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ESR Announces The Open Sourcing Of The World's First Text Adventure (ibiblio.org)
An anonymous reader writes:
Open source guru Eric S. Raymond added something special to his GitHub page: an open source version of the world's first text adventure. "Colossal Cave Adventure" was first written in 1977, and Raymond remembers it as "the origin of many things; the text adventure game, the dungeon-crawling D&D (computer) game, the MOO, the roguelike genre. Computer gaming as we know it would not exist without ADVENT (as it was known in its original PDP-10 incarnation...because PDP-10 filenames were limited to six characters of uppercase)...
"Though there's a C port of the original 1977 game in the BSD game package, and the original FORTRAN sources could be found if you knew where to dig, Crowther & Woods's final version -- Adventure 2.5 from 1995 -- has never been packaged for modern systems and distributed under an open-source license. Until now, that is. With the approval of its authors, I bring you Open Adventure."
Calling it one of the great artifacts of hacker history, ESR writes about "what it means to be respectful of an important historical artifact when it happens to be software," ultimately concluding version control lets you preserve the original and continue improving it "as a living and functional artifact. We respect our history and the hackers of the past best by carrying on their work and their playfulness."
"Despite all the energy Crowther and Woods had to spend fighting ancient constraints, ADVENT was a tremendous imaginative leap; there had been nothing like it before, and no text adventure that followed it would be innovative to quite the same degree."
"Though there's a C port of the original 1977 game in the BSD game package, and the original FORTRAN sources could be found if you knew where to dig, Crowther & Woods's final version -- Adventure 2.5 from 1995 -- has never been packaged for modern systems and distributed under an open-source license. Until now, that is. With the approval of its authors, I bring you Open Adventure."
Calling it one of the great artifacts of hacker history, ESR writes about "what it means to be respectful of an important historical artifact when it happens to be software," ultimately concluding version control lets you preserve the original and continue improving it "as a living and functional artifact. We respect our history and the hackers of the past best by carrying on their work and their playfulness."
"Despite all the energy Crowther and Woods had to spend fighting ancient constraints, ADVENT was a tremendous imaginative leap; there had been nothing like it before, and no text adventure that followed it would be innovative to quite the same degree."
I remember playing this with a group of friends on a teletypewriter overnight in the University of Wales Institute of Science and Technology Cardiff in 1981. We played the whole thing through from start to end in one session. I did the typing because I could touch type. I think we finished at about 5am. No computer game has really interested me since. Once you have played ADVENT you have played them all. I still have the printout somewhere, it weighs about five pounds.
Facts are history now plebs have politics for religion on social media.
The real game is being able to navigate in the source code. The dungeon stuff is just a bonus side effect.
Not going to say that ADVENT didn't inspire a lot of things, and I played it in several variants (including a version that was written on PLATO, called "adventl"), but there were certainly dungeon games written before ADVENT, specifically "dnd" on PLATO was written in 1974. Oubliette was released in late 1977 (so was unlikely to have been predicated on ADVENT) and Avatar was already being written by then as well, the first version of Moria was written in 1975 ...
I downloaded this to my Linux box and tried to run "make", but it complained about needing to be in C99 mode. Is this release only compatible with the original hardware and OS it was written on or something? I thought from the README it was supposed to be a port that works on modern computers/OSes?
The FORTRAN source can be found here:
http://rickadams.org/adventure...
Who wrote the C version while converting the game from 32 bit to 24 bit Hollerith code on a Harris H-800 at Weber State University n the 1980's.
P.S.: It was Open Source when I did that; it had been declared public domain.
P.P.S.: Public domain is better than a freaking license.
The summary says that ESR put the repo on GitGub. It's actually on GitLab.
It's nice to see not everyone slavishly uses GitHub all of the time.
What world is this where 1995 is before 1977? Or is there some new, fangled definition of "first" that I've never heard of?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
That is the difference between ADVENT and modern games.
Ancient technology. But the Hall of Mists that sways back and forward as if alive is far more evocative than anything a bazillion flop GPU can produce.
Plugh!
This code is a forward-port of the Crowther/Woods Adventure 2.5 from 1995, last version in the main line of Colossal Cave Adventure development written by the original authors. The authors have given permission and encouragement for this release.
For the sake of precision!
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
I was playing "Hunt the Wumpus" on IBM machines in 1974. That was a text adventure set in a maze of caves. Colossal Cave Adventure even seems like a rip-off of the Wumpus game.
Actually, I was playing on printing terminals at Bell Labs in holmdel NJ, running the game on a big IBM box 45 miles away in Murray Hill NJ via telnet. Ah, the innocence of unencrypted sessions and clear-text passwords. They wouldn't let me play blackjack because we had to pay for our cpu cycles, but the 300 baud acoustically coupled modems were easily fast enuf for simple ascii.
