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".
+included in the BSD Games collection. I have it from Don Woods directly
+that "[Jim Gillogly] was one of the first to request and receive a copy
+of the source" but that Woods did not actually know of the BSD port
+until I briefed him on it in 2017. (This contradicts some implications
+in third-party histories.)
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.
+Computer in 1981; neither Crowther nor Woods nor Gillogly were paid
+royalties.
The history of these non-mainline versions is complex and
murky. Functional differences were generally marked by changes in the
some in other languages - so the maximum point score is not
completely disambiguating.
-Same articles at <<DA>> are a narrative of the history of the
-game. There is an in-depth study of its origins at <<SN>>.
-Many versions are collected at The Interactive Fiction Archive
-<<IFA>>; note however that its dates for the earliest releases
-don't match other comments in the code or the careful reconstruction
-in <<SN>>.
+Same articles at <<DA>> are a narrative of the history of the game.
+There is an in-depth study of its origins at <<SN>>. Many versions
+are collected at The Interactive Fiction Archive <<IFA>>; note however
+that IFA's historical claims are thinly sourced and its dates for the
+earliest releases don't match either comments in the code or the
+careful reconstruction in <<SN>>.
-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.
+An attempt to untangle and document a lot of the non-mainline history
+has been made by Arthur O'Dwyer at <<QUUX>>. For our purposes, it
+will suffice to explain the chain of provenance that led from the
+original Adventure to the Open Adventure 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
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.
+he replied on 15 May 2017 giving both permission and encouragement.
Here is what Don said about differences between the original Adventure
and 2.5:
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.)
+history, in the late 1980s; we knew nothing of PLATO dnd. We did know
+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.
- [[[DND]]] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dnd_(video_game)
- [[[WUMPUS]]] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunt_the_Wumpus
+
+- [[[QUUX]]] https://github.com/Quuxplusone/Advent
projects / open-adventure.git / blobdiff