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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 ...
The FORTRAN source can be found here:
http://rickadams.org/adventure...
With GCC4.7 and with CFLAGS=-std=c99 added to the beginning of the Makefile it compiled for me just fine.
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.
Public domain is better than a freaking license
No it isn't. In some countries, public domain as a concept doesn't exist. In some others, public domain does exist, but things can't be explicitly assigned to the public domain and only end up there once copyright expires. In any of these jurisdictions, in the absence of a license the default remains that you have no rights. Additionally, if you simply place something in the public domain without a disclaimer of warranty, then you may find yourself liable for any of bugs in the code.
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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.
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.
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