The Software Toolworks in 1981 released The Original Adventure. In the late 1970s a freeware Commodore PET version was produced by Jim Butterfield some years later this version was ported to the Commodore 64. The game was also ported to Prime Computer's super-mini running PRIMOS in the late 1970s, utilising FORTRAN IV, and to IBM mainframes running VM/CMS in late 1978, utilizing PL/I. It can be found as part of the BSD Operating Systems distributions, or as part of the "bsdgames" package under most Linux distributions, under the command name "adventure". In 1977, 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 AMP MUD had a multi-player Colossal Cave. Extended versions with extra puzzles go up to 1000 points or more. As part of that expansion, Woods added a scoring system that went up to 350 points. Until Crowther's original version was found, the "definitive original" was generally considered to be the version that Don Woods expanded in 1977. Russel Dalenberg's Adventure Family Tree page provides the best (though still incomplete) summary of different versions and their relationships. Hence, Crowther/Woods Adventure, the first with a point scoring system, is also synonymous with Adventure 350. Large value numeric tags denoted the maximum score a player can achieve after playing a perfect game. Adventure II, Adventure 550, Adventure4+. Many versions of Colossal Cave have been released, generally titled simply Adventure, or adding a tag of some sort to the original name (e.g. Later versions of the game added pictures, such as this MS-DOS version by Level 9 Computing. 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. These PDP-10 dependencies made it difficult to port the Crowther/Woods Adventure to other platforms. Suspending a game in this manner saved an entire copy of the game program to disk, rather than just player specific data. This feature was the original basis for saving, or suspending, an adventure game. The "monitor" ( TOPS-10) operating system for the PDP-10 also had the platform-dependent ability to save, restore, and restart execution of a program's core memory image, even after a program terminated, known today as application checkpointing. This architecture was evident to the game player too, since the game only distinguished the first five characters of all the vocabulary words it understood. Each PDP-10 word (an integer) packed five 7-bit ASCII characters in the high order 35 bits of a 36-bit word, and programmers could compare integers in FORTRAN directly with five-character strings. The Adventure FORTRAN code took full advantage of the machine-dependent 36-bit architecture of the PDP-10. Like Crowther's original game, Woods' game also executed with all its data in memory, but required somewhat less core memory (42k words) than Crowther's game. The data consisted of 140 map locations, 293 vocabulary words, 53 objects (15 treasure objects), travel tables, and miscellaneous messages. His work expanded Crowther's game to approximately 3000 lines of code and 1800 lines of data. Woods also developed his game in FORTRAN for the PDP-10. It required about 60k words (nearly 300kB) of core memory, which was a significant amount for PDP-10/KA systems running with only 128k words. On the PDP-10, the program loads and executes with all its game data in memory. The data included text for 78 map locations (66 actual rooms and 12 navigation messages), 193 vocabulary words, travel tables, and miscellaneous messages. TechnologyĬrowther's original game consisted of about 700 lines of FORTRAN code, with about another 700 lines of data, written for BBN's PDP-10 timesharing computer. When Roberta Williams and her husband Ken discovered the game, and were subsequently unable to find anything similar, they were inspired to create their own software house, founding On-Line Software (later Sierra Online, and then Sierra Entertainment), which created the first graphical adventure game ( Mystery House), and quickly became a dominant player in the entertainment software market for the next two decades, creating successful adventure series such as King's Quest, Space Quest, and Leisure Suit Larry. A big fan of Tolkien, he introduced additional fantasy elements, such as elves and a troll. The version that is best known today was the result of a collaboration with Don Woods, a graduate student who in 1976 discovered the game on a computer at Stanford University and during 1976–1977 made significant expansions and improvements, with Crowther's blessing. Crowther/Woods Adventure (1977) running on a PDP-10
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