On the one hand you take life too seriously, and on the other, you do not take playful existence seriously enough. Seth
I remember playing this game in high school on our time-shared PDP-10... and I graduated in 1975. How is that possible?
Buzzing the information Superhighway at Warp speed
I still have brain cells dedicated to 'frotz me', 'aimfiz Belboz' and remembering grue repellent.
The Infocom games were generally quite good, but somebody needs to go back in time and bitch slap the devs for having logic in the game like 'with no hints that it's even a thing until step 500, you must perfectly perform a sequence of actions in the first 30 moves or the game cannot be completed'.
Let me guess: you pirated the games. This kind of logic was an early copy protection mechanism. When you bought them, you got a little pamphlet with hints and clues for the hardest puzzles.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
The HHGttG game came with pocket lint, a microscopic space fleet, and a pair of Joo-Janto 2000 Peril-Sensitive sunglasses. I don't remember the pamphlet, but I wouldn't have read it anyway; hints and clues are cheating.
Regardless, bad logic, bad gameplay.
The FORTRAN origin of the code is obvious.
The original code was written in 1977 and so was probably using Fortran 66 (or a derivative)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Compared to modern languages and even to K&R C, the Fortran 66 language had very of the features that we all take for granted.
Variable names were case insensitive (so UPPER CASE in practice) and limited to 6 characters
The IF statement was applied to a SINGLE statement so any complex behavior had to be implemented using conditional GOTOs ( no ELSE, no SWITCH-CASE, ....) .
For example, in Fortran77 you can write structured codes such as
IF ( X .EQ. 42 ) THEN
A=1
ELSE
A=2
ENDIF
but in Fortran 66 you had to write something like
IF ( X .NE. 42 ) GOTO 666
A=1
GOTO 777
666 A=2
777 CONTINUE
And of course, no stack, no recursivity, no dynamic allocation nor pointers, no function prototypes, no struct nor classes, no strings of variable length, ...
I have a working copy on the INVENT3K machine at INVENT3K.OPENMPE.COM (use simple telnet):
INVENT3K2:
INVENT3K2:HELLO PLAYER.ADVENT
HP3000 Release: C.75.00 User Version: C.75.05 MON, MAY 29, 2017, 12:22 PM
MPE/iX HP31900 C.45.05 Copyright Hewlett-Packard 1987. All rights reserved.
(banner snipped because it does not pass the slashdot junk filter)
OPEN FAILED
INITIALIZING...
TABLE SPACE USED
9712 OF 9800 WORDS OF MESSAGES
742 OF 750 TRAVEL OPTIONS
297 OF 300 VOCABULARY WORDS
140 OF 150 LOCATIONS
53 OF 100 OBJECTS
31 OF 35 ACTION VERBS
201 OF 205 RTEXT MESSAGES
10 OF 12 CLASS MESSAGES
9 OF 20 HINTS
32 OF 35 MAGIC MESSAGES
ARE YOU A WIZARD?
NO
VERY WELL.
INITIALIZATION COMPLETED.
WELCOME TO ADVENTURE.. WOULD YOU LIKE INSTRUCTIONS?
YES
SOMEWHERE NEARBY IS COLOSSAL CAVE, WHERE OTHERS HAVE FOUND FORTUNES IN
TREASURE AND GOLD, THOUGH IT IS RUMORED THAT SOME WHO ENTER ARE NEVER
SEEN AGAIN. MAGIC IS SAID TO WORK IN THE CAVE. I WILL BE YOUR EYES
AND HANDS. DIRECT ME WITH COMMANDS OF 1 OR 2 WORDS. I SHOULD WARN
YOU THAT I LOOK AT ONLY THE FIRST FIVE LETTERS OF EACH WORD, SO YOU'LL
HAVE TO ENTER "NORTHEAST" AS "NE" TO DISTINGUISH IT FROM "NORTH".
(SHOULD YOU GET STUCK, TYPE "HELP" FOR SOME GENERAL HINTS. FOR INFOR-
MATION ON HOW TO END YOUR ADVENTURE, ETC., TYPE "INFO".)
- - -
IF YOU HAVE ANY PROBLEMS, PLEASE CONTACT THE PERSON IN CHARGE OF THIS
PROGRAM AT YOUR MACHINE. YOU MAY ALSO CONTACT THE DEVELOPERS
WILLE CROWTHER (CROWTHER@PARC-MAXC), DON WOODS (DON@SU-AI), AND
GARY PALTER (PALTER@MIT-MULTICS).
IF YOU HAVE ANY PROBLEMS, CONTACT ANY OF US...
YOU ARE STANDING AT THE END OF A ROAD BEFORE A SMALL BRICK BUILDING.
AROUND YOU IS A FOREST. A SMALL STREAM FLOWS OUT OF THE BUILDING AND
DOWN A GULLY.
QUIT
DO YOU REALLY WANT TO QUIT NOW?
