Colossal Cave Adventure

1976 games PC games

One of the first (if not the first) text adventure game, developed by William Crowther in 1976.

Just like we know it today as dungeon crawlers, Colossal Cave Adventure put player at the entrance into mysterious cave system, supposedly filled with treasures. During the exploration you will stumble upon puzzles to solve, which will lead you to treasures, and the ultimate goal is to survive and leave the caves. The interface was, just like in any text adventure developed later, operated through use of two-word commands, f.e. "get key" or "drop lamp" to interact with the world, but at the same time players had inventory of items he had picked up. In later version there were also fantasy elements added to the game, which turned it into almost an RPG of its times.

Colossal Cave Adventure is a text-based adventure game, which is credited with being behind the whole genre being called text adventure games. In 1975 William Crowther, a programmer and avid caver, started to work on this title to fulfill the gap that was left after he had to give up spelunking. Despite the hardware limitations of PDP-10 mainframe computer and the fact the he was being a precursor of the genre (so he had to work out how to reach his targets), he build a game within a year. Later Don Woods improved the game, introduced some new mechanics into the title, which made it very impressive, especially for 1977.

Our rating
★★★★☆

Video
★☆☆☆☆

Audio
★☆☆☆☆

Playability
★★★★☆

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