info/Colossal-Cave.origin

Newsgroups: rec.arts.int-fiction
From: librik@netcom.com (David Librik)
Subject: The Origin of ADVENTURE
Date: Sun, 23 Oct 1994 22:33:25 GMT

The following article was posted on alt.folkore.computers, but I think its
historical significance warrants its re-posting here.  This is how and why
Will Crowther invented Adventure.  (One thing not mentioned in here is that
Will was a caver who did a good deal of exploration in the Flint Ridge -
Mammoth Cave System, where there really is a Colossal Cave containing a
Bedquilt area.)  To find out what Don Woods, Stanford AI hacker, did with
Will's game, read Steven Levy's book HACKERS.

(The original discussion concerned the origin of the magic word XYZZY.)

- David Librik
librik@cs.Berkeley.edu

Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
From: bernie@fantasyfarm.com (Bernie Cosell)
Subject: Re: XYZZY Origins
Sender: cosell@world.std.com (Bernie Cosell)
Organization: Fantasy Farm, Pearisburg, VA
Date: Sun, 23 Oct 1994 01:21:12 GMT

In article <37tu1o$kdf@hpuerci.atl.hp.com>, Sandy Morton writes:

} In article <+A3Bv*zh0@fantasyfarm.com>, bernie@fantasyfarm.com (Bernie
Cosell) writes:
} |> Depends on what you mean by 'adventure'.  Will Crowther says he
} |> made up the term out of whole cloth when he was putting ADVENT
} |> together.  Advent was the original program of this genre from which
} |> all the others have descended in one way or another.
} 
} This is the adventure to which I refer.  So, how do you know this?  And,
} have you any idea what he meant by "out of whole cloth"?  More, please.

Well, Will Crowther made the game up after we had been playing D&D
for a few months.  A new arrival on the ARPANET project was also a
housemaster at Harvard at the time and D&D had pretty much just
appeared.  He dungeounmastered up a dungeon and a bunch of us from
the project team got sucked into playing.

Due to our inclinations, we were almost zero interested in the 'battle and
monster' aspect of the game, but rather a lot more interested in the
cooperation/innovation/puzzlesolving aspect.  And so quite against the
tide of the D&D world at the time, our dungeon turned into more of
a group problem-solving expedition than an every man for himself
hack-em-up.  Anyhow, it was great fun but VERY difficult for folk
who had any sort of a life: getting the eight of us together at the
same time and in the same place with nothing else to do for four
hours or so was a nontrivial problem.

So Will had the astounding idea that he could cobble up a
computer-mediated version of the game.  We mostly thought he was
nuts [but had long-since learned not to underestimate what Will
could innovate].  Given our predilections in the real game, in
ADVENT puzzles and cleverness were more of a premium than quick
reflexes and keeping track of hit-points.

I can't recall why he decided to do it in FORTRAN.  I'm not
convinced that portability was a big concern of his, but FORTRAN
was actually a fairly reasonable higher-level-language choice among
those available on TENEX [I mean, what did you have?  BCPL,
BBN-Lisp and FORTRAN; I'll note in passing that when I did the
Eliza-clone called "doctor" back in '66, I made a different
decision: I decided on BBN-Lisp].

As for 'out of whole cloth', I meant just what the idiom means: he
devised this little pseudo-puzzle and needed a magic word to make it
happen, and he just made one up.  It has no antecedent nor is it an
acronym or anything like that.

  /bernie\
-- 
Bernie Cosell                               bernie@fantasyfarm.com
Fantasy Farm Fibers, Pearisburg, VA         (703) 921-2358
    --->>>    Too many people; too few sheep    <<<---