remix logo

Hacker Remix

Colossal Cave Adventure (1976)

44 points by shakna 12 hours ago | 18 comments

o11c 8 hours ago

Note that there are numerous versions and forks of Colossal Cave Adventure, several of which are called "the original". For the most complete known family tree (actually a DAG in a few places), with links, see:

https://mipmip.org/advfamily/advfamily.html

Some important versions: WOOD0350 (added most of the feature we know about; allegedly there was an early 250-point version in the wild but it's poorly documented), GILL0350 (C port, made it into bsdgames among others), WOOD0430 (the final version by him, what open-adventure is based on). But several other lineages are also well known (you can see .

The link submitted is a bit of a mess. src/ contains multiple versions of CROW0000 (which had been thought lost prior to 2005). But the various images are for other versions, and I haven't checked the binaries.

If you're interested in hacking your own version of adventure, the best by technical measures (reproducibility, sane file format, etc.) is:

https://gitlab.com/esr/open-adventure

(But the major change of file format does mean it becomes difficult to apply changes from other members of the Adventure family. This is also a problem for some others though!)

WillAdams 59 minutes ago

For folks interested in the code see:

http://literateprogramming.com/adventure.pdf

(the source re-written as a Literate Program by Dr. Donald Knuth)

Wish I still had the teletype prints of when I played it on an HP 3000 minicomputer at a local college --- did finally finish the game using a port to Windows.

My wife quite enjoyed _Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet_ which is one of the references from Wikipedia and covers the backstory in great detail.

musicale 9 hours ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossal_Cave_Adventure

And the 2023 graphical remake (from Ken and Roberta Williams [King's Quest, etc.] no less):

https://colossalcave3d.com

svat 9 hours ago

It's a featured article on Wikipedia! (“This article appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page as Today's featured article on May 17, 2022.”)

Also there are many versions/implementations:

- https://www.ifwiki.org/Adventure#Versions

- https://mipmip.org/advfamily/advfamily.html

anthk 7 hours ago

IFDB has tons of ports.

The Puny Inform version will run on every computer since the 70's with a ZMachine interpreter. Even the ZX, C64 with OZmoo and so on.

https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=fft6pu91j85y4acv

wduquette 1 hour ago

I had a copy of the Fortran IV source for the PDP-11 back in the late 70’s. My friend and I tried to extend the game a bit, but soon ran into trouble. Dunno whether this is the same code or not.