YES
OK
YOU SCORED 27 OUT OF A POSSIBLE 350, USING 1 TURNS.
YOU ARE OBVIOUSLY A RANK AMATEUR. BETTER LUCK NEXT TIME.
TO ACHIEVE THE NEXT HIGHER RATING, YOU NEED 9 MORE POINTS.
END OF PROGRAM
CPU=20. Connect=1. MON, MAY 29, 2017, 12:23 PM.
Tracy Johnson
Old fashioned text games hosted below:
http://empire.openmpe.com/
BT
Sure new projects MIGHT use Fortran 77.
no stack, no recursivity, no dynamic allocation nor pointers, no function prototypes, no struct nor classes, no strings of variable length,
Are you some kind of wimp? Real Fortran programmers don't need that kind of new fangled clap-trap!
We did, of course, have macro pre-processors. (and you needed them to pack and unpack 6-bit chars in a machine-dependent way. Especially when porting from 24 bit ICL machines to 60-bit Crays).
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
Will Crowther, the original author of this game, is one of the most down-to-earth, humble tech pioneers you could ever meet. Not only was he one of the two main programmers on the original ARPANet team, not only was he one of he best rock climbers on the East Coast in the 1960's, pioneering many climbing routes at the Gunks in NY State, a regional climbing mecca, but he was also the sole original author of this game that started it all.
I met him about twenty years ago, when he taught rock climbing in his spare time to Boston area climbers. He was smart. He loved to teach and give back, and he never talked about himself or his own accomplishments unless you knew the right questions to ask, and were aware of his impressive history.
Will seldom gives interviews. I've met some impressive people in my life, but to me, his focus on getting amazing things done over self-promotion left a lasting impression. I'm psyched that ESR brought this little piece of history back into the public eye, and shed a little light on such a role model in the process.
[repost from April]
FORTRAN was -- for some still is-- the 'Perl' of scientific computing. Get it in and get it done... and it doesn't always compile down very tight, but always fast because for mainframe developers getting this language optimized for a new architecture was first priority.
At 15, the first real structured program I ever de-constructed completely while teaching myself the language, was the FORTRAN IV source for Crowther and Woods Colossal Cave Adventure, widely regarded as 'the' original interactive text adventure, a genre which would later go multi-user to become the MUD. Read about it here, or play it in Javascript.
FORTRAN IV and Dartmouth BASIC (I'll toss in RPG II also) were the 'flat' GOTO-based languages, an era of explicit rather than implicit nesting -- a time in which high level functions were available to use or define but humans needed to plan and implement the actual structure in programs mentally by using conditional statements and labels to JUMP over blocks of code. Sort of "assembly language with benefits".
Crowther's PDP-11 Adventure version was running on the 36-bit GE-600 mainframes of GEISCO (General Electric Information Services) Mark III Foreground timesharing system... this is in the golden age of timesharing and no one did it better than GE. It took HOURS at 300bps and two rolls of thermal paper to print out the source and data files, and I the Adventure code and data out on the floor and traced the program mentally, keeping a notebook of what was stored in what variable... I had far more fun doing this than playing the game itself.
Then the "real life" adventure began. I started poking around on the Mark III timesharing system, and found a way to jump out of my partitioned access and explore. What really helped was a collection of FORTRAN/77 system utilities written by an engineer working at GEISCO (this is General Electric, no relation to GEICO and the year is ~1980). Their development environment as well as the commercial systems were controlled by password protected accounts, each with file/user areas... BUT there was also this command line debugger that was able to write to memory regions beyond your own job, and if you were able to parse out memory structures (reading source for the utilities helped) you could "punch yourself in" to any user number (location), effectively changing identity to that of another user and seeing their files. Or examine the buffers containing character streams of other users' terminals in real time. It was fascinating and I soon had developed a suite of tools in F77 to assist in exploration of the system, leap-frogging onto the commercial file systems too. I kept the source encrypted by the F77 'SCRAM' function, decrypting it only to edit and compile. My cache of tools was stored "in" a user number that did not exist, you can think of it as a unpointed-to lost cluster of sorts. I was totally white hat about it, never prying into customer files (McDonald's etc.) and even wrote a summary of vulnerabilities and dropped it into one of their secure areas. I just wanted to be hired. Cat 'n mouse games ensued, even a trace and FBI phone tap. GEISCO originally thought I was a rogue employee but when they learned I was just a kid the heat was off, they were afraid of public embarrassment.
GE actually bought me a plane ticket to Rockville MD so they could pick my (now 18 year old) brain, and the matter was closed soon after. In the end I was not hired or even encouraged to apply and learned a valuable lesson about corporate culture, that it was not for me.
Some eight months after my little escapade, the 414 kids made national headlines and one of them even got his face on Newsweek magazine... and I am thinking to myself, I was there first.
Lots of peopl
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>