Colossal Cave Adventure (1976) is a text-based game developed for the PDP-10. A text-based computer game lets players type commands to explore, solve puzzles, and interact with the world using written language alone.
Colossal Cave Adventure melds the developer’s explorations of Mammoth Cave in Kentucky, USA, and a love of the role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons (1974). Creator Will Crowther was a programmer at Bolt, Beranek and Newman (BBN), where he worked on ARPANET, the forerunner to the Internet.
While Crowther was on vacation, Stanford student Don Woods discovered the game on the BBN computer system and began expanding it, adding Dungeons & Dragons-inspired world-building. Together they overcame the limits of early computer technology to create an immersive fantasy world. It wasn’t all confined to computers though. As Colossal Cave Adventure was text-only, players often created their own maps to guide their gameplay.
From Mammoth to Colossal
Colossal Cave Adventure is closely based on sections of the real-life Mammoth Cave in Kentucky, USA. In the 1970s, the game’s designer Will Crowther and his wife Patricia mapped miles of caves as a hobby, first in small notebooks, then digitally. Patricia is known for discovering a link between the Mammoth and Flint Ridge cave systems, described as “the Everest of cave exploration”. Look out for the Bedquilt region, which connects the two systems, in these hand-drawn player maps.
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