I remember playing Adventure in grade school. It was available through the mainframe computers we had at the school, this would have been in 1978 or 79. My brother was in the computer club and he showed me how to get access. During school hours, the game was 'protected' by a wandering wizard who would interrupt play right at the start unless you knew the secret word. The word was AMANDA, which I believe was someone's girlfriend. Adventure and Dungeon inspired me to try writing my own games as well but as I wasn't a hacker I only got so far as BASIC programming could get me! Interesting bit about how the code was used to define rooms; in my version I came up with a system where each direction (N, S, E, W, U, D) had an assigned prime number, and each room had an identifying number that was the product of the available directions you could move. If you tried moving the engine would try dividing the room ID by the number associated with the direction to see if movement was possible. Probably overly complicated but I still remember today being pleased with coming up with that solution.
Adventure seems to be the archetype or inspiration for most of the fully featured text adventure games created since then. Fantastic story behind it. And the hack used to find the correct email address among all of existing. :D
As someone who spent the last two years re-coding this game (www.colossalcave3d.com) I can say that there is far more to this game than anyone realizes. Every time I've thought I knew the game, we dug deeper into the source code and discovered small details that we never knew were there. Crowther and Woods did an incredible job on the game. One thing I've decided is that graphics handicap a game in some ways, whereas in text you can do a whole lot more, a whole lot faster, than when you have a graphic world you are dealing with. It's part of why most books, when they are made into movies, get cut down dramatically. Typically, only a small subset of the book appears on screen. Words are underrated.
Indeed, you've hit on exactly what made Adventure so amazing for its time: that ineffable sense that the terminal was a sort of window into a complex, living world inside the computer. And this was powerful because computers themselves were a mystery in those days, so the sense of wonder about the world of Adventure was a sort of proxy for the sense of wonder about the computer itself. Of course with enough time playing you could see behind the curtains and realize that much of the complexity was just an illusion, but you couldn't help but still come away with the notion that the computer itself was like a magic spell that could do anything.
Oh, my! I remember playing this one in the late 70s, on school expeditions to places with mightier computers than our DEC PDP 8/e. New York Tech, for example, then a computer science powerhouse and just down the road.
It was fascinating, and frustrating. I had discovered D&D (well, actually, Tunnels & Trolls, which was cheaper and then easier to find) and here was something very much like it, on a computer! The frustrating part was, it was on a computer! I didn't have one, and access so so difficult. The high school's DEC wasn't going to cooperate.
So, it wasn't until I got a IBM PC, and the "official" Microsoft version of Adventure, that I could play.
FWIW I thought the end game was kind of impossibly hard. Were there any clues as to what those red sticks were?
I remember playing Adventure in grade school. It was available through the mainframe computers we had at the school, this would have been in 1978 or 79. My brother was in the computer club and he showed me how to get access. During school hours, the game was 'protected' by a wandering wizard who would interrupt play right at the start unless you knew the secret word. The word was AMANDA, which I believe was someone's girlfriend. Adventure and Dungeon inspired me to try writing my own games as well but as I wasn't a hacker I only got so far as BASIC programming could get me! Interesting bit about how the code was used to define rooms; in my version I came up with a system where each direction (N, S, E, W, U, D) had an assigned prime number, and each room had an identifying number that was the product of the available directions you could move. If you tried moving the engine would try dividing the room ID by the number associated with the direction to see if movement was possible. Probably overly complicated but I still remember today being pleased with coming up with that solution.
Adventure seems to be the archetype or inspiration for most of the fully featured text adventure games created since then. Fantastic story behind it. And the hack used to find the correct email address among all of existing. :D
As someone who spent the last two years re-coding this game (www.colossalcave3d.com) I can say that there is far more to this game than anyone realizes. Every time I've thought I knew the game, we dug deeper into the source code and discovered small details that we never knew were there. Crowther and Woods did an incredible job on the game. One thing I've decided is that graphics handicap a game in some ways, whereas in text you can do a whole lot more, a whole lot faster, than when you have a graphic world you are dealing with. It's part of why most books, when they are made into movies, get cut down dramatically. Typically, only a small subset of the book appears on screen. Words are underrated.
What a fantastic read. Thank you!
Indeed, you've hit on exactly what made Adventure so amazing for its time: that ineffable sense that the terminal was a sort of window into a complex, living world inside the computer. And this was powerful because computers themselves were a mystery in those days, so the sense of wonder about the world of Adventure was a sort of proxy for the sense of wonder about the computer itself. Of course with enough time playing you could see behind the curtains and realize that much of the complexity was just an illusion, but you couldn't help but still come away with the notion that the computer itself was like a magic spell that could do anything.
Oh, my! I remember playing this one in the late 70s, on school expeditions to places with mightier computers than our DEC PDP 8/e. New York Tech, for example, then a computer science powerhouse and just down the road.
It was fascinating, and frustrating. I had discovered D&D (well, actually, Tunnels & Trolls, which was cheaper and then easier to find) and here was something very much like it, on a computer! The frustrating part was, it was on a computer! I didn't have one, and access so so difficult. The high school's DEC wasn't going to cooperate.
So, it wasn't until I got a IBM PC, and the "official" Microsoft version of Adventure, that I could play.
FWIW I thought the end game was kind of impossibly hard. Were there any clues as to what those red sticks were?