= 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
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.
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 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 <<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.
-
-== 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.
-
-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)
-will be reproducible.
-
-A -l command-line option has been added. When this is given (with a
-file path argument) each command entered will be logged to the
-specified file. Additionally, a generated "seed" command will be put
-early in the file capturing the randomized start state of the PRNG
-so that replays of the log will be reproducible.
-
-Using "seed" and -l, the distribution now includes a regression-test
-suite for the game. Any log captured with -l (and thus containing
-a "seed" command) will replay reliably, including random events.
-
-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.
+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.
== Sources ==
projects / open-adventure.git / blobdiff