Lampward
cd ..

Adventure

Will Crowther and Don Woods · 1977

The cave that started it all: a maze of twisty little passages, a brass lantern, and a parser that expects you to try things.

Play

SAVE creates a named Lampward checkpoint on this device. Nothing is saved automatically.

  • Glulx
  • Cave crawl
  • Parser
  • About 4 hours
  • 154 KB

About

Colossal Cave Adventure is the origin point of the text adventure. Will Crowther's 1975–76 cave simulation, expanded by Don Woods in 1977, established the vocabulary the whole form still uses: rooms, inventory, treasure, and a two-word parser.

Lampward serves the 430-point Adventure 2.5 edition — the last version Don Woods released — through a 2024 Glulx port of Open Adventure. The play experience is the 1995 edition's; the file is not the 1977 binary.

Tags

  • Cave crawl
  • Classic
  • Puzzles

History

This chronology includes the world around Adventure: background that may predate the game, its creation and publication, and later editions, research, and preservation. An early date is historical context, not necessarily a game release.

  1. Background

    Will Crowther's original FORTRAN Adventure — Will Crowther

    The game before it was a game about treasure. Crowther was a programmer at Bolt, Beranek and Newman — he had helped build the ARPANET's routers — and a caver who surveyed Mammoth Cave with the Cave Research Foundation.

  2. Publication

    Adventure published — by Will Crowther and Don Woods

    The publication year for the work itself. Earlier entries are historical background, not earlier releases of the game.

  3. History

    Don Woods's 1977 expansion, and the 350-point Adventure — Don Woods

    Woods found the game on a computer at the Stanford AI Lab, wanted to extend it, and had no way to reach the author — so he mailed crowther@ at every host on the ARPANET until one replied.

  4. History

    Adventure 2.5 — the 430-point edition — Don Woods

    Woods kept working on it for nearly twenty years. Adventure 2.5, released in 1995, is the last version he produced and the one Lampward serves: 430 points, a larger cave, and refinements to puzzles the 1977 edition left rough.

  5. Research

    Somewhere Nearby is Colossal Cave — Dennis G. Jerz

    The scholarship that closed the loop between the game and the ground. Jerz read the recovered 1976 source and then went to Kentucky with it, matching Crowther's rooms to real survey stations in the Bedquilt entrance of Mammoth Cave.

  6. Source & preservation

    Open Adventure — Eric S. Raymond and contributors

    The maintained restoration Lampward's playable file descends from. Raymond translated Woods's 1995 sources to C and has kept them building on modern systems, preserving the behaviour rather than modernising the game.

  7. Archive

    advent430.ulx in the IF Archive

    Where Lampward acquired the binary, and the archival record of the exact file: 157,440 bytes, Glulx 3.1.0. Lampward records its SHA-256 at import and will not silently serve a different build.

  8. Source & preservation

    Bedquilt — the Wasm2Glulx port — Daniel Fox Franke

    The exact file Lampward runs. Open Adventure's C was compiled to WebAssembly and then translated to Glulx by Wasm2Glulx — the first game moved into interactive fiction's own virtual machine that way.

  9. Lampward

    Playable release — Adventure 2.5 / 430-point edition

    The exact release Lampward currently serves. It may be a later edition or port of an older work.

Documents & sources

  • source archive · External archive

    Open Adventure

    Eric S. Raymond and contributors

    The maintained restoration Lampward's playable file descends from. Raymond translated Woods's 1995 sources to C and has kept them building on modern systems, preserving the behaviour rather than modernising the game. Released under the BSD 2-Clause License with Don Woods's permission — which is the permission Lampward's hosting actually rests on.

    GitLab · BSD 2-Clause License

  • archived listing · External archive

    advent430.ulx in the IF Archive

    Where Lampward acquired the binary, and the archival record of the exact file: 157,440 bytes, Glulx 3.1.0. Lampward records its SHA-256 at import and will not silently serve a different build.

    IF Archive

  • source archive · Reference

    Will Crowther's original FORTRAN Adventure

    Will Crowther

    The game before it was a game about treasure. Crowther was a programmer at Bolt, Beranek and Newman — he had helped build the ARPANET's routers — and a caver who surveyed Mammoth Cave with the Cave Research Foundation. After his divorce he wrote a program his daughters could play: a simulation of the cave he knew, in FORTRAN, on a PDP-10. It had no fantasy and no scoring to speak of. Its rooms were real passages.

