X-Git-Url: https://jxself.org/git/?p=open-adventure.git;a=blobdiff_plain;f=history.adoc;h=0aa8f10442a8c9cb7a9fd1897d8f3b4f45c7c028;hp=c3d7b3ab1b8c8893a3d94f106916076f822478ce;hb=7d0b15ef897d7a066998fa0a44fb7be958c60cd8;hpb=75094fd6588bafec66a7d8fbe8c7674b56f58579 diff --git a/history.adoc b/history.adoc index c3d7b3a..0aa8f10 100644 --- a/history.adoc +++ b/history.adoc @@ -2,9 +2,11 @@ by Eric S. Raymond 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 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 @@ -41,17 +43,20 @@ 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 <>. +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 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 <>. + +== Open Adventure == -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 <>. 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 @@ -65,7 +70,7 @@ 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. +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: @@ -109,12 +114,22 @@ and 2.5: > also details like just what _can_ you do in the dark...? ............................................................................ +Great care has been taken to preserve 2.5's exact gameplay as intended +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 <>. 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 @@ -127,25 +142,31 @@ 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.) +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 +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/[The Digital Antiquarian] -- [[[DA]]] http://www.filfre.net/sitemap/ +- [[[SN]]] + http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/1/2/000009/000009.html[Digital + Humanties Quarterly] -- [[[SN]]] http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/1/2/000009/000009.html +- [[[DND]]] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dnd_(video_game)[dnd (ivdeo game)] -- [[[DND]]] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dnd_(video_game) +- [[[WUMPUS]]] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunt_the_Wumpus[Hunt The Wumpus] -- [[[WUMPUS]]] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunt_the_Wumpus +- [[[QUUX]]] https://github.com/Quuxplusone/Advent[Quuxplusone/Advent]