ADVENT running on an Osborne_1 Computer circa 1982

Discover great deals on thousands of new and used action and fighting games, console games, xbox, gameboy, playstation, nintendo, and family games on eBay with big savings!

Colossal Cave Adventure

Colossal Cave Adventure (also known as ADVENT, Colossal Cave, or Adventure) (Crowther & Woods, 1976) was the first computer adventure game. more...

Home

Genre

Hugo House of Horrors

Syberia

The Dig

The Journeyman Project

The Legend of Kyrandia

The Longest Journey

The Neverhood

Zork

Arcade

Board, Card Game

Family

Fighting

Other

Racing

Shooter

Sports

Others

Systems

Wholesale Lots

It was originally designed by Will Crowther, a programmer and keen caver, and is based on the layout of parts of the Mammoth Cave system in Kentucky. Most specifically, the name of the cave in the game comes from the section of the complex called "Colossal Cave", but the actual map layout is a faithful reproduction of the nearby "Bedquilt Cave" (which gives its name only to one particular room/passage in the game). This reproduction is apparently so faithful that experienced cavers who have played the game but never seen the cave have been able to find their way around significant parts of Bedquilt.

History

Will Crowther was a programmer at Bolt, Beranek & Newman, which developed the ARPANET (the forerunner of the Internet). Crowther was a caver, who applied his experience in Mammoth Cave (in Kentucky) to create a game that he could enjoy with his young daughters.

Crowther had explored the Mammoth Cave in 1972, and created a vector map based on surveys of parts of the real cave, but the text game is a completely separate entity, created around 1975 and featuring more fantasy elements, such as axe-throwing dwarves.

The version that is known today was created in 1976 by Don Woods, another programmer, who discovered the game on his company's machine and made a number of improvements to it, with Crowther's blessing. A big fan of Tolkien, he introduced several elements from his stories, such as elves, trolls, and a volcano.

Technology

The original Colossal Cave Adventure was written in Fortran. Although this was not the ideal language, due to weaknesses in its treatment of character strings, it was nonetheless the only language then available on BBN's PDP-10. The program required almost 300 KB of main memory in order to run, an significant amount at that time.

In 1976, Jim Gillogly of the RAND Corporation spent several weeks porting the code from Fortran to C under Unix, with the agreement of both Woods and Crowther.

The game was also ported to Prime Computer's super-mini running PRIMOS in the late 1970s, utilizing Fortran 4.

Later versions of the game moved away from general purpose programming languages such as C or Fortran, and were instead written for special interactive fiction engines, such as Infocom's Z-machine.

Later versions

Many versions of Colossal Cave have been released, mostly entitled simply Adventure, or adding a tag of some sort to the original name (e.g. Adventure II, Adventure 550, Adventure4+, ...). Microsoft released a version of Adventure with its initial version of MS-DOS 1.0 for the IBM PC (on a single sided disk, requiring 32KB of RAM). Russel Dalenberg's Adventure Family Tree page provides the best (though still incomplete) summary of different versions and their relationships.