. ... The PDP-10 was a computer manufactured by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) from the late 1960s on; the name stands for Programmed Data Processor model 10. It was the machine that made time-sharing common; it looms large in hacker folklore because of its adoption in the 1970s by many...

In 1977, Jim Gillogly of the RAND Corporation spent several weeks porting the code from Fortran to C under Unix, with the agreement of both Woods and Crowther. James J. Gillogly is an American computer scientist and cryptographer. ... The RAND Corporation is a nonprofit global policy think tank first formed to offer research and analysis to the United States armed forces. ... C is a general-purpose, block structured, procedural, imperative computer programming language developed in 1972 by Dennis Ritchie at the Bell Telephone Laboratories for use with the Unix operating system. ... Filiation of Unix and Unix-like systems Unix (officially trademarked as UNIX®, sometimes also written as or ® with small caps) is a computer operating system originally developed in 1969 by a group of AT&T employees at Bell Labs including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie and Douglas McIlroy. ...

The game was also ported to Prime Computer's super-mini running PRIMOS in the late 1970s, utilising Fortran 4. Prime Computer was a Natick, Massachusetts-based producer of minicomputers from 1972 until 1992. ... This article does not cite any references or sources. ...

Later versions of the game moved away from general purpose programming languages such as C or Fortran, and were instead written for special interactive fiction engines, such as Infocom's Z-machine. The Z machine at Sandia National Laboratory. ...

Later versions

ADVENT running on an Osborne 1 Computer circa 1982.

Later versions of the game supplied graphics.

Many versions of Colossal Cave have been released, mostly entitled simply Adventure, or adding a tag of some sort to the original name (e.g. Adventure II, Adventure 550, Adventure4+, ...). Microsoft released a version of Adventure with its initial version of MS-DOS 1.0 for the IBM PC (on a single sided disk, requiring 32KB of RAM). Russel Dalenberg's Adventure Family Tree page^[7] provides the best (though still incomplete) summary of different versions and their relationships. Image File history File links You_are_standing. ... Image File history File links You_are_standing. ... An opened Osborne 1 computer, ready for use. ... Image File history File links Colossaladventure. ... Image File history File links Colossaladventure. ... Microsoft Corporation, (NASDAQ: MSFT, HKSE: 4338) is a multinational computer technology corporation with global annual revenue of US$44. ... Microsofts disk operating system, MS-DOS, was Microsofts implementation of DOS, which was the first popular operating system for the IBM PC, and until recently, was widely used on the PC compatible platform. ...

Until Crowther's original version was found,^[8] the "definitive original" was generally considered to be the version that Don Woods expanded in 1977. As part of that expansion, Woods added a scoring system that went up to 350 points. Extended versions with extra puzzles go up to 1000 points or more. The AMP MUD had a multi-player Colossal Cave. This article is about a type of online computer game. ...

Dave Platt's influential 550 points version was innovative in a number of ways. It broke away from coding the game directly in a programming language such as Fortran or C. Instead, Platt developed A-code — a language for adventure programming — and wrote his extended version in that language. The A-code source was pre-processed by an F77 "munger" program, which translated A-code into a text database, and a tokenised pseudo-binary. These were then distributed together with a generic A-code F77 "executive", also written in F77, which effectively "ran" the tokenised pseudo-binary.

Platt's version was also notable for providing a randomised variety of responses when informing the player that, e.g., there was no exit in the nominated direction, for introducing a number of rare "cameo" events, and for committing some outrageous puns.

Memorable words and phrases

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to:

Colossal Cave Adventure

Image File history File links This is a lossless scalable vector image. ... Wikiquote is one of a family of wiki-based projects run by the Wikimedia Foundation, running on MediaWiki software. ...

Xyzzy

Xyzzy is a magic word found in the game. It often confounds early players. They will type in "xyzzy" to see if it's useful at different parts and get the generic response "Nothing happens". This became an inside joke amongst gamers.^[9] Adventure (also known as ADVENT or Colossal Cave) (Crowther & Woods, 1976) was the first computer adventure game. ...

