= 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
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.
-We 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