= 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. 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 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 (some sources, apparently erroneously, say 1976). That version is sometimes known as 350-point Adventure. Between 1977 and 1995 Crowther and Woods themselves continued to work intermittently on the game. This main line of development culminated in the 1995 release of Adventure 2.5, also known as 430-point Adventure The earliest port to C was by Jim Gillogly under an early Unix running at the Rand Corporation in 1977; this version was later, and still is, included in the BSD Games collection. It was blessed by Crowther and Woods and briefly marketed in 1981 under the name "The Original Adventure". Many other people ported and extended the game in various directions. A notable version was the first game shipped for the IBM Personal Computer in 1981; this, for which neither Crowther nor Woods nor Gillogly were paid royalties, what "The Original" was competing against. The history of these non-mainline versions is complex and murky. Functional differences were generally marked by changes in the maximum score as people added puzzles and rooms; however, multiple ports of some versions existed - some in FORTRAN, some in C, some in other languages - so the maximum point score is not completely disambiguating. Same articles at <> are a narrative of the history of the game. There is an in-depth study of its origins at <>. Many versions are collected at The Interactive Fiction Archive <>; note however that its dates for the earliest releases don't match other comments in the code or the careful reconstruction in <>. Future versions of this document may attempt to untangle some of the non-mainline history. For now, it will suffice to explain the chain of provenance that led from the original Adventure to the version distributed with this document. The original 350-point ADVENT on the PDP-10 had been one of my formative experiences as a fledgling hacker in 1976-77. Forty years later, in February 2017, while doing some casual research into the history of text adventure games, I looked through some source code at <> and was delighted to learn of Adventure 2.5, a version of the Crowther-Woods mainline later than I had ever played. Adventure 2.5 had been shipped long enough ago that today's conventions of open-source licensing were not yet fully established. The Makefile contained a rights reservation by Don Woods and that was it. I wrote to Don asking permission to release 2.5 under 2-clause BSD; he replied on 15 May giving both permission and encouragement. == Nomenclature == This project is called "Open Adventure" because it's not at all clear to number Adventure past 2.5 without misleading or causing collisions. Various of the non-mainline versions have claimed to be versions 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 and for all I know higher than that. It seems best just to start a new numbering series while acknowledging the links back. I have reverted to "Advent" to avoid a name collision with the BSD Games version. == Sources == [bibliography] - [[[IFA]]] http://rickadams.org/adventure/ - [[[[DA]]] http://www.filfre.net/sitemap/ - [[[SN]]] http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/1/2/000009/000009.html