To progress into the actual cave, you need to enter the all-important well-house that will serve as a home base, pick up an inventory item - a key - and figure out you need to both > UNLOCK and then > OPEN the grate (which my rusty fingers actually struggled with!) which introduces the basic (and here very literal) lock-and-key puzzle that forms the backbone of the whole text adventure genre, naturally this game included. The player begins in an above-ground area where they can wander around getting used to simple movement, and in the forest, introduced likewise to the notion that you can get lost, but here in a very safe way. The first thing that struck me on starting the game is how ahead of the curve the design sensibility for the introduction is. The port of the 350-point Crowther & Woods game I played helpfully had a list of changes from the original included right there in the help section, although it didn’t cover everything: For instance, the Inform parser allows one to use shortcuts like > BUILDING that made the magic words useless. By that point though, the genie was out of the bottle: just take a glance at this family tree of Colossal Cave Adventure versions, ranging anywhere from from faithful ports to complete re-imaginings. Don Woods took up the cause of adding onto it to make the canonical and influential 350-point 1977 version, which was kinda a stopover on the way to his 1978 430-point version. But no matter: to the hackers, no program was ever really finished. In its original, solely-Will-Crowther-authored 1975 edition, it was in an unfinished state. There’s a pronounced spiritual kinship between the post-commercial community of IF authors on Usenet and the pre-commercial mainframe hobbyist (“hacker”) culture on ARPANET, and that, as much as the clear chain of formal tradition, explains the insistent continuity.Ĭolossal Cave Adventure, like Spacewar and other mainframe games, spread like a folk song. I think equally important, though, is how the all-text interactive fiction game was only big-league commercially viable for a very limited amount of time, spanning from about Adventureland to Hitchhikers’ Guide To The Galaxy. Part of it is also the high quality of the work. An element is that text doesn’t age as poorly as graphics, reasonably and intuitively enough. Modern top-down shooters don’t sneak in coy references to the likes of Spacewar or Air-Sea Battle, fans of consumer-grade flight simulators don’t hold up Jet Rocket or Interceptor as peak examples of the form. No other genre of games and fans so worships its ur-text, instead letting them live only as historical curiosities for the niche of particularly retro-minded gamers. (In my personal opinion, such an attitude is often very fruitful.) In 2019, it’s still expected you get references to it, and the users of the Interactive Fiction Database still ranked it in the 50 top Interactive Fiction games of all time, tied with (among many, many others) an Adam Cadre game and a Porpentine game, which basically sums up how the Interactive Fiction community prizes highly (and simultaneously) restless innovation and a deep appreciation for tradition. In 1995, Graham Nelson, author of Curses and of the Inform programming language in which he implemented the port I played, championed a then-20-years-old game as “still represent the bulk of the best work in the field” and instantly familiar to readers. There is no other game of its era or the next one, all the way up to Super Mario Bros, that is anywhere near as celebrated and long-lived as Colossal Cave Adventure.
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