Adventure

From IFWiki

Adventure
a.k.a. Colossal Cave or Adventure (CROW0000)
Game
Main linksDownload
Published1976
Credits
AuthorWilliam Crowther
Gameplay
Interaction style
Parser
Parser
Literary genre
Adventure
Adventure
Location
Underground
Underground
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The very first text adventure game.

How it begins

You might be anyone. You are standing in the forest, outside a small brick building which is a well-house for a spring. Inside the building, you can easily find some keys, tasty food, a shiny brass lamp, and an empty bottle. If you explore the surrounding area, you will discover a locked steel grate set in a depression. You have no obvious goals, but you might want to open the grate and explore underground.

Notable features

  • Being the first IF game.

Trivia and Comments

Notes about versions

(This list is very incomplete. It needs to be heavily researched and double-checked. Ideally, we want authors/porters, year of release, platform info, language if not English, and what version was derived from what. Also, a summary or overview of differences between all the versions would be a nice thing to have handy. -- David Welbourn 15:52, 29 May 2006 (EST))

According to Baf's Guide, the game is also known by all these titles: Abenteuer, ADVENT, Adventure in Humongous Cave, Aventura, Aventure, Avontuur, Colossal Adventure (Jewels of Darkness), Colossal Cave, nuntalyli'u, and Original Adventure.

A very thorough listing of known versions is available on various Adventure Family Tree websites, such as Nathanael Culver's (the most complete) and Russel Dalenberg's (2006). A graphical Family Tree with emphasis given to historically significant versions is available on Arthur O'Dwyer's site. In a nomenclature originating with Russel Dalenberg, the versions and variants of Adventure are often referred to by short abbreviations encoding their latest author's name and their maximum score; so for example the original Adventure would be WOOD0350, whereas Donald Knuth's 1990s-era port would be KNUT0350.

Versions which have separate wiki pages

The following navbox appears automatically at the bottom of Adventure ports and translations which use the abbreviations from the Adventure Family Tree:

Adventure versions

Original game: Adventure

Family tree based on wiki pages

Game pages with "parent" cross-references:

Other game pages:

Add game page using Form:Game • Use abbreviations from Adventure Family Tree


See also

Versions

Original version CROW0000

Date: 1976

  • Adventure (William Crowther; YEAR?; FORTRAN).
    • Download adv_crowther.zip from the IF Archive - Long believed lost, this was found from a backup of Don Wood's student account thanks to the efforts of Dennis Jerz. Included are three versions of the Fortran-IV source code, along with two versions of the data file. Also included are Fortran-77 versions of the source code, converted to Fortran-77 by Matthew Russotto.

The original version was written by Crowther for his two daughters.

What year?

  • Baf's Guide lists the release year as 1976.
  • According to Compute!'s Guide to Adventure Games by Gary McGath, William Crowther wrote the preliminary version of Adventure in 1975, in FORTRAN, on a DEC PDP-10 computer, and made it available nationwide via ARPAnet.
  • IFRO lists the release year as 1972, and the platform as FORTRAN.
  • According to A history of 'Adventure' by Rick Adams, in 1972, William and his wife Pat were co-workers for Bolt, Beranek and Newman in Boston. They were also cavers. When the Crowthers' marriage ended, William felt estranged from his daughters, and decided to write for them a computer simulation of his caving experiences combined with elements borrowed from Dungeons and Dragons, a role-playing game that he also had been playing.
  • Wikipedia doesn't attempt to date the original, noting only that Crowther was a caver in 1972, and that the Don Woods version was written in 1976.
  • Colossal Cave Adventure (c. 1975) by Dennis G. Jerz, notes that sources set the date anywhere from 1968 to 1977. Also: "In response to an e-mail query, Crowther put it at 1975, 'give or take a year'." In Somewhere Nearby is Colossal Cave (see Links), Jerz argues "...Crowther wrote the game during the 1975-76 academic year and probably abandoned it in early 1976", with the Woods version released in early 1977.
  • Jason Dyer's 2016 attempt to untangle the chronology.

Related games

Links

N.B. IF Archive games are temporarily unavailable in the UK.

General info

Reviews

Spoilers

Note: To refer to this game from another page, you can type {{game citation|Adventure}}. This will display as Adventure (William Crowther; 1976).

Date: 1976

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