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Lured by the siren song of ever-improving graphics power, terrified by the risks involved with truly unique ideas in gaming, the industry is collectively stumbling along a path well-worn by Hollywood, which uses non-stop action and visual spectacle to compete against itself for the quickest path to the consumer’s dollar. Further, many elements that Adventure did not implement - complex non-player characters, believable AI, dynamic branching plots - still elude today’s game designers. ‘Nevertheless, many things that Adventure players enjoyed - logic and resource-management puzzles and the exploration of a complex virtual topography within the context of a framing story - remain staples in adventure, role-playing, and multiplayer game genres. ‘Colossal Cave Adventure’, even later version Where Knuth’s procedural formalism argues “you cannot fully appreciate the astonishing brilliance of its design until you have seen all of the surprises that have been built in ”, Buckles explores the narratives that her volunteer players generated as they attempted (often unsuccessfully) to make sense of their partial exposure to the simulated world. ‘Knuth’s approach is the mirror image of Buckles (1985), whose dissertation on Adventure employs literary formalism to examine what she calls a “storygame” in terms of established genres such as the riddle and the folktale.

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Knuth expects his reader to have played Adventure multiple times, but offers his close reading of the code as the proper way to experience the work. His text carefully translates the Crowther/Woods FORTRAN code to CWEB, prefacing each section of code with a discussion of how the rules defined in each section of code affect the gameplay. ‘Within the computer science field, Knuth (1998) used Adventure as his sole example in a 107-page tutorial on “literate programming” - coding for human readers as well as machines. Indeed, the post-commercial IF community was producing valuable analysis and theory long before games began to emerge as an academic subject. ‘Even after the commercial market faded, hobbyists continued to play, review, and create interactive fiction.

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When the PC and Mac emerged as the dominant hardware platforms in the late 80s, both the aesthetic and economic advantages of text adventures evaporated.

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Text games were also easily portable to multiple platforms, thereby increasing sales potential in a crowded market. ‘Last year’s graphic games dated quickly due to rapid hardware advances, while last year’s text games still appealed to this year’s text gamers, which helped sales. During the late 70s, text-based computer games had tactical advantages over games using the slow, blocky, and expensive graphics that were then cutting-edge. In 1978, Atari employee Warren Robinett reworked the general exploration-and-treasure premise into a 2D graphic game, also called Adventure, which sold a million units. Other entrepreneurs inspired by Adventure included Scott Adams (founder of Adventure International), who published the lean but accessible Adventureland in 1978, and Ken and Roberta Williams (co-founders of Sierra On-Line), who produced the first graphic adventure game ( Mystery House, 1980) after Roberta got hooked on Adventure. ‘When Adventure reached MIT in the spring of 1977, one group of players reacted by creating Zork and the company Infocom, whose text-adventure titles were best-sellers during the 80s. The New Hacker Dictionary includes the term “vadding” (“from VAD, a permutation of ADV (i.e., ADVENT), used to avoid a particular admin’s continual search-and-destroy sweeps for the game”), defining it as a “leisure-time activity of certain hackers involving the covert exploration of the ‘secret’ parts of large buildings”. Lines from Adventure, such as “You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike” and the magic word “XYZZY”, quickly entered hacker culture. ‘While today’s young computer professionals may have only passing familiarity with Adventure, the game had a tremendous effect on an earlier generation of programmers. Text-adventures, also known as “interactive fiction”, attracted modest scholarly attention as an emerging literary form in the 80s.

Similar text games representing environments defined both by story and rules were extremely popular during the 80s and (with the addition of graphics) through the 90s. “light lamp”) in order to solve puzzles and collect treasure.

Playing Adventure involves reading prose descriptions of the setting, and typing brief commands (i.e. ‘ Will Crowther’s Colossal Cave Adventure was neither the first computer game nor the first program to emulate conversation nevertheless, Adventure - an interactive textual simulation of a caving expedition, augmented by fantasy-themed puzzles – inspired a generation of hackers.

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