    The Colossal Cave Adventure page

    Recovered in 2005 from a backup of Don Woods's Stanford student account, which is the only reason the original is readable at all.

  • research · Reference

    Somewhere Nearby is Colossal Cave

    Dennis G. Jerz · Digital Humanities Quarterly 1.2

    The scholarship that closed the loop between the game and the ground. Jerz read the recovered 1976 source and then went to Kentucky with it, matching Crowther's rooms to real survey stations in the Bedquilt entrance of Mammoth Cave. The Hall of the Mountain King, the low crawl, the grate — they are places. This is the primary source for the claim that Adventure began as a map.

    Digital Humanities Quarterly · DHQ vol. 1 no. 2 (2007)

  • reference · Reference

    The Cave Research Foundation

    The volunteer organisation Crowther and his then-wife Patricia surveyed with. Patricia Crowther was part of the 1972 team that found the connection between the Flint Ridge system and Mammoth Cave, making it the longest cave in the world. The survey culture that produced Adventure's room descriptions is still going.

    Cave Research Foundation

  • reference · Reference

    Don Woods's 1977 expansion, and the 350-point Adventure

    Don Woods

    Woods found the game on a computer at the Stanford AI Lab, wanted to extend it, and had no way to reach the author — so he mailed crowther@ at every host on the ARPANET until one replied. What he added is most of what people remember: the dwarves, the pirate, the treasures, the scoring, the magic words. The 350-point version spread across the network through 1977 and is the edition the whole form descends from.

    The Colossal Cave Adventure page

  • reference · Reference

    Adventure 2.5 — the 430-point edition

    Don Woods

    Woods kept working on it for nearly twenty years. Adventure 2.5, released in 1995, is the last version he produced and the one Lampward serves: 430 points, a larger cave, and refinements to puzzles the 1977 edition left rough. Play here is this edition's, not the 350-point original's.

    IFWiki

  • source archive · External archive

    Bedquilt — the Wasm2Glulx port

    Daniel Fox Franke

    The exact file Lampward runs. Open Adventure's C was compiled to WebAssembly and then translated to Glulx by Wasm2Glulx — the first game moved into interactive fiction's own virtual machine that way. It runs in what Open Adventure calls oldstyle mode, so what you play is the 1995 experience delivered by a 2024 toolchain. The project is named for the cave entrance.

    GitHub · BSD 2-Clause License

  • reference · Reference

    Colossal Cave Adventure on IFDB

    Bibliographic identification for the work and its many editions — useful precisely because 'Adventure' names a family of games rather than one file.

    IFDB

Rights to these documents are separate from rights to the game. Lampward links to archives it may not mirror, and says so rather than implying it holds a copy.

Credits & License

Credits
Will Crowther and Don Woods. Open Adventure restoration by Eric S. Raymond and contributors; Glulx port by Daniel Fox Franke, compiled with Wasm2Glulx for the Bedquilt project.
Playing
Adventure — Adventure 2.5 / 430-point edition, Glulx 3.1.3
License
BSD 2-Clause License
Use
Open source: redistribution is permitted, including commercially, as long as the BSD 2-Clause notice travels with the file.
Source
Notices

Copyright (C) 1977, 2005 by Will Crowther and Don Woods.

BSD 2-Clause LICENSE Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met: 1. Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer. 2. Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution. THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS AND CONTRIBUTORS "AS IS" AND ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE ARE DISCLAIMED. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE COPYRIGHT HOLDER OR CONTRIBUTORS BE LIABLE FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES (INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE GOODS OR SERVICES; LOSS OF USE, DATA, OR PROFITS; OR BUSINESS INTERRUPTION) HOWEVER CAUSED AND ON ANY THEORY OF LIABILITY, WHETHER IN CONTRACT, STRICT LIABILITY, OR TORT (INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE OR OTHERWISE) ARISING IN ANY WAY OUT OF THE USE OF THIS SOFTWARE, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE.

Artwork
No cover art is used; the title card is generated by Lampward.

Rights to the game binary, to cover art, and to any documentary material on this page are separate. A permission covering one does not cover the others.