ADVENT

/advent/ , n. The prototypical computer adventure game, first designed by
Will Crowther on the PDP-10 in the mid-1970s as an attempt at
computer-refereed fantasy gaming, and expanded into a puzzle-oriented game
by Don Woods at Stanford in 1976. (Woods had been one of the authors of
INTERCAL. ) Now better known as Adventure or Colossal Cave Adventure, but
the TOPS-10 operating system permitted only six-letter filenames in
uppercase. See also vadding, Zork, and Infocom. Figure1.Screen shot of the
original ADVENT game Orange River Chamber You are in a splendid chamber
thirty feet high. The walls are frozen rivers of orange stone. An awkward
canyon and a good passage exit from east and west sidesof the chamber. A
cheerful little bird is sitting here singing. drop rod Dropped. take bird
You catch the bird in the wicker cage. take rod Taken. w At Top of Small Pit
At your feet is a small pit breathing traces of white mist. A west passage
ends here except for a small crack leading on.  Rough stone steps lead down
the pit. down In Hall of Mists You are at one end of a vast hall stretching
forward out of sight to the west. There are openings to either side. Nearby,
a wide stone staircase leads downward. The hall is filled with wisps of
white mist swaying to and fro almost as if alive. A cold wind blows up the
staircase. There is a passage at the top of a dome behind you. Rough stone
steps lead up the dome. This game defined the terse, dryly humorous style
since expected in text adventure games, and popularized several tag lines
that have become fixtures of hacker-speak: A huge green fierce snake bars
the way! I see no X here (for some noun X). You are in a maze of twisty
little passages, all alike. You are in a little maze of twisty passages, all
different. The magic words xyzzy and plugh also derive from this game.
Crowther, by the way, participated in the exploration of the Mammoth Flint
Ridge cave system; it actually has a Colossal Cave and a Bedquilt as in the
game, and the Y2 that also turns up is cavers' jargon for a map reference to
a secondary entrance. ADVENT sources are available for FTP at
ftp://ftp.wustl.edu/doc/misc/if-archive/games/source/advent.tar.Z. You can
also play it as a Java applet. There is a good page of resources at the
Colossal Cave Adventure Page.
