The Evolution of Adventure Games Prelude: Castle & Wander

There has been a major development in adventure game history that has happened since I first started this feature in 2014. In 2015, a long-lost fantasy story tool titled Wander was found after being lost for decades.

An interactive fiction enthusiast, with the handle "ant", contacted Wander's author, Peter Langston, in 2015. The 1980 version of the Wander game creation system was discovered in an e-mail archive by a man named Lou Katz, but it only contained a version of Colossal Cave Adventure partially converted to Wander. The entire 1980 version was discovered when a man named Doug Merrit found the files included with a PSL Games collection released that year.

A 1984 version was also discovered and, as that version was said to be easier to compile than previous versions, it was used to make the engine and the included games compile on modern systems.

Because of this, it's now apparent that the title of the first text adventure game belongs to the first game developed with Wander.

Wander was written by Peter Langston in HP Time-Shared BASIC, likely on an HP2000 in 1973. He converted it to the C programming language in 1974. The first game developed with Wander, Castle, released in 1974, contains many of the hallmarks of the adventure game genre, including story-based gameplay, an inventory, and puzzles. These elements are present in the well-known game that was had its initial release the following year, in 1975. These elements also remain present in most western adventure game released to this day.

1973 also saw the release of Hunt the Wumpus by Gregory Yobb. This game was not a text adventure, but it did contain some elements that were present in text adventures including multiple rooms accessible by using a text parser. It also contained bats that transported you to a random room. The latter is the primary reason that this game was worth mentioning in this article, as these same bats would later appear in the Colossal Cave Adventure, the game that popularized adventure games and gave the genre its name.

On To The Next Part

The Evolution of Adventure Games Part I: Text Adventures

When adventure game websites started in the early to mid-1990s, adventure games were generally divided into a few categories: interactive fiction, interactive fiction with graphics, 2D first-person point and click adventure games, and 3D point and click adventure games (plus a breakdown between the first-person and third-person perspective for graphic adventures).  There were variations (for instance, the early Sierra titles had a protagonist that was controlled with the keyboard and had the text parser of interactive fiction), but purists stuck to these categories, and anything that didn't adhere to these wasn't considered a real adventure.  I was one of those purists then, as my website for covering adventure games, in general, was titled Real Adventure in 2000.  There are still purists out there, as there always will be, but today it's much harder to be one, as the genre has continued to evolve and there are now so many variations of adventure games.

There were text-based games released in the early 1970s that had some hallmarks of text adventures. However, this type of game became popularized, and the genre got its name, when Will Crowther developed Colossal Cave Adventure from 1975 to 1976 and released it on the ARPANet (the precursor to the internet). It was expanded with permission by Don Woods in 1977, and became so popular, it inspired many game designers to create their own games in this style.

Because of the technical limitations of computers at the time, the filename for Colossal Cave Adventure was ADVENT.  Because of the common shortening of the game's filename, the game became widely known as either Advent or Adventure, leading to the name of the adventure genre as we know it today.

The first adventure games were completely text based because of limitations of the computers of the time, which could not display graphics. This led to a novel way to experience games, which were written out as descriptive passages, like paragraphs in a novel, and users would input commands which would branch the story based on the command chosen. This was very similar in practice to a concept that was happening concurrently in print books, which themselves began with the release of Edward Packard's Sugarcane Island in 1976, which were originally known as Adventures of You but later became known as Choose Your Own Adventures.

Colossal Cave Adventure inspired Scott Adams, who founded Adventure International with his wife Alexis to sell their adventure games.  Adventure International released Adventureland in 1978, which was the first commercially published adventure game.  Adventure International continued to produce and sell adventure games (both containing just text and text with static graphics) until they went bankrupt in 1985 as a result of the North American video game crash of 1983.  Scott Adams returned to creating commercial text adventures in 2000, and has released two new text adventures which were published through Scott Adams Grand Adventures.

Colossal Cave Adventure also inspired members of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology modeling group, who created an adventure game titled Dungeon, later renamed Zork due to a trademark claim by the owners of the Dungeons and Dragons franchise. It was developed on a mainframe computer, with larger storage capacity than home computers at the time. Three of the game's four creators, Tim Anderson, Marc Blank, and Dave Lebling, founded Infocom in 1979 to sell Zork commercially on home computers. To do so, they created the Z-code scripting language and broke up the game into three parts. The first, Zork I, was released in 1980.

Infocom was purchased by Activision in 1986, however they continued to produce text adventures (both containing just text and text with static graphics) until they were closed in 1989. Activision continued releasing adventure games under the Infocom name until the mid 1990's.

Text adventures, which are also known today as interactive fiction, went out of popularity in the 1980's as graphics were introduced to the genre.  However, there are still a small group of developers who still release text adventure games, both for free and commercially.  Variations of the Z-machine engine that Infocom used to create their adventure games are still used to create text adventures to this day.

Back To The Prelude

On To Part II

Play Colossal Cave Adventure On Your Phone!

Rich Rutenberg has created a way to play the original adventure game, Colossal Cave Adventure, with speech recognition through your phone or through your computer. The game version used is the 1976 350 point version by Will Crowther and Don Woods.

It was built with Asterisk, which enables the game to be played with English words by telephone or Skype. An American telephone number is set up to play the game at 610-332-7236. It is only available in English now, but 45 languages are available to be translated if someone wants to tackle the 542 narrations required for each language. Rich eventually hopes that the game can be used as a foreign language teaching tool.

Asterisk has been used in the past for adventure games ZoIP is a reimplementation of Zork for phones using Asterisk that was first created in 2005. There are phone numbers for connecting to Zork here.