I was speaking with a friend last night about an early computer game I played at Hartwick College’s computer center about 1981. I had always known it as “Adventure;” but knew very little about its origins or background.
Well, after “trolling” the internet for an hour or so this morning, I found a few references to the programmer who created it (William Crowther, who was employed by Bolt, Beranek and Newman in Boston), and the mainframe computer it was created on (the PDP-10, created by Digital Equipment Corporation). It was a revelation. I played it for hours – which probably could have been more productively spent at study.
As I was subsequently to learn, Crowther was a “caving” expert who wrote the program (one and two-word commands) to navigate through a cave – all the while avoiding being killed by dragons and shaken-down by trolls lurking under bridges. Crowther developed the game in 1975, and first released it under the name “Colossal Cave Adventure” on the ARPAnet, predecessor to the Internet, which Bolt, Beranek and Newman had developed.
It had proved immensely popular, and eventually it spread to the college microcomputing world.
Scott Adams, another programmer, was a huge fan of the game, and one of the few who achieved “Grand Master” status for scoring perfectly (350 pts.) on Crowther’s version. In 1978 he started a company, “Adventure International” that sought to introduce the game to a wider audience, including the new personal computer market. It closed down in 1985, having lost market share in the gaming industry – presumably because of its graphics, which lagged behind those of other companies at the time.
Here’s a brief video of what “Adventure” looked like to the average “cave dweller.”
My brother in law would appreciate this post. We were not too long ago talking about this. hehe