Hunt the Wumpus

Hunt the Wumpus was a text-based game that contained many features that were later used in adventure games.  It was originally written in BASIC by Gregory Yob and was first published in the November 1973 issue of the People's Computer Company journal.

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.

This game didn't contain the inventory (other than the 5 arrows for your bow) or puzzles that most text adventures came to be known for, however, it is a notable footnote in the history of adventures, as it laid the groundwork and inspired the adventures 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.

Like Colossal Cave Adventure after it, this game was released for free, but some ports to other platforms and in other languages have been released commercially over the years. I have decided to put this game in the main section rather than the free games section because of it's importance. I usually list all the systems the games in the main section have been released on, but this game has been ported to just about every platform ever made. I'm not going to attempt to even try to list all the systems on which it's available.