wumpus

/wuhmp@s/ , n. The central monster (and, in many versions, the name) of a
famous family of very early computer games called Hunt The Wumpus. The
original was invented in 1970 (several years before ADVENT ) by Gregory Yob.
The wumpus lived somewhere in a cave with the topology of an dodecahedron's
edge/vertex graph (later versions supported other topologies, including an
icosahedron and Mbius strip). The player started somewhere at random in the
cave with five crooked arrows ; these could be shot through up to three
connected rooms, and would kill the wumpus on a hit (later versions
introduced the wounded wumpus, which got very angry). Unfortunately for
players, the movement necessary to map the maze was made hazardous not
merely by the wumpus (which would eat you if you stepped on him) but also by
bottomless pits and colonies of super bats that would pick you up and drop
you at a random location (later versions added anaerobic termites that ate
arrows, bat migrations, and earthquakes that randomly changed pit
locations). This game appears to have been the first to use a non-random
graph-structured map (as opposed to a rectangular grid like the even older
Star Trek games). In this respect, as in the dungeon-like setting and its
terse, amusing messages, it prefigured ADVENT and Zork and was directly
ancestral to the latter (Zork acknowledged this heritage by including a
super-bat colony). A C emulation of the original Basic game is available at
the Retrocomputing Museum, http://www.catb.org/retro/.

