103 lines
4.6 KiB
Text
103 lines
4.6 KiB
Text
= A brief history of Colossal Cave Adventure =
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by Eric S. Raymond
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Adventure is the fons et origo of all later dungeon-crawling games,
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the grandaddy of interactive fiction, and one of the hallowed artifacts
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of hacker folklore.
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The very first version was released by Crowther in 1976, in FORTRAN on
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the PDP-10 at Bolt, Beranek, and Newman. (Crowther was at the time
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writing what we could now call firmware for the earliest ARPANET
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routers.) It was a maze game based on the Colossal Cave complex in
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Kentucky, lacking the D&D-like elements now associated with the game.
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Adventure as we now know it, the ancestor of all later versions, was
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was released on a PDP-10 at the Stanford AI Lab by Don Woods in 1977
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(some sources, apparently erroneously, say 1976). That version is
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sometimes known as 350-point Adventure.
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Between 1977 and 1995 Crowther and Woods themselves continued to work
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intermittently on the game. This main line of development culminated
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in the 1995 release of Adventure 2.5, also known as 430-point Adventure
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The earliest port to C was by Jim Gillogly under an early Unix running
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at the Rand Corporation in 1977; this version was later, and still is,
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included in the BSD Games collection. It was blessed by Crowther and
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Woods and briefly marketed in 1981 under the name "The Original
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Adventure".
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Many other people ported and extended the game in various directions.
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A notable version was the first game shipped for the IBM Personal
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Computer in 1981; this, for which neither Crowther nor Woods nor
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Gillogly were paid royalties, what "The Original" was competing
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against.
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The history of these non-mainline versions is complex and
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murky. Functional differences were generally marked by changes in the
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maximum score as people added puzzles and rooms; however, multiple
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ports of some versions existed - some in FORTRAN, some in C,
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some in other languages - so the maximum point score is not
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completely disambiguating.
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Same articles at <<DA>> are a narrative of the history of the
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game. There is an in-depth study of its origins at <<SN>>.
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Many versions are collected at The Interactive Fiction Archive
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<<IFA>>; note however that its dates for the earliest releases
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don't match other comments in the code or the careful reconstruction
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in <<SN>>.
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Future versions of this document may attempt to untangle some of the
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non-mainline history. For now, it will suffice to explain the chain of
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provenance that led from the original Adventure to the version
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distributed with this document.
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The original 350-point ADVENT on the PDP-10 had been one of my
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formative experiences as a fledgling hacker in 1976-77. Forty years
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later, in February 2017, while doing some casual research into the
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history of text adventure games, I looked through some source code at
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<<IFA>> and was delighted to learn of Adventure 2.5, a version of the
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Crowther-Woods mainline later than I had ever played.
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Adventure 2.5 had been shipped long enough ago that today's conventions of
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open-source licensing were not yet fully established. The Makefile
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contained a rights reservation by Don Woods and that was it.
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I wrote to Don asking permission to release 2.5 under 2-clause BSD;
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he replied on 15 May giving both permission and encouragement.
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== Nomenclature ==
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This project is called "Open Adventure" because it's not at all clear
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to number Adventure past 2.5 without misleading or causing
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collisions. Various of the non-mainline versions have claimed to be
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versions 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 and for all I know higher than that. It seems
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best just to start a new numbering series while acknowledging the
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links back. I have reverted to "Advent" to avoid a name collision
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with the BSD Games version.
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== Functional changes in Open Adventure ==
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A "seed" command has been added. This is not intended for human use
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but as a way for game logs to set the PRNG (pseudorandom-number generator) so
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that random events (dwarf & pirate appearances, the bird's magic word)
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will be reproducible.
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A -l command-line option has been added. When this is given (with a
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file path argument) each command entered will be logged to the
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specified file. Additionally, a generated "seed" command will be put
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early in the file capturing the randomized start state of the PRNG
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so that replays of the log will be reproducible.
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Using "seed" and -l, the distribution now includes a regression-test
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suite for the game. Any log captured with -l (and thus containing
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a "seed" command) will replay relibly, including random events.
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== Sources ==
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[bibliography]
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- [[[IFA]]] http://rickadams.org/adventure/
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- [[[[DA]]] http://www.filfre.net/sitemap/
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- [[[SN]]] http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/1/2/000009/000009.html
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