"He said, 'I don't know if we can get the rights.' So I left the office and went and did something else, and then an hour later I came in to ask him about lunch and he said, 'I just got off the phone with Don Woods.'"ĭon Woods isn't the creator of Colossal Cave, but he was a critical part of its ultimate popularity. "His eyes kind of brightened up," she remembers. Ken and Roberta Williams, during the Sierra On-Line days Williams suggested to Ken that instead of his project they take a crack at remaking Colossal Cave Adventure, turning the old text-based design into a modern, 3D game. That's why I started with Mystery House, my first design, and I went from there." I remember thinking how I was so drawn into this game to the point where I couldn't quit, I just had to keep going, and I couldn't be the only one. And I did it, and when it was done, I wanted to play more games like this, and there weren't any. I wanted to get every point, and this is a hard game to get all the points. "I was so immediately drawn into it I got addicted to it, literally," Williams recalls of her first time playing the 1976 text-based adventure. "Without Colossal Cave, Sierra On-Line would never have existed, and I would not have my career, or Ken either," she says. At the time, Ken was learning Unity with the intent of making a new game of his own when Williams suddenly remembered a game that had been very, very special to her years ago: Colossal Cave Adventure. You'll be adventuring in no time.But when the COVID-19 pandemic prompted lockdowns that halted many of her usual adventures, Williams needed a new project. There are a few other commands, but keep things as simple as possible and use single words. Try one-word commands like "In," "Exit," "Get," "Drop" to interact. Type the first letter of compass directions to move: N, S, E, W. If you've never played Colossal Cave Adventure, here are a few command tips to get you started: You can play for a few minutes and simply stop responding, and then come back hours or days later and pick up right where you left off, for as long as Swenson keeps the server running. Near as I can tell, the original code didn't display in all-caps like the Colossal Cave Python bot, but playing it via text is a genuinely cool experience. A SMALL STREAM FLOWS OUT OF THE BUILDING AND DOWN A GULLY. YOU ARE STANDING AT THE END OF A ROAD BEFORE A SMALL BRICK BUILDING. (ERRORS, SUGGESTIONS, COMPLAINTS TO CROWTHER) SOMEWHERE NEARBY IS COLOSSAL CAVE, WHERE OTHERS HAVE FOUND FORTUNES IN TREASURE AND GOLD, THOUGH IT IS RUMORED THAT SOME WHO ENTER ARE NEVER SEEN AGAIN. WELCOME TO ADVENTURE!! WOULD YOU LIKE INSTRUCTIONS? If you text +1 (669) 238-3683, the server will respond after a few seconds with the opening spiel of Colossal Cave Adventure: Like, well, responding by SMS.Īrt from the ZX Spectrum version of Adventure. It was only designed to work for this one piece of software, not all FORTRAN IV code, but it does that job, along with adding some modern touches. Swenson's interpreter ended up being more complicated than the original code it was designed to interpret, but efficiency isn't really the goal with a fun project like this one. Then he talks about simulating "loading the tape drive" for the PDP-10, which is of course just a text file now. Swenson talked about what it was like to deal with the 36-bit code at about the 11 minute mark, which is probably my favorite part of the presentation. And even if there was one, we don't have a PDP-10 to run it on." "You can't actually take FORTRAN IV and compile it these days. "It was a fun challenge to get this to work at all," he said in the talk. Notably, FORTRAN IV predated the standard of 8 bits in a byte. Specifically, Swenson was dealing with FORTRAN IV code, common in supercomputers of the day but unused for decades now. Other parts of Swenson's talk are a bit easier to follow, and there's something really cool in translating a game as old as Colossal Cave into a more modern programming language.
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