 | Hunt the Wumpus |
Hunt the Wumpus was a text-based game that contained many features that were later used in adventure and role-playing games.
Gameplay
The game has the player wandering around a series of 20 rooms connected by tunnels. Each room has tunnels leading to three other rooms which formed a dodecahedron. There is a wumpus in one of the rooms, and it will eat you if you enter the room it is in. If you enter a room with bats, they will pick you up and fly you to a random room. There are also bottomless pits in two of the rooms which will lead to your death if you enter them. You have as your arsenal five crooked arrows that you may fire into any tunnel in an attempt to kill the wumpus. If you miss, the wumpus will become startled and move to an adjacent room. If it moves into the room you're in, you will be eaten.
Development
Release
It was first published in the November 1973 issue of the People's Computer Company journal.
Hunt the Wumpus was converted to BASIC by David H. Ahl in 1976 and published in the book "The Best of Creative Computing". It was converted from BASIC to Inform by Magnus Olsson in 1999.
Like Colossal Cave Adventure after it, Hunt the Wumpus was released for free, but some ports to other platforms and in other languages have been released commercially over the years.
Legacy
Hunt the Wumpus laid the groundwork and inspired the adventure games and role-playing games that would come after it. The bats that transported you to a random room would later appear in the game that kickstarted the adventure game genre, Colossal Cave Adventure.
