Film and Media Atlas

How Stories Are Broadcast
Sign In
Text size
100%
Theme
Landmark Work

Colossal Cave Adventure

Interactive and Networked Media Landmarks

Colossal Cave Adventure is a text-based computer game created by programmer William Crowther in 1976 and later expanded by Don Woods, in which the player explores a network of underground caves and rooms by typing short text commands and reading printed descriptions of their surroundings. Crowther based the cave layout partly on his own experience exploring and mapping Kentucky's Mammoth Cave system, then added fantasy elements including magic words and treasure to be collected. The game is widely regarded as the founding work of the text adventure and interactive fiction genre, and it directly inspired later commercial games including Zork and an entire subsequent genre of parser-driven computer games.

Facts
Release Year
1976 1
Country
United States 1
Connections

Created By

In Medium

In the Other Atlases
Sources
1. Colossal Cave Adventure (Wikipedia)
Wikimedia Foundation
  • Lead paragraph, opening sentence
    Colossal Cave Adventure (also known as Adventure or ADVENT) is a text-based adventure game, released in 1976 by Will Crowther for the PDP-10 mainframe computer.
  • Lead section, second paragraph, opening sentence
    The original game, written in 1975 and 1976, was based on Crowther's maps and experiences caving in Mammoth Cave in Kentucky, the longest cave system in the world; further, it was intended, in part, to be accessible to non-technical players, such as his two daughters.
View the Source
Comments (0)
No comments yet. Be the first to share a thought.
Reader Challenges (0)
No disputes yet. Spotted an error or a better source? Open the first one.