COLOSSAL CAVE ADVENTURE · 1977
THE GAME
This is the first text adventure — the program that founded
interactive fiction. Will Crowther wrote it at Bolt Beranek and
Newman in Cambridge, Massachusetts around 1975–76, in FORTRAN IV
on a DEC PDP-10. You type one- or two-word commands; the machine
answers in prose. Every adventure game since is downstream of this
program.
THE CAVE IS REAL
Crowther and his wife Patricia were expedition cavers with the Cave
Research Foundation, surveying the Mammoth Cave system in Kentucky
— Pat was on the 1972 team whose connection of Flint Ridge to
Mammoth made it the longest known cave on Earth. The game follows
the real Bedquilt section: researcher Dennis Jerz has shown its map
tracks the actual passages closely. The Hall of Mists, the Hall of
the Mountain King, Bedquilt, and Y2 (a survey station name) are all
real places. The survey plot beside the terminal is drawn in their
honor.
THE HISTORY
Crowther wrote the game after his divorce, in part to share caving
with his young daughters. In 1976–77 Don Woods, a graduate
student at Stanford, found a copy on the lab computer, tracked
Crowther down by emailing every host on the ARPANET, and with his
blessing expanded it into the famous 350-point version. Crowther's
original was thought lost for decades — until 2005, when it
was recovered from a backup of Woods' student account. The data
file this site runs is dated March 31, 1977: a smaller cave, no
scoring, no pirate. Just the grate, the bird, the snake, the
dwarves, and XYZZY, as it first was.
CREDITS
WILL CROWTHER — original design and program
PATRICIA CROWTHER — the caving and survey work behind the map
DON WOODS — the 1977 expansion, and the tape that saved this version
DENNIS JERZ — the research that recovered and documented the original
(DHQ, 2007)
Source preserved at
wh0am1-dev/adventure · this port lives at
timmcelreath/colossal-cave