Colossal Cave Adventure
1976 · Text Adventure · PDP-10
Overview
Colossal Cave Adventure is a text-based adventure game, released in 1976 by developer Will Crowther for the PDP-10 mainframe computer. It was expanded upon in 1977 by Don Woods. In the game, the player explores a cave system rumored to be filled with treasure and gold.
Deep Dive
Colossal Cave Adventure is a text-based adventure game, released in 1976 by developer Will Crowther for the PDP-10 mainframe computer. It was expanded upon in 1977 by Don Woods. In the game, the player explores a cave system rumored to be filled with treasure and gold. The game is composed of dozens of locations, and the player moves between these locations and interacts with objects in them by typing one- or two-word commands which are interpreted by the game's natural language input system. The program acts as a narrator, describing the player's location and the results of the player's attempted actions. It is the first well-known example of interactive fiction, as well as the first well-known adventure game, for which it was also the namesake.
Developer Story
Colossal Cave Adventure was created by Will Crowther in 1975-76, a caver and programmer at Bolt Beranek and Newman who helped build ARPANET. Crowther modelled the game's cave system on Mammoth Cave in Kentucky, where he had spent years caving with his then-wife. After his divorce, he wrote the game partly as a way to stay connected with his daughters, who loved his caving stories. Don Woods found the program on Stanford's ARPA network in 1976 and expanded it significantly, adding fantasy elements including the treasure-hunting structure.
Did You Know?
- The cave geography is based on the real Mammoth Cave system in Kentucky — Crowther used actual survey data from his years of caving.
- The phrase "You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike" became one of the most famous sentences in computing history.
- Crowther originally wrote the game for his daughters after separating from his wife — it was a form of digital storytelling for children.
- Don Woods discovered the game on Stanford's network by searching for files with "advent" in the name — short for "adventure," the filename Crowther used.
- Colossal Cave Adventure directly inspired Zork, the Sierra On-Line adventure games, and the entire text adventure genre.
