Play the first ever text adventure game in your Linux terminal | Hacker News Reader

Play the first ever text adventure game in your Linux terminal

linuximpact.com

81 pointsdddavid32 comments

I ran the game and when I `suspend`ed it, it said:

    I can suspend your adventure for you so you can resume later, but
    you will have to wait at least 45 minutes before continuing.

It definitely enforces it:

    This adventure was suspended a mere 1 minute ago.
    Even wizards have to wait longer than that!

Does anyone know the motivation behind that design choice?

It's especially weird since the README encourages suspending the game every half hour or so.

Perhaps to discourage save scumming?

Yep, comment lines from the original Crowther and Woods PDP-10 FORTRAN source code:

    C  SUSPEND.  OFFER TO EXIT LEAVING THINGS RESTARTABLE, BUT REQUIRING A DELAY
    C  BEFORE RESTARTING (SO CAN'T SAVE THE WORLD BEFORE TRYING SOMETHING RISKY).

https://www.ifarchive.org/indexes/if-archive/games/source/

Yes. People who wrote games "Way Back Then" (wbt) did not see games as about high scores but as more like life choices. There is no save in life. So adventure and rogue (my poison of choice) were more about how to learn, how to adapt. How to fail gracefully (over and over again). Not that learning any of that is very much fun, but hey, that's life.

[edit misspell games fortunately there is save in HN]

So time sharing systems don’t get filled up with people playing games.

By the way, “Colossal Cave Adventure” was a retcon added at least 20 years later.

The game was originally called “advent”.

"At least 20 years" is almost certainly an overstatement.

Slippage of what people call it is only to be expected for something that doesn't really formally give itself a title (ADVENT being more of a filename), and what it does most directly identify itself as became so synonymous with the genre. The game starts up with "WELCOME TO ADVENTURE!!" and then the instructions (if you ask for them) begin "SOMEWHERE NEARBY IS COLOSSAL CAVE..." so the naming is not exactly out of left field.

You can pretty readily find evidence of people calling it "Colossal Cave" and "Colossal Cave Adventure" already in the 80s.

I think the first time I saw it (a Mac port from the early 90s or earlier among a pile of other free/shareware games on a set of floppies), it was called "Adventure," obviously also a popular choice for what to call the game, and my preference.

I first played it on a Commodore PET around 83 or so, but later got it for my Atari ST, probably around 87 and it was already called Colossal Cave then.

From the 4.2BSD UNIX User's Manual (2/1/1983)

    Adventure(6)
    ...
    DESCRIPTION
    The object of the game is to locate and explore Colossal Cave ...

So certainly before 1983.

I also recall the name Colossal Cave from the mid-80s, although I also remember the name Advent. I think it was called both. One might be the file name and the other the formal name, or something.

Single anecdata point here. In the early 80s I remember it being called "Adventure" when playing it on Apple 2 and I think IBM PCs. But not sure on the latter.

> The game was originally called “advent”

Just like the precursor to Zork was called “dungeo”[0], both due to a six character file name limit!

[0] https://dungeo.org/

I still want to try emulating[1] ITS someday, just to experience the original versions of emacs, zork/dungeon, macsyma, SHRDLU, ...

Though I imagine like an online community or game it can't really be recreated since it depended on its users at MIT and elsewhere, and its specific time and place in history.

[1] https://github.com/PDP-10/its

If you don't know the answer, why make up a fake one?

Former Dec 10 time-sharing user and vax systems operator here, leeds uni 1980s: this is exactly what we told students.

When a power user reset the mud by ejecting its incore memory and the head of ops lost his finger-of-death status I think he was locked out for a week. (Mud, the first multi user dungeon had persistent state which was at risk if tops10 decided it needed the memory. Run enough large jobs, mud reinstalled)

> this is exactly what we told students.

That doesn't really answer my question. Whether it's what you told students or not, it is known to be false. The same question applies to "you" - why lie to the students like that?

New great excuse in town: "I used ChatGPT to generate this comment, it hallucinated". And because ChatGPT is right more often than human, this is even a pretty great one, you can just say "sorry I forgot to put a disclaimer it was ChatGPT".

That would have the opposite effect. If you don't want people to leave the game running when they're idle, you don't penalize the save-and-exit command.

We figured a way around that. On a PDP, you could detach your session, go about your business, then attach it when you came back.

When I was at university, my workaround was to patch the relevant bytes in the saved file to reset the timestamp. (Made even more convenient by running it via a wrapper script that automatically zeroed the timestamp on exit.)

For a slightly modernized take, there is a graphical remake by Roberta Williams' company Cygnus Entertainment:

https://www.colossalcave3d.com

Probably not the kind of thing that will be a hit with most current gamers, but it is an interesting and surreal project.

While developing our new from-scratch Fortran compiler (LLVM Flang), getting the original Adventure game’s sources to compile was a key milestone for me, and I got lost in it for hours once it worked. Lots of great memories!

If you want to play it on macOS, you can install it through Homebrew:

    brew install open-adventure

then to run it type:

    advent

Is included on linux distros since a lot of time so there is no need to recompile it from source. I tried the game on console many years ago, but I remember it as boring wandering, basically. I never finished it.

> Is included on linux distros since a lot of time so there is no need to recompile it from source

bsdgames is my favorite package; see also /usr/games and

    man 6 intro

> boring wandering, basically

It's not the only game to focus on exploration. As I understand it the exploration came first and the fantasy/puzzle game elements were added later.

Note debian also includes open-adventure, a 430-point version, and there are probably others available on various distros.

I stand corrected. I didn't remembered any cave. What I was really playing was dunnet in emacs, that is cyberpunk themed

m-x dunnet

Dead end

You are at a dead end of a dirt road. The road goes to the east. In the distance you can see that it will eventually fork off. The trees here are very tall royal palms, and they are spaced equidistant from each other.

There is a shovel here. >

wandering, wandering...

> go southeast

The bear is very annoyed that you would be so presumptuous as to try and walk right by it. He tells you so by tearing your head off.

Also at https://web.archive.org/web/20231109230950/https://linuximpa...

Yeah it seems like it got hugged to death. At least we know a grue didn't get it!

Wrong game, but I expect that's the joke! Now enjoy this immortal tribute:

MC Frontalot - It is Pitch Dark https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4nigRT2KmCE

Couple of things: 1) the writeup says this has been written in Fortran but the files in the gitlab are .c/.h. Was it rewritten in C at some point? 2) no one's ported this to a browser version yet? WASM maybe? Sounds like a fun project.

Wow, that brings back memories!

Back in the day (that's 40+ years ago), I played this so many times. Forerunner to speed running: I tried to optimize the number of moved required to finish the entire game.

From "advent" to D&D to other RPGs...

Wump is a better adventure. :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com