= A brief history of Colossal Cave Adventure =
by Eric S. Raymond
+// SPDX-FileCopyrightText: (C) Eric S. Raymond <esr@thyrsus.com>
+// SPDX-License-Identifier: CC-BY-4.0
Adventure is the fons et origo of all later dungeon-crawling computer
-games, the grandaddy of interactive fiction, and one of the hallowed
+games, the granddaddy of interactive fiction, and one of the hallowed
artifacts of hacker folklore.
== Origin and history ==
the game.
Adventure as we now know it, the ancestor of all later versions, 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.
+released on a PDP-10 at the Stanford AI Lab by Don Woods on June 3rd,
+1977 (some sources 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
............................................................................
Great care has been taken to preserve 2.5's exact gameplay as intended
-by Don. However, under the hood Open Adventure is rather different from
-2.5. Where 2.5 was written in FORTRAN mechanically translated into extremely
-ugly C, Open Adventure has been translated into much more modern and
-idiomatic C. The extremely cryptic and opaque format of the original
-database of rooms, objects, and strings has been moved to YAML;
-this makes the brilliant design of it much easier to comprehend.
+by Don. We have added a "version" command.
+
+However, under the hood Open Adventure is rather different from 2.5.
+Where 2.5 was written in FORTRAN mechanically translated into
+extremely ugly C, Open Adventure has been translated into much more
+modern and idiomatic C. The extremely cryptic and opaque format of
+the original database of rooms, objects, and strings has been moved to
+YAML; this makes the brilliant design of it much easier to comprehend.
== 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
+not to Adventure. The designers of later roguelikes frequently cite
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
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.)
+well after historians rediscovered Yob's game.)
Neither of these games used an attempt at a natural-language parser
even as primitive as Adventure's.
== Sources ==
+// asciidoc and asciidoctor both foo up on bare links ending in ')'.
[bibliography]
-- [[[IFA]]] http://rickadams.org/adventure/
+- [[[IFA]]] http://rickadams.org/adventure/[Colossal Cave Adventure Page]
-- [[[DA]]] http://www.filfre.net/sitemap/
+- [[[DA]]] http://www.filfre.net/sitemap/[The Digital Antiquarian]
-- [[[SN]]] http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/1/2/000009/000009.html
+- [[[SN]]]
+ http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/1/2/000009/000009.html[Digital
+ Humanities Quarterly]
-- [[[DND]]] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dnd_(video_game)
+- [[[DND]]] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dnd_(video_game)[dnd (video game)]
-- [[[WUMPUS]]] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunt_the_Wumpus
+- [[[WUMPUS]]] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunt_the_Wumpus[Hunt The Wumpus]
-- [[[QUUX]]] https://github.com/Quuxplusone/Advent
+- [[[QUUX]]] https://github.com/Quuxplusone/Advent[Quuxplusone/Advent]
projects / open-adventure.git / blobdiff