THE ADVENTURE GAME
For me anyway, the adventure game is still one of the most rewarding and mind stretching forms of entertainment. Transporting you to fantasy worlds, the game would describe the location you were in and you would interact with the surroundings using simple Verb & Noun commands. This would sometimes become frustrating (especially with sloppy programming where a response wasn't considered). Over time, the text adventure eventually evolved into mouse controlled point and click style adventures. But that's not what I am going to talk about here! I'm going to focus on the original adventures and a few rare gems. Lets travel back in time to 1972.
William Crowther and his wife Pat, both avid caver's, explored and mapped portions of the Mammoth and Flint Ridge cave systems in Kentucky for the Cave Research Foundation in their spare time. Other activities Crowther really enjoyed were rock climbing and the classic Role Playing Game "Dungeons & Dragons" among a group of friends.
Unfortunately, it was during this period that Crowther's marriage ended. Feeling separated from his two daughters and wanting to be closer to them, he decided to write a program that they might enjoy: a simulation of his cave explorations that also contained elements of his fantasy role playing. He was intrigued by the idea of trying a computer-mediated version of the game.
He wrote a computer simulation based on the maps he had drawn from his hobby. His first version included caving jargon and many of the names of rooms in this version came from actual features in the caves he had been exploring. Crowther's daughters enjoyed the game, and it was passed from friend to friend during the early days of the Internet, appearing on countless computer systems as if from out of nowhere.
In 1976, Don Woods was working at Stanford University's Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab, and found a
copy of Crowther's program left on one of his work computers by someone who had downloaded it. He contacted Crowther by sending an early form of email. After corresponding with Crowther and getting his authority, Woods set about re-writing the program.
At the time, J.R.R. Tolkien`s work The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings were very popular and influenced by these, Woods included touches such as a troll, elves, and a volcano inspired by Tolkien.
Jim Gillogly at the Rand Corporation spent several weeks in 1976 converting the code (with Woods' and Crowther's authority) from the original adventure source code into C for UNIX. Most UNIX systems run successors of this C version. Gillogly later ported the code to Heathkit and then IBM-PC personal computers with the help of Walt Bilofsky, founder of The Software Toolworks (which was eventually renamed Mindscape).This version was marketed in 1981 under the name "The Original Adventure."
And so...the Original adventure was born and with it - Interactive Fiction.
Shortly after this in 1977 students Dave Lebling and Marc Blank are inspired by Adventure and start to create a similar game by themselves. They named the project Zork (the same name they use for any work in progress). This will be mentioned again in a later part to this story.
Then in 1978 - someone by the name of Scott Adams discovered Adventure. He had started programming in the late sixties at High School in America. This early interest in computing turned to a profession after taking a degree course in System programming, and soon was captivated by Colossal Caves and Adventure. He owned a Tandy Model I and thought he would see if he could write an Adventure type game on the TRS80. He didn't listen to the people who said it would be impossible to get a program which existed on megabytes of storage into a 16K machine.
Instead of taking the existing program and put it into the paltry 16K which he had to work with, he sat down and wrote an adventure language of his own for the machine - an interpreter - and proceeded to write an adventure in that language.
Founded by Scott in 1979, Adventure International was to revolutionise gaming. These forms of Interactive Fiction were mainly simple verb-noun entries, but had exciting plots and were very well-designed.
The first title to be released was Adventureland. The text on the back of the box read -
You wander through an enchanted world trying to recover the 13 lost treasures. You'll encounter wild animals, magical beings, and many other perils and puzzles. Can you rescue the Blue Ox from the quicksand? Or find your way out of the maze of pits? Happy Adventuring...
This game was a hit and spurred on a further 13 exciting stories. These and Adventureland we will cover in part two.
Article by Jops, April 2006.
