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