Maze of twisty little passages

"You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike" is a memorable line from the game. Among hackers it is sometimes modified to refer to something other than "passages" that one can be lost in. This article is about computer hacking. ...

In another part of the game, the player is in a maze of passages that are different, not alike. In this maze, the phrase maze of twisty little passages is varied into eleven slightly different forms, one for each location:

• Little maze of twisting passages
• Little maze of twisty passages
• Little twisty maze of passages
• Maze of little twisting passages
• Maze of little twisty passages
• Maze of twisting little passages
• Maze of twisty little passages
• Twisting little maze of passages
• Twisting maze of little passages
• Twisty little maze of passages
• Twisty maze of little passages

Don Woods was doing doctoral research in graph algorithms, and he designed this maze as (almost) a complete graph, with two exceptions important to game play. One potential name variation, "little twisting maze of passages", is not used. In the mathematical field of graph theory, a complete graph is a simple graph where an edge connects every pair of distinct vertices. ...

Plugh

When the player first arrives at an area known as "Y2", the player receives the message A hollow voice says "plugh". The magic word takes the player between the rooms "inside building" and "Y2".

All vocabulary words of the original game were truncated at five characters, and it is sometimes claimed ^{[citation needed]} that "plugh" is actually the truncated "plughole", which would be in keeping with the speleological theme of the game. Grotte des Faux-Monnayeurs, Switzerland Speleology is the scientific study of caves and other karst features, their make-up, structure, physical properties, history, life forms, and the processes by which they form (speleogenesis) and change over time (speleomorphology). ...

Dave Platt's 550-point version of Colossal Cave — perhaps the most famous variant of this game other than the original, itself a jumping-off point for many other versions including Michael Goetz's 581 point CP/M version — included a long extension on the other side of the Volcano View. Eventually, the player descends into a maze of catacombs and a "fake Y2". If the player says "plugh" here the player finds himself or herself transported to a "Precarious Chair" suspended in midair above the molten lava. (The 581-point version was on SIGM011 from the CP/M Users Group, 1984.) CP/M is an operating system originally created for Intel 8080/85 based microcomputers by Gary Kildall of Digital Research, Inc. ... Cleveland Volcano in the Aleutian Islands of Alaska photographed from the International Space Station For other uses, see Volcano (disambiguation). ... Look up lava, Aa, pahoehoe in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ...

Some games recognize "plugh" and will respond to it, usually by making a joke.^[10] The adventure game Prisoner 2 contained a cavern with the word "PLUGH" written on the wall; if the player typed this word into the command parser, he was sent back to his starting point.

Down the hall from Platt, three programmers were developing a debugger for a commercial operating system (CP6). They added a command to show a stack trace, and called the command “plugh”. The command passed all internal reviews for release until a technical writer refused to allow a funny word that didn’t mean anything to be included in the product. A lengthy development meeting determined that plugh stood for “Procedure List Used to Get Here”.^{[citation needed]} A stack trace (also called backtrace) is a report of the active stack frames instantiated by the execution of a program. ...

Other lines

Other memorable lines from the game are:

• A huge green fierce snake bars the way!
• With what? Your bare hands? (refers to killing the snake, a dragon, etc.)
• With what? Your bare hands? Against his bear hands? (refers to killing the bear)
• It's not hungry (it's merely pinin' for the fjords). (if you try to feed the bird) — a reference to Monty Python's Dead Parrot sketch
• The game responds to a frustrated player's swearing with watch it! and to commands to eat inappropriate things (e.g., the bird, the snake) with Yecch!

Saint George versus the dragon, Gustave Moreau, c. ... Monty Python, or The Pythons, is the collective name of the creators of Monty Pythons Flying Circus, a British television comedy sketch show that first aired on the BBC on 5 October 1969. ... Palin, Cleese and the dead parrot, from And Now For Something Completely Different. ...

Continued development

Just as Don Woods picked up the development of Adventure where Crowther left off, other programmers continued the story in their own way.

