Set in an ancient underground empire, Zork (a generic name used by MIT programmers for an unfinished program) was written in MDL, a LISP-like language with powerful string manipulation commands, which allowed for sophisticated interaction between the user and the game.

Meanwhile, four programmers at MIT were developing a Colossal Cave Adventure-inspired game of their own. YOU ARE STANDING IN AN OPEN FIELD WEST OF A WHITE HOUSE, WITH A BOARDED FRONT DOOR. Adams second adventure, “ Pirate Adventure”, added a simple storyline inspired by the novel “ Treasure Island”, where the player, aided by an NPC (non-player character) pirate, must build a ship to reach the island, and then find two pieces of treasure.ĭeveloped in part using ideas from Scott’s wife Alexis, the paradigms established in Pirate Adventure would largely define the rest of Scott Adams’ games, and was a huge influence on what would become known later as the “ interactive fiction” genre. While it had no plot, the game was still popular, and released on a number of contemporary home computers including the Apple II, Commodore Pet and the Atari 800. The first text adventure for a personal computer, Adventureland had players search for a number of “lost artifacts”. In 1978, Scott Adams wrote a version of Colossal Cave Adventure, titled “ Adventureland” in BASIC on a TRS-80 Model I microcomputer. Written by William Crowther and Don Woods for the PDP-10 mainframe computer, Colossal Cave Adventure would define the text adventure genre, one that would become especially popular in the early days of home computing, when computers had very limited graphical capabilities, and a few sentences were often better than a dozen blocky, monochrome images. The player moves from place to place using simple directional (NSEW) commands, can collect items found in these locations, use these items to solve problems, and if they fail at this, get killed by various traps. So begins 1977’s Colossal Cave Adventure, the world’s first text adventure game. WELCOME TO ADVENTURE!! WOULD YOU LIKE INSTRUCTIONS? Y SOMEWHERE NEARBY IS A COLOSSAL CAVE, WHERE OTHERS HAVE FOUND FORTUNES IN TREASURE AND GOLD, THOUGH IT IS RUMOURED THAT SOME WHO ENTER ARE NEVER SEEN AGAIN.

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