Forum Overview :: Reviews :: Colossal Cave Adventure

[quote name="Tansin A. Darcos (TDARCOS)"]There are few times that a single program spawns an entire genre of application software, but 1978's Colossal Cave Adventure did exactly that. Two men, Crowther and Woods, who loved exploring caves, took their love of spelunking in a new direction, by writing a computer program to create a game in which you had the ability to be in a simulated world that you could apparently walk around and be told, in prose, what was happening, and you could give simple commands to the game to tell it what you wanted to do. The fact that the source to the program was available in a reasonably portable language for that time (Fortran IV), made it possible for Colossal Caves Adventure to move to virtually every computer system in existence, from minicomputers such as the PDP-11 all the way to Mainframes such as the IBM 360/370 series. This started a whole new genre in computer games: Interactive Fiction. Where before, people might write a book to tell a story, they could now write a much richer story by creating an apparent world where the user could walk around, touch and interact with things and other characters, and the state of the game could change based on those choices The availability of graphical character sets allowed the development of interactive fiction games which had actual maps, where you could see the game board, and then with the development of actual graphic imaging capability spawning graphical interactive fiction games such as the PC-based <i>Myst</i> and coin-operated games such as <i>Dragon's Lair</i>. Colossal Cave Adventure provides a series of puzzles, where you start in the outdoors in front of a house; you want to get into the house, and eventually enter the caves and explore them. To do that may sound easy but some solutions to puzzles cause other puzzles to be blocked until you change what you are doing. For example, you have one puzzle where you want to get a bird in a cage, but you'll also find a magic rod that you'll need, but you have to drop the rod until you catch the bird, but you also need the cage. And you also try to accumulate treasures and put them in the trophy room in the house, but along the way you'll meet a pirate in a maze who robs you, and so you have to find where he hid the loot. And you have to avoid being killed by dwarves. Yes, lots of puzzles and things you need to do to complete the game, and there is even a scoring system to determine whether you got all possible points. The game went through a number of enhancements, as other people expanded the game by adding more puzzles and higher scores. Other similar games such as Dungeon pushed this further by expanding the world of the game and adding a whole new series of puzzles. Then the commercial Zork series of games pushed this even further. Other interactive fiction titles such as <i>A Mind Forever Voyaging</i> and <i>The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy</i> developed new and different scenarios, but the base idea remained the same: to solve a series of puzzles in order to complete the game and hopefully get a full score. While primitive by today's standards, the original Colossal Cave Adventure was quite innovative for its time, creating a new genre of game, an interactive puzzle which could be told as fiction has done for books. And Colossal Cave started it all. [/quote]