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The classics never die – or so we hope. One classic, Colossal Cave Adventure, is getting a new lease of life on GitLab. Regarded the first text adventure game, Colossal Cave Adventure was first given life in the 1970s on a Digital PDP-10, by ARPANET pioneer William Crowther, and expanded on by Don Woods, then a Stanford …
I played this in spring 1979 on a Xerox Sigma 6 mainframe and it change my life.
No exaggeration, it really did, mainly because I was playing this game rather than revising for my degree finals.
In retrospect I would do it again, but keep the maps.
now, courtesy of Internet luminary and software-preservation enthusiast Eric Raymond, it's back.
It never went away. I still have a paper tape copy from the late 70's somwehere, there's even an Android app. There are useful pages (out of tens of thousands) at http://rickadams.org/adventure/ and http://www.mipmip.org/advfamily.html
Oh man, this takes me back... text adventures were where I cut my programming and game development teeth; looking back, it was such a blissful time when if you needed a new "scene" added, you just needed a few lines of description and not a honk-load of time and effort to model/texture/animate it.
Simpler times... kids these days don't know what they are missing!
Inspired me to write a text adventure on a BBC using 6502 Assembler. I even wrote my own compression routine to cram the text into RAM (just a dictionary lookup, nothing clever).
Seemed so fast after using BASIC. Dread to think what a modern OS would make of my writing JMP locations into the code ahead of it executing.
Not enough to impress anyone though - couldn't sell it.
On some of the systems I've worked on getting them to do the right, or set up some test data to test a new feature, often felt like a quest.
Hmm. Speaking of menus gave me an idea.. Colossal Cave + Festival + Asterisk. Now I now where to send telemarketers/scammers/
I thought that this was used as the basis for *insert telco here* phone menu system..
for sales press 1
for accounts press 2
for support press 3
*3*
for home support press 1
for business support press 2
*2*
for leased line press 1
for other network press 2
*2*
you have encountered a Basilisk... you have died ...
for sales press 1
for accounts press 2
for support press 3
may I recommend attending any performance by John Robertson of his "Dark Room" shows.
Australian performer I saw in the UK (Pwllheli, no that's not Elvish) a couple of months ago so probably accessible to readers of Vultures North and South.
www.thejohnroberston.com/thedarkroom or Duckduckgo "you awake to find yourself in a dark room"
You are in a maze of twisty turny passages all alike.
> right
You are in a maze of twisty turny passages all alike.
> right
You are in a maze of twisty turny passages all alike.
> right
At which point I decided to spend more time with my life and have no intention of going back, north, east or west...
I was left sufficiently scarred that I've never wanted to go back and check. It was a long time ago 30 years I'd imagine, the detail fades, the scars remain. PI Mania (or whatever it was called) on the BBC Micro produced similar feelings of disgust (for being a waste of my time) and inadequacy (for not being able to get it right) and I put that down fairly rapidly too.
I admire your desire for accuracy (even if it verges on pedantic) and am envious that you had both the time *and* inclination to go and check your facts.
In the variant I encountered, the message randomly cycled through a set of slight variants, such as, IIRC:
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
You are in a maze of little twisty passages, all alike.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all different.
The sneaky bit being that the exact message text had no relationship to your actual location in the maze, and would change even if you went nowhere. I have a grudging admiration for the person who thought THAT part up.
IIRC, there were two mazes of twisty little passages.
One had subtly different descriptions for each location ("...twisty little passages, no two the same", "...passages, all different", etc) so you could map it using the descriptions. The other had the same description everywhere ("twisty little passages, all the same"). The way to map this maze was to drop things, so you could identify passages by their contents.
Correct.
But in a later variant of the game (which was in a labyrinth under a house - can't remember the name of it) you'd find yourself in a "twisty little passages all alike" maze. So you dropped items so that you could map it - say, a box.
And then, a couple of moves later, you heard a voice saying "A nice box! How useful!" - and you discovered that someone else in the maze was (a) picking up your items and (b) dropping them elsewhere. Infuriating. I never did successfully complete that maze.
You are in a twisty little maze of passages, all different.
You are in a twisty maze of little passages, all different.
