![]() Although no longer for sale commercially, you can still download playable versions from Scott Adams’ own website or play them directly on your browser using the links he supplies at that address.Īdventureland: Still text, but no PDP-10 required. Adventureland was successful enough in the early gaming marketplace that Adams was able to spin off his own company, Adventure International, and market an entire line of adventure games for several different models of computer. To give you a sense for how much memory that is, the text in this blog post takes up about one and half kilobytes, but that picture at the beginning probably uses more memory than Scott Adams’ TRS-80 had in total.Īmazingly, Adams succeeded, writing a game called Adventureland that neatly mimicked the Colossal Cave Adventure without copying it and it ran, as planned, on a 16-kilobyte TRS-80. Yes, that’s not 16 gigabytes or even 16 megabytes - that’s 16 kilobytes of memory, where a kilobyte is 1,024 memory locations, each of which can store a single number in the range 0 to 255. However, in 1978, a young Wisconsin programmer named Scott Adams (no relation to the creator of Dilbert) set out to prove that something very much like the Colossal Cave Adventure could be written on a Radio Shack TRS-80 Model I, a popular home computer of the day, and that he could do it in 16-kilobytes of memory. The original Crowther and Woods version wouldn’t have run on microcomputers in the late 1970s because early personal computers weren’t powerful enough they didn’t have enough internal memory and they mostly lacked disk drives. If you’ve never played the Colossal Cave Adventure and you’re curious what it was like, here’s a simulation sponsored by the AMC-TV show Halt and Catch Fire. It spawned a long line of imitations that continues to this day, though you might not recognize most of its descendants based on the text screen reproduced above. The Colossal Cave Adventure looks deceptively simple - you type in one- or two-word commands to move around in and interact with a world described purely through text - yet it created a remarkably large, surprisingly open world and went on to become one of the most influential computer games ever written. Here’s what it looked like running on a DEC PDP-10:Ĭolossal Cave Adventure: All those words add up to a lot of game. Although it was too large to be played on most microcomputers of the period, it was widely available on mainframe and minicomputer systems. In 1976, a Stanford University graduate student named Don Woods expanded Adventure with Crowther’s permission into what became known as The Colossal Cave Adventure. By all reports Crowther’s version was fairly rudimentary compared to later versions, but it caught on and spread from computer system to computer system. He wrote the game in part so that his daughters could play it and in part to indulge his love for Dungeons & Dragons. It was set in a huge cave not unlike Mammoth Cave in Kentucky, which Crowther had explored. In the early to mid 1970s, when microcomputers were still barely a blip on the computer hobbyist horizon, mainframe programmer and part-time spelunker Will Crowther logged on to a DEC PDP-10 and used his FORTRAN skills to write a computer game called, simply, Adventure. And it’s possible they’re more popular than ever. But after four decades, they’re still here. ![]() They’ve fallen in and out of fashion, they’ve gone through multiple visual and gameplay styles, and there have been periods when they’ve nearly disappeared altogether. ![]() ![]() Telltale Game’s Tales from the Borderlands: What adventure games look like in 2015.Īdventure games have gone through many permutations over the last 40 years. ![]()
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