X-Git-Url: https://jxself.org/git/?a=blobdiff_plain;f=history.adoc;h=8a0f8bf4b8b694bae802aaba3900d3f88dcb64f0;hb=25d98f6dabdc389b54127e542dd6ff69cfd5d168;hp=743ed619af2d0fd906572abfa50c9ec83e3b08f6;hpb=720146740b72ec26712d61a88a8384ecdfe29a2a;p=open-adventure.git diff --git a/history.adoc b/history.adoc index 743ed61..8a0f8bf 100644 --- a/history.adoc +++ b/history.adoc @@ -1,9 +1,9 @@ = 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 @@ -13,7 +13,7 @@ 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 -was released on a PDP-10 at the Stanford AI Lab by Don Woods in 1977 +released on a PDP-10 at the Stanford AI Lab by Don Woods in 1977 (some sources, apparently erroneously, say 1976). That version is sometimes known as 350-point Adventure. @@ -114,17 +114,26 @@ There is record of one earlier dungeon-crawling game called "dnd", written in 1974-75 on the PLATO system at University of Illinois <>. This was in some ways similar to later roguelike games but not to Adventure. The designers of later roguelikes frequently site -Adventure as an explanation, but not dnd; like PLATO itself, dnd seems -not to have become known outside of its home university until +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 <>, written by Gregory Yob in -1972. Though the wumpus was later included as a monster in the Nethack -roguelike game, 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. +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 == @@ -164,6 +173,13 @@ The adventure.text file is no longer required at runtime. Instead, it is compiled at build time to a source module containing C structures, which is then linked to the advent binary. +The game-save format has changed. This was done to simplify +FORTRAN-derived code that formerly implemented these functions; +without C's fread(3)/fwrite() and structs it was necessarily pretty +ugly by modern stabdards. Encryption and checksumming have been +discarded - it's pointless to try tamper-prooing saves when everyone +has the source code. + == Sources == [bibliography]