Adventure (Text Adventure / Interactive Fiction) - the Colossal Cave

This is a brief page about the original text adventure game, Adventure.

I've won the 350-point game, and thought I'd share my maps and solution. Here are my maps:

  1. Outside (start) - I lost my old map of this, and didn't work hard on this one.
  2. Xyzzy level
  3. Y2 level (east)
  4. Y2 level (west)
  5. Maze - all alike
  6. Maze - all different
  7. N/S canyon
  8. Complex junction / Bedquilt
  9. Swiss cheese / Plover
  10. Giant
  11. To the troll
  12. Past the troll
  13. Junction of 3 Secret Canyons
  14. Finale (Repository)
Here's my original Adventure solution/walkthrough for the original 350-point game. You only have a limited amount of time with the lamp, so any final walkthrough like this will mix up puzzle solutions.

You can download many different versions of Adventure at no charge. One nice one is Advent.z5 (12-Jun-2006), Adventure aka Colossal Cave. This is the original 350 points version ported to Inform by Graham Nelson, based on Dave Baggett's TADS reconstruction "Colossal Cave Revisited". (This is Release 9 / Serial number 060321.) To play this, you need a Z-machine player. There are lots of Z-machine players out there, including Frotz for Windows, Zoom for MacOS, and Frobnitz for PalmOS.

See Rick Adams' page on Adventure for much, much more information, as well as downloads.

If you're interested in the history of Adventure, a lot of background on the original Adventure game (and the cave it's based on) is discussed in "Somewhere Nearby is Colossal Cave: Examining Will Crowther's Original 'Adventure' in Code and in Kentucky" by Dennis G. Jerz of Seton Hill University (Digital Humanities Quarterly, Summer 2007, Volume 1 Number 2) For a long time the original code had been lost, but the original Fortran source code of Adventure has been found, showing that Will Crowther's original version was a game - Crowther's original version included magic words, dwarves, and so on. Almost instantly after the source code was available, someone ported it and got it running (here is the original Adventure, runnable).

You can view my home page, my little demo puzzle Accuse, or my page on Anchorhead.