Colossal Cave Adventure
Adventure (English for Adventure) was the first computer game category Adventure, who gave it his name. Adventure was also known by the name of ADVENT and Colossal Cave.
Adventure has been programmed on a DEC PDP-10 computer, a then popular minicomputer, in the programming language Fortran IV.
William Crowther, a computer scientist and recreational cavers had originally written a text-based program on the observance of the Mammoth and Flint Ridge cave system in the U.S. state of Kentucky. In this program, you could mainly just go from room to room and read the descriptions. The long-lost source code has been rediscovered in an old backup in 2005.
Between 1975 and 1976, he expanded the program to an action game with various, somewhat disjointed fantasy elements, such as estimating, dwarves, a maze and spells.
Developments
As of March 1977, advanced the student Don Woods, who had received the source code for Crowther, the game's plot containing a variety of other elements such as a pirate, more mazes, as well as a scoring target and a game: how to bring all the treasures in themselves. This original 350 points version of Adventure spread rapidly through the private copying over the ARPAnet in American universities and tasted this after later expressed (not entirely serious ) estimates about two weeks worked per data center employees.
It soon emerged enhanced versions, which are generally characterized by the maximum achievable score; the 550 -point version was probably the most common of these extensions.
Since at that time only a few individuals had a computer, the game has not been used commercially. However, it was the inspiration for, designed by Scott Adams first commercial Adventure Adventureland (1978).
From mid- May 1977 made Woods extended version for attention at MIT. In June 1977 there was a first version of Zork, a substantially revised program, which has been continuously developed. The Zork creators founded the company Infocom and produced from 1980 Zork versions, several successors and various other adventure games for home computers.
1979 eponymous computer game for the Atari 2600 was released. However, this was a graphics- based game with independent action, so no porting or implementing the text-based adventure game.
Today 's Adventure in the C- port of the BSD Unix distributions.
Trivia
The key combination XYZZY was used in this game as a " spell " and is therefore regarded as one of the first cheat code in computer games. The same combination is also used in the game Minesweeper.
The game was also called ADVENT because the length of file names was limited at this computer to a maximum of six characters.