…or the start of a new Adventure?
“You are standing at the end of a road before a small brick building. Around you is a forest. A small stream flows out of the building and down a gully.”
And so begins one of the first interactive fiction computer games, Colossal Cave Adventure!
A Brief History*
The idea for Adventure is credited to married couple William and Pat Crowther In 1972, both avid spelunkers who worked for the Cave Research Foundation to map caves, including portions of Mammoth and Flint Ridge cave systems. Will (and others) input cave survey data into a computer at his workplace, and Pat developed a computer program to read that data and output maps of the caves as line drawings on a plotter (an early kind of printer for images). created maps of the cave using their survey data.
A few years later, Will (now divorced from Pat) wrote a computer program simulation of his cave explorations for their two daughters. As an avid Dungeons and Dragons roleplaying game player, he combined the cave exploration data with aspects of fantasy roleplaying. The game was a hit with them and was shared among friends and acquaintances, who would install it (often unbeknownst to system administrators) on computers at corporations and universities.
Crowther’s game was soon after expanded by Don Woods, then a programmer at Stanford University’s Artificial Intelligence Lab. Woods had found a copy of the game on one of the university’s computers and tracked Crowther down to get his permission to develop the game further. Jim Gillogly (Rand Corporation) later ported the program over from FORTRAN to C for UNIX and later for Heathkit computers (CPM) and later still to IBM-PC machines.
Neal Van Eck, who was a systems analyst at the Institute for Social Research (ISR) brought Adventure home in 1976 to play on the Heathkit H-8 computer he had built. Running on 8.5 inch floppy disks at that time, he showed all his children how to play the game. His eldest, Richard Van Eck, credits this experience as the catalyst for his later research on videogames and learning as a professor of instructional design and technology.
Get Adventure Here
Neal Van Eck made his own contribution to the game by adding sound, color, and an additional puzzle to the Adventure 6 version, bringing the maximum point total to 560. You can download this version here (Windows only). You can also download a full map to the game here (but we recommend trying to solve the game on your own, first). If you’d like to download other versions of the game for other platforms, check out Dave Kinder’s guide on Rick Adams’ site.
*Adapted from Rick Adams’ Colossal Cave Adventure page.