You are in a maze of little twisty passages, all different.
etc.
You know where you are by tracking the wording variations. Unlike the "all alike" maze, where you have to drop things to figure out the map.
I was introduced to this specific adventure in the book "Spectrum Adventures - a guide to playing and writing adventures" by Tony Bridge and Roy Carnell (yep, that Roy Carnell) with the "Eye of the Star Warrior" as a type-in listing.
Spent a couple of days typing the listing in... but it was fun.
I'm still addicted to playing adventure games, pity the programmers' a sadistic lot :p
Maybe I should introduce my wife to Zork? :)
Typing listings in - blimey, that dates us all... That book used to be available on World of Spectrum, but can now be found here. I had a copy ages ago - the cover art was just bizarre.
I've a boxset of the old Infocom text adventures - I'll raise your Zork with a Leather Goddesses of Phobos (nice to see that one sneak into a scene on The Martian)
As I understand it the authors of adventure were spelunkers and fellow spelunkers recognize the cave we were roaming around in. The text descriptions were marvelous and the game cost industry millions when it first hit. I believe the original was in FORTRAN but was ported all over the place.
I lost a couple of days sleep when this game hit our college.
Happy Memories*. The version we had was installed on an Intel 8080 Development System which had 8" floppy disks, and lots of fancy add-ons such as ICE and a Coral Compiler.
My work colleague was having trouble getting past the snake.
"No problem" I said, typing in: "Kill snake".
On screen response: "What! With your bare hands?" to which I replied yes.
(I'd been looking through the data files and had stumbled across "congratulations, you killed the snake with your bare hands.")
* Measured in kilobytes.
I had much the same system as you with an IDS 8080 plus Coral compiler and a pair of 8 inch drives. My IDS though was on the rather more spiffy 8085 IDS.
Yeah we all cheated by looking at the binary. It wasn't as if you could find a walkthrough on the internet back in 1980. However I recall actually not needing to cheat to kill the snake as I was at the try everthing stage of desperation.
A year or two later someone at work got a copy of the source code. It was only then that I found out that the final point missing in my otherwise maximum score was obtained by leaving the Spelunker Today magazine in Witts End.
And of course it makes critical appearances in The Soul of a New Machine, by Tracy Kidder.
It's called a "spring house". A structure built over a spring to keep critters & detritus out of the/a source of fresh water. Often used to keep dairy, fresh meat and/or some varieties of fruit cool back in the old days (whenever that was ... I still use mine as a larder/beer cooler occasionally).
I played this extensively on the school RM 380Z under CP/M in about 1979/80.
Two years later my brother then played it during his time there too - despite there being options like Galaxians on the few Speccys they had.
How many games have actually stood the test of time?
How many people were sad enough to watch the entire video walk through in the article and note the differences in his version?
Ah, yes, good memories. I played the FORTRAN version in college on an IBM mainframe timesharing add-on, I think ORVYL? I hacked it so that it could store and load state so I could save and resume playing later.
The original is a jewel of programming too. All state machine and state table driven, it's a real beauty. Still some of the best and cleanest programming I've seen, even in the original FORTRAN.
Somewhere I still have the map I drew for it. On fanfold line printer paper, no less.
The version that most impressed me was a cassette-loaded version for the Atari personal computers, which used compression to fit "in core" :-), perhaps as low as 16K.
My own professional development was aided by my work on a mad scheme to adapt the PDP-11 version to run on a 6502, by studying the RT-11 linker and the FORTRAN runtime library. The RT-11 FORTRAN compiler used threaded code, so it was not _entirely_ mad to link the "object" file with a native-6502 replica of the PDP-11 runtime. My manager got wind of it and forecefully expressed his opinion of this use of my time, although the knowledge of compiler and linker internals gained was "relevant to business".
Then a friend who knew of this endeavor asked if I could help porting to COBOL for the Data General "Eagle", as their (engineering) management was distressed that the productivity in the "engineering" side of the house was lagging that in the "business" side, for some reason. That project was even more quickly squashed when _his_ manager got wind of it. SIgh.
Now, if someone wants to contribute a restorable IBM 1407 to the Computer History Museum, maybe my next attempt should be 1401 assembly.