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on 2016-02-15. Email addresses have been mangled by Google Groups;
I've repaired the ones that can be unambiguously deduced. Any instance
of "...@" in this text should be considered suspect.
This is one post from an otherwise unremarkable thread in comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.rpg,
between April 3 and May 9, 1996.
On 1996-05-02, Ken Hargreaves pastes a version of "History of Adventure"
from what he calls "the 750 version of adventure". This is the most complete
"History of Adventure" I've found to date; for example, it specifically mentions
that Long received the source code directly from Don Woods "in mid-1977".
===========================================================================
From: ken@zadall.com (Ken Hargreaves)
Subject: Re: Ultima Online: Second Day Impressions
Date: 1996/05/02
Message-ID: <DqsEu5.5Mn@zadall.com>
X-Deja-AN: 152617876
sender: ne...@zadall.com (The news programs owner)
references: <4ln1gb$pd5@hobyah.cc.uq.oz.au> <4lobgl$29f@mozo.cc.purdue.edu> <4lolrs$pi9@acme.freenet.columbus.oh.us>,<4lra7n$17r@uruguay.it.earthlink.net> <4m3658$1ti@golem.wcc.govt.nz> <31865FF4.4744@motown.ge.com> <badger.830905867@phylo.life.uiuc.edu>
organization: Zadall Systems Group
newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.rpg,rec.games.computer.ultima-dragons
In article <badger.830905867@phylo.life.uiuc.edu>, badger@phylo.life.uiuc.edu (Jonathan Badger) wrote:
>
>Are you sure we are talking about the same game? 1977 is the date I've
>seen in all references in the literature for "Adventure". Which
>actually makes sense considering that the next major adventure game
>was Zork/Dungeon in 1979 or so. Why would there be a huge span of time
>between these two games?
It looks like there were smaller versions running before 1977
From the fortran source of the 750 version of adventure:
ADVENTURE was originally developed by William Crowther, then at
BBN in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and later substantially rewritten and
expanded by Don Woods at Stanford University. According to legend,
Crowther's original version was modelled on an a real cavern, called
Colossal Cave, which is a part of Kentucky's Mammoth Caverns. That
version of the game included the main maze and a portion of the
third-level (Complex Junction - Bedquilt - Swiss Cheese rooms, etc.), but
not much more.
Don Woods and some others at Stanford later rewrote portions of the
original program, and greatly expanded the cave. That version of the
game is recognizable by the maximum score of 350 points. This (350-
point) version seems to have been adapted to nearly every known
type of computer found outside the Iron Curtain, or inside, for all I
know. Don was kind enough to transmit the source program to the present
author in mid-1977.
The latest additions were done throughout 1978-80 by David Long at the
University of Chicago, Graduate School of Business. Additions include
the seaside entrance and all of the cave on the "far side" of Lost River
(Rainbow Rm - Crystal Palace - Blue Grotto -Rotunda - Joshua's wall,
the Gothic Cathedral, etc.). The surface has also been greatly increased
to include a much more varied landscape containing swamp, marsh, seashore
and meadowland areas. Most recent additions include the great
Castle of Aldor, the Elephants' Burial Ground, Sham Rock, the Lost Silver
Mine, the helicopter, the Secret Garden, Bigrat and more. The current
cave is nearly triple the size of the Woods model, and moreover the
puzzles and treasures are somewhat more "dense", (and more difficult!)
in the current version. During the expansion process, the code was
almost entirely rewritten to permit more generalized handling of objects
and to interpret a more complex natural English syntax.
Except for a few trivial subroutines (to get user-ID's for
logging purposes, for example), ADVENTURE is written entirely in FORTRAN.
This not because the authors love FORTRAN, but because it is almost
infinitely portable. There were indeed moments when it took great
strength to withstand the temptation to whip out some character
handling routine in Assembler, instead of the furshlugginer compiler.
This was the problem with the first versions of DUNGEON (a.k.a. ZORK),
developed at M.I.T., which, though now widely available on personal
computers, was for some time totally non-portable since it was originally
coded in an obscure variant of LISP.
As a side note, in response to a frequently asked question, let me add
that Dungeon (Zork) and Adventure-6 were developed almost completely
independently. The advanced parser, the object containment facility,
and virtually all the game puzzles were designed and implemented
prior to our receiving any version of Dungeon. With all due modesty
(none), I will point out that Adventure's containment facility is at
least as powerful as Dungeon's, if not more so, since Adventure's
facility permits searching for contained objects in open containers down
to any desired level of containment. Further, the parser permits a few
constructs not currently permitted in Dungeon (at least in the version we
have at U.C.), such as permitting any number of objects (up to some
limits imposed by compiled array sizes) to be specified following
transitive verbs. In addition, Adventure's parser can handle multiple
verb constructs such as "GET AND THROW AXE" properly. Finally,
Adventure's parser is slightly better about doing the right things with
the various applications of the group words "ALL" and "TREASURES".
A planned enhancement for Release 7 will permit such constructs as
"PUSH ALL OF THE BUTTONS" or "TAKE BOTH SACKS", etc.
--
Ken Hargreaves ken@zadall.com or kph@wimsey.com