= A brief history of Colossal Cave Adventure =
by Eric S. Raymond
-Adventure is the fons et origo of all later dungeon-crawling games,
-the grandaddy of interactive fiction, and one of the hallowed artifacts
-of hacker folklore.
+Adventure is the fons et origo of all later dungeon-crawling computer
+games, the grandaddy of interactive fiction, and one of the hallowed
+artifacts of hacker folklore.
The very first version was released by Crowther in 1976, in FORTRAN on
the PDP-10 at Bolt, Beranek, and Newman. (Crowther was at the time
writing what we could now call firmware for the earliest ARPANET
routers.) It was a maze game based on the Colossal Cave complex in
-Kentucky, lacking most of the D&D-like elements now associated with
+Kentucky, including fewer of the D&D-like elements now associated with
the game.
Adventure as we now know it, the ancestor of all later versions, was
Here is what Don said about differences between the original Adventure
and 2.5:
+............................................................................
> The bulk of the points come from five new 16-point treasures. (I say "bulk"
> because I think at least one of the scores included some padding and I may
> have tweaked those.) Each of the new treasures requires solving a puzzle
> succumb even given access to the game source. You really need to fit
> together not only the goals and the map and use of inventory space, but
> also details like just what _can_ you do in the dark...?
+............................................................................
+
+== Earlier non-influences ==
+
+There is record of one earlier dungeon-crawling game called "dnd",
+written in 1974-75 on the PLATO system at University of Illinois
+<<DND>>. This was in some ways similar to later roguelike games but
+not to Adventure. The designers of later roguelikes frequently site
+Adventure as an influence, but not dnd; like PLATO itself, dnd seems
+not to have become known outside of its own user community until
+rediscovered by computer historians many years after Adventure
+shipped.
+
+There was also Hunt The Wumpus <<WUMPUS>>, written by Gregory Yob in
+1972. There is no evidence that Yob's original (circulated
+in BASIC among microcomputer enthusiasts) was known to the ARPANET-
+and minicomputer-centered culture Crowther and Woods were part of
+until well after Adventure was written.
+
+(I was a developer of the Nethack roguelike early in that game's
+history; we knew of Hunt The Wumpus then from its early Unix port, but
+it didn't influence us either, nor in any apparent way the designers
+of other early roguelikes. After my time the wumpus was included as a
+monster in Nethack, but this was done in a spirit of conscious
+museumization after historians rediscovered Yob's game.)
+
+Neither of these games used an attempt at a natural-language parser
+even as primitive as Adventure's.
== Nomenclature ==
best just to start a new numbering series while acknowledging the
links back.
-I have reverted to "Advent" for the binary to avoid a name collision
+We have reverted to "advent" for the binary to avoid a name collision
with the BSD Games version.
== Functional changes in Open Adventure ==
+By default, advent issues "> " as a command prompt. This feature
+became common in many variants after the original 350-point version,
+but was never backported into Crowther & Woods's main line before now.
+The "-o" (oldstyle) version reverts the behavior.
+
A "seed" command has been added. This is not intended for human use
but as a way for game logs to set the PRNG (pseudorandom-number generator) so
that random events (dwarf & pirate appearances, the bird's magic word)
- [[[IFA]]] http://rickadams.org/adventure/
-- [[[[DA]]] http://www.filfre.net/sitemap/
+- [[[DA]]] http://www.filfre.net/sitemap/
- [[[SN]]] http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/1/2/000009/000009.html
+
+- [[[DND]]] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dnd_(video_game)
+
+- [[[WUMPUS]]] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunt_the_Wumpus