Colossal Cave Adventure
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Colossal Cave Adventure (also known as ADVENT, Colossal Cave, or Adventure)[1] was the first computer adventure game. It was originally designed by William Crowther, a programmer and spelunking enthusiast who based the layout on part of the Mammoth Cave system in Kentucky.[2] The Colossal Cave subnetwork has many entrances, one of which is known as Bedquilt. Crowther reproduced portions of the real cave so faithfully that cavers who have played the game can easily navigate through familiar sections in the Bedquilt region on their first visit.[3]
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[edit] History
William Crowther was a programmer at Bolt, Beranek & Newman, which developed the ARPANET (a forerunner of the Internet). Crowther was a spelunker, who applied his experience in Mammoth Cave (in Kentucky) to create a game that he could enjoy with his young daughters.[4]
Crowther had explored the Mammoth Cave in the early 1970s, and created a vector map based on surveys of parts of the real cave, but the text game is a completely separate entity, created during the 1975-76 academic year [5] and featuring fantasy elements such as an axe-throwing dwarf and a magic bridge.
The version that is best known today was the result of a collaboration with Don Woods, a graduate student who discovered the game on a computer at Stanford University and made significant expansions and improvements, with Crowther's blessing.[6] A big fan of Tolkien, he introduced additional fantasy elements, such as elves and a troll.
Until the 2007-2008 academic year, students at Stanford University were required to re-implement the game as an assignment in the first computer programming course.
Colossal Cave also holds a prominent place in computing history: when Roberta Williams and her husband Ken found the game, and were subsequently unable to find anything similar, they were inspired to found On-Line Software (later Sierra Online, and then Sierra Entertainment), which created the first graphical adventure game (Mystery House), and then quickly came to dominate the entertainment software market for the next two decades.
[edit] Technology
Crowther's original game consisted of about 700 lines of Fortran code, with about another 700 lines of data, written for BBN's PDP-10. (See the original source code) The program required about 60K words (nearly 300KB) of core memory in order to run, which was a significant amount for PDP-10/KA systems running with only 128K words.
Later versions of the game moved away from general purpose programming languages such as C or Fortran, and were instead written for special interactive fiction engines, such as Infocom's Z-machine.
[edit] Later versions
Many versions of Colossal Cave have been released, mostly entitled simply Adventure, or adding a tag of some sort to the original name (e.g. Adventure II, Adventure 550, Adventure4+, ...). Microsoft released a version of Adventure with its initial version of MS-DOS 1.0 for the IBM PC (on a single sided disk, requiring 32KB of RAM). Russel Dalenberg's Adventure Family Tree page provides the best (though still incomplete) summary of different versions and their relationships.[7]
Until Crowther's original version was found, the "definitive original" was generally considered to be the version that Don Woods expanded in 1977.[8] As part of that expansion, Woods added a scoring system that went up to 350 points. Extended versions with extra puzzles go up to 1000 points or more.
Dave Platt's influential 550 points version was innovative in a number of ways. It broke away from coding the game directly in a programming language such as Fortran or C. Instead, Platt developed A-code — a language for adventure programming — and wrote his extended version in that language. The A-code source was pre-processed by an F77 "munger" program, which translated A-code into a text database, and a tokenised pseudo-binary. These were then distributed together with a generic A-code F77 "executive", also written in F77, which effectively "ran" the tokenised pseudo-binary.
[edit] References
- ↑ Crowther, 1976; Crowther & Woods, 1977.
- ↑ Montfort, Nick (2003). Twisty Little Passages: An Approach To Interactive Fiction. Cambridge: The MIT Press. ISBN 0-262-13436-5
- ↑ Mel Park. Bev Schwartz meets the real Bedquilt
- ↑ Rick Adams. "Here's where it all began…". The Colossal Cave Adventure page.
- ↑ Jerz, Dennis (2007) Somewhere Nearby Is Colossal Cave: Examining Will Crowther's Original “Adventure” in Code and in Kentucky, Digital Humanities Quarterly
- ↑ L’avventura è l’avventura » Interactive Fiction? I prefer Adventure
- ↑ Russel Dalenberg (March 20 2004). "Adventure Family Tree" (ASCII Art).
- ↑ "Adventure: Crowther's original source code found; photos from inside the real Colossal Cave".
[edit] External links
- Baf's Guide to the IF Archive with downloadable versions for many platforms.
- FORTRAN source code for Crowther and Woods collaboration
