Colossal Cave Adventure

For people who check facts

Adventure (also known as ADVENT or Colossal Cave) was the first computer game to appear in the genre of interactive fiction (before it was even called that). Will Crowther, a programmer at the legendary Bolt, Beranek & Newman (developers of ARPANET, the forerunner of the Internet), was a caver, who applied his experience in Mammoth Cave (in Kentucky) to create a game that he could enjoy with his young daughters. [1] Crowther was exploring the real Mammoth Cave in 1972, and did create a vector map based on surveys of the real cave, but the text game is a completely separate entity, created around 1975. [1] The version that is known today was created in 1976 by Don Woods, who added additional rooms and puzzles to Crowther's unfinished game. It was written in FORTRAN, originally for the PDP-10. Many versions of Adventure may be found, for nearly any computer imaginable.

Warning: Plot details follow.

Table of contents

1 Maze of twisty little passages
2 Plugh
3 xyzzy
4 Other lines
5 Versions
6 External links

Maze of twisty little passages

"You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all different." is a memorable line from the game. Among hackers it is sometimes modified to refer to something other than passages that one can be lost in.

What is really interesting about the maze is that the phrase maze of twisty little passages is varied systematically into 12 slightly different formulations:

Maze of twisty little passages
Twisty maze of little passages
Little twisty maze of passages
Maze of little twisty passages
Little maze of twisting passages
Little maze of twisty passages
Twisting maze of little passages
Twisty little maze of passages
Twisting little maze of passages
Maze of little twisting passages
Maze of twisting little passages
Little twisting maze of passages

Plugh

When you first arrive at an area known as "Y2", you receive the message A hollow voice says "plugh". The magic word takes you between the rooms "inside building" and "Y2".

Michael Goetz' 581 point CP/M version of Colossal Cave included a long extension on the other side of the Volcano View. Eventually, you descended into a maze of catacombs and a "fake Y2." If you said "Plugh" here you found yourself transported to a Precarious Chair suspended in midair above the molten lava. (The game was on SIGM011 from the CP/M Users Group, 1984.)

xyzzy

xyzzy was a magic word found in the game. It has later been used as a metasyntactic variable by hackers and as a marker in program sources for known-incorrect or incomplete code.

Many other interactive fiction games contain responses to the command XYZZY as a tribute to Adventure. Zork, for example, replies with:

A hollow voice says, "Fool."

while more recent games have shown a trend of increasingly more elaborate and in-jokeyy responses.

xyzzy was a Microsoft Minesweeper cheat and is the default password for Apple Computer's Network Assistant. It was also the name of a user interface (client) on the VMS operating system for the EARN/BITNET Relay chat system (the forerunner of IRC).

Other lines

Other memorable lines from the game are:

A huge green fierce snake bars the way!
With what? Your bare hands? (refers to killing a dragon, etc. )

Versions

There are many versions of Colossal Cave that have been released over the years. Because Crowther's original version is apparently lost [1], the 350 point version is held to the 'definitive original.' Extended versions with extra puzzles go up to 770 points or more. The AMP MUD had a multi-player Colossal Cave.