Dave Platt's's 550-point F77 version had some memorable moments as well:

• Into view there bounces a horrible creature!! Six feet across, it resembles a large blob of translucent white jelly; although it looks massive, it is bouncing lightly up and down as though it were as light as a feather. It is emitting a constant throbbing sound, and it >ROAR<s loudly as it sees you. — this is a reference to Rover from The Prisoner

Platt also had a number of "cameos" — very rare random events of no consequence. For example: The Rover is a fictional entity from the 1967 BBC television program known as The Prisoner. ... For other uses, see The Prisoner (disambiguation) and Prisoner. ...

• From the darkness nearby comes the sound of shuffling feet. As you turn towards the sound, a nine-foot cyclops ambles into the light of your lamp. The cyclops is dressed in a three-piece suit of worsted wool, and is wearing a black silk top-hat and cowboy boots and is carrying an ebony walking-stick. It catches sight of you and stops, seeming frozen in its tracks, with its bloodshot eye bulging in amazement and its fang-filled jaw drooping with shock. After staring at you in incredulous disbelief for a few moments, it reaches into the pocket of its vest and pulls out a small plastic bag filled with a leafy green substance, and examines it carefully. "It must be worth eighty pazools an ounce after all" mumbles the cyclops, who casts one final look at you, shudders, and staggers away out of sight.

Other versions added their own flavour to the proceedings. This page is about the mythical creature. ... Worsted is the name of both a yarn, usually made from wool, and the cloth made from this yarn. ... Duke Ellington wearing a top hat. ... For other uses, see Ebony (disambiguation). ... Look up Cannabis in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ...

• With extreme difficulty, you take down from the wall a seven foot high, twenty foot long, three hundred and sixty degree view of Mars taken from the Viking lander. — from the Witt's End extension in Mike Goetz's CP/M version (1983); this action would summon Rover (see above)

• I am sorry, but magic rug flying regulations specifically prohibit any activity other than (a) enjoying the view (recommended), (b) reviewing one's possessions (optional) and (c) clutching rug edges in sheer stomach-churning terror (not recommended). — from Mike Arnautov's 770-point version (2003)

See also

• Interactive Fiction

Zork I is one of the first interactive fiction games, as well as being one of the first commercially sold. ...

References

1. ^ Montfort, Nick (2003). Twisty Little Passages: An Approach To Interactive Fiction. Cambridge: The MIT Press. ISBN 0-262-13436-5
2. ^ Mel Park. Bev Schwartz meets the real Bedquilt
3. ^ Rick Adams. Here's where it all began…. The Colossal Cave Adventure page.
4. ^ Jerz, Dennis (2007) Somewhere Nearby Is Colossal Cave: Examining Will Crowther's Original “Adventure” in Code and in Kentucky, Digital Humanities Quarterly
5. ^ http://www.avventuretestuali.com/interviste/woods-eng
6. ^ Mark J. P. Wolf, Bernard Perron, The Video Game Theory Reader, Foreword by Warren Robinett, 2003, Routledge, ISBN 0415915880
7. ^ Russel Dalenberg (March 20). Adventure Family Tree (ASCII Art).
8. ^ Adventure: Crowther's original source code found; photos from inside the real Colossal Cave.
9. ^ Rick Adams. Everything you ever wanted to know about…the magic word XYZZY. The Colossal Cave Adventure page.
10. ^ David Welbourn. >plugh responses. A web page giving responses to "plugh" in many games of interactive fiction

Warren Robinett is a designer of interactive computer graphics software, notable as the developer of Adventure, the first graphical adventure video game, and as the founder of The Learning Company, where he designed Rockys Boots. ... Routledge is an imprint for books in the humanities part of the Taylor & Francis Group, which also has Brunner-Routledge, RoutledgeCurzon and RoutledgeFalmer divisions. ...

External links

• Baf's Guide to the IF Archive with downloadable versions for many platforms.
• FORTRAN source code for Crowther and Woods collaboration
• Jerz, Dennis G. (2007). Somewhere Nearby is Colossal Cave: Examining Will Crowther's Original “Adventure” in Code and in Kentucky. Digital Humanities Quarterly. The Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations. Retrieved on 2007-08-11.
• Crowther's original source code for Adventure (as recovered from Don Woods's student account at Stanford)
• Windows executable version of Crowther's original ADVENT
• iPod version of Colossal Case Adventure