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Original Colossal Cave Adventure Now Playable On Alexa (amazon.com)

Posted by EditorDavid on from the Alexa,-start-Colossal-Cave dept.

Last month Eric Raymond announced the open sourcing of the world's very first text adventure. Now Slashdot reader teri1337 brings news about their own special project: A few old-timers here may recall with fond memories the phrase "Somewhere nearby is Colossal Cave..." Well, a voice-playable version of Colossal Cave "Adventure" is now available on Amazon Echo devices as a [free] Alexa Skill. This is a port of the original 1976 text adventure game written by Willie Crowther and Don Woods, which started the interactive fiction genre and led to later games like Infocom's Zork. This version was written from scratch as an AWS Lamda function incorporating the original 350-point game database, and made available with permission from Don Woods.

5 of 36 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Good. by FatdogHaiku · · Score: 3, Interesting

    When I first ran across this it was a few years old. Someone wanted me to port it to Pick Basic as a way to get me interested in programming. It was called Adventure then. Inform has their port source here:
    http://inform-fiction.org/examples/index.html

    --
    You have the right to remain sentient. If you give up the right to remain sentient, you will be elected to public office
  2. Re:I know what Colossal Cave cave is by 110010001000 · · Score: 3, Informative

    Alexa is a voice interface hooked to a database that logs personal information about you and your family and sells that information to anyone that Amazon can sell it to.

  3. Re:I know what Colossal Cave cave is by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

    Indeed he his, I just checked his grave cam.

  4. Re:XYZZY by teri1337 · · Score: 5, Informative

    Don Woods informed me that he pronounces it "zizzy". As such, the skill allows both the pronunciation "zizzy" or spelling out the letters individually as "X-Y-Z-Z-Y" to work equally.

  5. StoryHarp from 1998 for voice-activated IF by Paul+Fernhout · · Score: 2

    By me: http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/...

    It's a tool for quickly editing interactive fiction that can be driven by voice recognition.

    I actually applied (with mixed feelings, given Alexa's possibilities for privacy violation) to Amazon's Alexa developer funding program to port StoryHarp to Alexa's system just after Alexa came out, but nothing came of it.

    --
    A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.