9/3/2023 0 Comments Colossal cave magic wordsThe games are listed below and appear in order of the year of their original appearance (but later reconstructive ports will be listed immediately following the original). In the meantime, I will update this page (un)regularly. This is a work in progress and may take a while to develop. The object of this page is to highlight a number of variants, and to compare their respective geographies in the form of one map per version. The original game was written in FORTRAN, then ported to C, or to assembly language for smaller machines, and finally to dedicated languages for interactive fiction such as TADS and Inform. Some versions and portsĪs mentioned above, the long history of the Colossal Cave Adventure has resulted in many different versions. After the commercial demise of the text adventure in the second half of the 1980s new games were and are still being produced by enthusiasts who due to the nature of the text game have no need of teams of coders, the latest hardware, and marketing campaigns. The text adventure form was used and continued by a number of developers in the 1970s and 1980s to make new games with different themes - Infocom, Magnetic Scrolls, Adventure International, and Level 9 are some of the best known ones. Space Invaders, Pacman, and other successful arcade games were obvious candidates, but the Colossal Cave adventure was also picked up by several developers. With the advent of games consoles and home computers, game publishers undertook to port existing video games to these machines. "A huge green snake bars the way", "xyzzy", "twisty passages", and the notion of dwarfs coming out of nowhere and attacking you by throwing axes are phrases that can be encountered in discussions not otherwise related to Colossal Cave. The prose of the game itself has become part of hacker lore. It has been said that once Woods' version became known and available, regular work on many ARPANET computers stopped for two weeks as users tried to solve it (to counter this phenomenon a blocking routine was introduced so that the game could only be played outside office hours). Crowther's original game did not feature a points system, Woods' version awarded a maximum of 350 points, and later games were expanded to 430 points, or 550 points, or 551 points, et cetera. Different versions were often referred to by the number of points a player could earn by finding treasure. At the same time it evolved into many different versions with rooms and elements added by other programmers. Initially with the relative few who had access to machines like the PDP-10 that were connected to the ARPANET, but eventually the Colossal Cave Adventure was ported to smaller machines such as mini computers and home computers. From then on, the game found fame and success. This was also the first version of the game to be called the Colossal Cave Adventure. The game was subsequently encountered by and expanded upon (with permission from Crowther) by Don Woods, a student at Stanford University, who added rooms as well as functionality. From the 11th edition of Encyclopaedia Brittanica (now in the public domain). Map of Colossal Cavern, with "Bedquilt route" in the right and middle of the map. This form of gaming where the player's input resembles natural language became known as a "text adventure", and later "interactive fiction". In it, the player could travel between locations (now referred to as "rooms") and manipulate objects in order to solve puzzles by entering one or two-word commands through the computer keyboard. Will Crowther, a computer programmer and caving enthousiast, played a significant role in mapping these caves and subsequently wrote a game in FORTRAN on a DEC PDP-10 mimicking the lay-out of the caves as an amusement for his daughters. The Colossal Cave adventure is a digital version of the Bedquilt Cave, part of the Mammoth Cave system in Kentucky USA (not the Colossal Cave near Tucson, Arizona, despite the name). The history of the Colossal Cave Adventure computer game has been related in great detail elsewhere ( here, here and here, for example), but here follows an abridged outline. The object is to compare their geographical lay-outs it's a work in progress, and it's done for my own amusement. On this page, a number of variants of this game are enumerated and discussed briefly. The entire genre of text adventures, or interactive fiction as it is called nowadays, rests on this game.
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