X-Git-Url: https://jxself.org/git/?p=open-adventure.git;a=blobdiff_plain;f=history.adoc;h=86f49034250544adb7364605496f07b2ad169951;hp=24f7fcf020ec652c189a7d91798216555c87ca94;hb=2ddd09189336df222ef88099a3041584ec5b327e;hpb=2935e07bc9b01751bfcb2972f84f5df1bc82d75c diff --git a/history.adoc b/history.adoc index 24f7fcf..86f4903 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 @@ -26,14 +28,13 @@ at the Rand Corporation in 1977; this version was later, and still is, 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 brefed him on it in 2017. (This contradicts some implications +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 @@ -42,17 +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 @@ -66,7 +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: @@ -110,12 +114,20 @@ 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. 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 @@ -128,11 +140,12 @@ 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. @@ -150,3 +163,5 @@ 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