Adventure (Colossal Cave)
Will Crowther (1975)
Will Crowther & Don Woods (1976)
Adventure was a simulation of Mammoth Cave with bits of D&D thrown into the mix.
Will Crowther, who at the time was going through a divorce, created it. He was an avid
explorer of the Mammoth Cave System, with his wife Pat, and he wanted to share this with
his daughters, who he began to feel estranged from after the marriage ended.
After Crowther uploaded Adventure to the ARPAnet, Don Woods came along and added
a lot of Tolkien imagery. He “reworked the caves and stocked them with magical items and
puzzles, liberally ignoring the original style from time to time.”* It was this
version that spread across the ARPAnet.
By today’s standards, the game is practically unplayable, frustrating, and unfair.
But it was incredibly influential, rekindling a Stanford/MIT rivalry, which bore Zork and
the whole commercial era.
“In early 1977, Adventure swept the ARPAnet. Willie Crowther was the original author,
but Don Woods greatly expanded the game and unleashed it on an unsuspecting network.
When Adventure arrived at MIT, the reaction was typical: after everybody spent a lot of
time doing nothing but solving the game (it’s estimated that Adventure set the entire
computer industry back two weeks), the true lunatics began to think about how they could
do it better.” – Tim Anderson, The History of Zork – First in a Series, The New Zork Times,
Winter 1985, Page 7.