![]() ![]() Hence, Crowther/Woods Adventure, the first with a point scoring system, is also synonymous with Adventure 350. Large value numeric tags denoted the maximum score a player can achieve after playing a perfect game. Adventure II, Adventure 550, Adventure4+. ![]() Many versions of Colossal Cave have been released, generally titled simply Adventure, or adding a tag of some sort to the original name (e.g. Later versions of the game added pictures, such as this MS-DOS version by Level 9 Computing. Later versions of the game moved away from general purpose programming languages such as C or Fortran, and were instead written for special interactive fiction engines, such as Infocom's Z-machine. These PDP-10 dependencies made it difficult to port the Crowther/Woods Adventure to other platforms. Suspending a game in this manner saved an entire copy of the game program to disk, rather than just player specific data. This feature was the original basis for saving, or suspending, an adventure game. The "monitor" ( TOPS-10) operating system for the PDP-10 also had the platform-dependent ability to save, restore, and restart execution of a program's core memory image, even after a program terminated, known today as application checkpointing. This architecture was evident to the game player too, since the game only distinguished the first five characters of all the vocabulary words it understood. Each PDP-10 word (an integer) packed five 7-bit ASCII characters in the high order 35 bits of a 36-bit word, and programmers could compare integers in FORTRAN directly with five-character strings. The Adventure FORTRAN code took full advantage of the machine-dependent 36-bit architecture of the PDP-10. Like Crowther's original game, Woods' game also executed with all its data in memory, but required somewhat less core memory (42k words) than Crowther's game. The data consisted of 140 map locations, 293 vocabulary words, 53 objects (15 treasure objects), travel tables, and miscellaneous messages. His work expanded Crowther's game to approximately 3000 lines of code and 1800 lines of data. ![]() Woods also developed his game in FORTRAN for the PDP-10. It required about 60k words (nearly 300kB) of core memory, which was a significant amount for PDP-10/KA systems running with only 128k words. On the PDP-10, the program loads and executes with all its game data in memory. The data included text for 78 map locations (66 actual rooms and 12 navigation messages), 193 vocabulary words, travel tables, and miscellaneous messages. TechnologyĬrowther's original game consisted of about 700 lines of FORTRAN code, with about another 700 lines of data, written for BBN's PDP-10 timesharing computer. When Roberta Williams and her husband Ken discovered the game, and were subsequently unable to find anything similar, they were inspired to create their own software house, founding On-Line Software (later Sierra Online, and then Sierra Entertainment), which created the first graphical adventure game ( Mystery House), and quickly became a dominant player in the entertainment software market for the next two decades, creating successful adventure series such as King's Quest, Space Quest, and Leisure Suit Larry. A big fan of Tolkien, he introduced additional fantasy elements, such as elves and a troll. The version that is best known today was the result of a collaboration with Don Woods, a graduate student who in 1976 discovered the game on a computer at Stanford University and during 1976–1977 made significant expansions and improvements, with Crowther's blessing. Crowther/Woods Adventure (1977) running on a PDP-10
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