Once, during a sleepover my friend (we were around 8 at the time) put the phone on an acoustic coupler modem and used the connected terminal to log into the DEC minicomputer and introduce me to the joys of Colossal Cave Adventure.

We were lost in time so much that his dad was more than a little upset when he got home because he’d been trying to call his wife before hitting the road home.

I didn’t get any real exposure to computers for a few years until my dad bought a TI 99/4a from another work friend. Of course one of the first games was their version of Adventure and then Zork style games.

Just picked up a TI from Facebook marketplace the other day- it’ll be interesting to see exactly what the nostalgia hit is going to be like…

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!)

After a year of logs, lots and lots of logs: ALL bots and login probes, ZERO humans. Even the humans who examined log entries may have been enticed to try it. So only the bots are poking, and the humans operating them are not paying attention. It left me with a sense of sadness and dread.

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

https://colossalcave3d.com

Also there are many versions/implementations:

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

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

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

The extensive FAQ indicates much care, thought, research and testing devoted to making modern improvements and expanding the game while remaining faithful to the original lineage of the most popular mainline versions. Particularly interesting to me were: improvements to the parser, extended vocabulary, expanded descriptions and some careful pruning of a few minor locales which confused many players, never had an apparent purpose and were perhaps never completed in original versions. ADV770 is playable in browsers and currently supported, with the author even offering free individualized, contextual hints via email for stuck players.

Having started with a 4K 8-bit microcomputer, I never got to play the mainframe-based original and have had it on my list for a while. My first experiences with text adventure games were cassette tape-based games written in 8-bit assembler by solo programmer, garage-based "game publishers" and sold by mail in the back of early 80s hobby zines. While those authors were clearly inspired by playing the OG Adventure, the limitations of CPU, memory and only a few months of part-time development by a single programmer clearly showed. The extremely limited vocabulary, abbreviated descriptions and simplified parsers were frustrating, so I suspect I never got the full experience of the larger, more mature mainframe-based games which had benefited from iteration by multiple authors and direct feedback from hundreds of players in university computer labs. I think ADV770 sounds like what I'm looking for: a well-curated synthesis of the most beloved and iconic versions that remains faithful to the OG story and experience but with some of the rough edges fixed.

and the various versions at http://www.gobberwarts.com/

and https://quuxplusone.github.io/Advent/

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.

That was me. On the engineering filesystem of GEISCO (General Electric Information Services Co Mark III foreground, the thing using Honeywell equipment that later became GEnie) ... still a kid I leveraged the debugger to root-like access for a time and it was fun. I did a global search for Adventure and found it in 4 separate 'private' employee-user places, and patched them all. ~1981.

   GOTO(1100,1004,1013,1020,1004,1004)(IKIND+1)

If the integer value is 1 (not zero), control flow transfers to label_1, if the value is 2, it transfers to the second label, etc.

Interesting! It's like a simplified switch statement.

It's a very faithful translation, with the jokes being perfectly adapted. If you are a native Spanish speaker, get it from a IF archive mirror under games/zcode/spanish.

Overall, Advent and the ZMachine have been ported to far more platforms than Doom. And, contrary what to Romero/Carmack fanboys say with the predictor, The ZMachine actually ran under a pen like device, with handwritting detection et all.

If we count up the versions for Advent in any language (even Forth and that Lambda Calculus interpreter from IOCC) and the ZMachine itself, Adventure wins second as the most ported game ever except for Tetris or Pong, because Tetris it's so simple that it can be run under a 4bit CPU and a 10x20 display.

But, potentially, giving a working ASCII display with 16x64, or with enough pixels, Sokoban could be the most ported game ever if people made ports for it. Why? You can reimplement a Sokoban game analogically with just a graph paper, pen and some cardboard to create the player and the boxes as squares. Then you could just draw down the levels with a marker.