The Adventure Family Tree (2024) | Hacker News Reader

The Adventure Family Tree (2024)

mipmip.org

56 pointsexvi9 comments

I'm proud of you for building this. It's very high quality. There are academics out there being paid to do worse work on less important things. And look at those citations!

I kind of suspect that in a century or two, some historian working on an early computing history project is going to stumble upon this and toast your name.

We had a copy of the Fortran source for the PDP-11 when I was a teenager. My buddy and I managed to add a room: in the first room of the Maze of Twisty Little Passages All The Same, if you gave the command "out" (as one tried), you discovered that you were "Nowhere". "There is nothing in all directions." You could then enter "in" to go back to the Maze, or "get nothing" to add "nothing" to your inventory.

There was a place in another room where your way was blocked by lava; our plan was to let you drop the "nothing" on the lava, and proceed, but we had run out of memory. (28K max!)

Are you talking about the Volcano View? ("You are on the edge of a breath-taking view. Far below you is an active volcano, from which great gouts of molten lava come surging out, cascading back down into the depths. The glowing rock fills the farthest reaches of the cavern with a blood-red glare...")

Or did you and your friend also add the lava room? Or (this would be the really interesting case, family-tree-wise) was there already a lava room present in your version?

I can't immediately think of a lava obstacle in any version. (Well, the volcanic rift in GOET0580 and IIRC the very endgame of ROBE0665, in a sense. And the Volcano View is crossable in PLAT0550 and its descendants.)

Infocom's "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" (1984) includes an object named "no tea", which is in your inventory for much of the game.

Yes, the Volcano View. We planned to add a new area just past it, but as I say we ran out of memory.

I've no idea where the version we started with would fall in the family tree, but this would have been ~1979, and the OS was HT-11, Heathkit's version of RT-11 for their H11 computer kit. So far as I know there was nothing special about it, except that it had been ported to RT-11 on the PDP-11.

What an amazing work.

Colossal Cave Adventure: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossal_Cave_Adventure

TIL that Knuth made a Literate Programming port of Adventure in 2002.

I am always pleased to see any reference to the original Crowther/Woods era Colossal Cave Adventure. Zork gets too much praise in my opinion compared to its ancestor which really defined the genre.

First of all. fantastic! As documented in the book _Soul of a New Machine_, Adventure plays a central role in the bring up of the DG "Eagle" / MV8000 machine. It seems to not list it (even if no copies survive) would be a gap.

This is fantastic. Thanks!

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