The Adventure Family Tree (2024)

I am always pleased to see any reference to the original Crowther/Woods era Colossal Cave Adventure. Zork gets too much praise in my opinion compared to its ancestor which really defined the genre.

Re: The Adventure Family Tree (2024)

#6

Post by wduquette » Mon, May 11, 2026, 4:48 PM UTC

We had a copy of the Fortran source for the PDP-11 when I was a teenager. My buddy and I managed to add a room: in the first room of the Maze of Twisty Little Passages All The Same, if you gave the command "out" (as one tried), you discovered that you were "Nowhere". "There is nothing in all directions." You could then enter "in" to go back to the Maze, or "get nothing" to add "nothing" to your inventory.

There was a place in another room where your way was blocked by lava; our plan was to let you drop the "nothing" on the lava, and proceed, but we had run out of memory. (28K max!)

Re: The Adventure Family Tree (2024)

#7

Post by CobrastanJorji » Mon, May 11, 2026, 5:11 PM UTC

I'm proud of you for building this. It's very high quality. There are academics out there being paid to do worse work on less important things. And look at those citations!

I kind of suspect that in a century or two, some historian working on an early computing history project is going to stumble upon this and toast your name.

Re: The Adventure Family Tree (2024)

#8

Post by Thoreandan » Mon, May 11, 2026, 5:22 PM UTC

TIL that Knuth made a Literate Programming port of Adventure in 2002.

Re: The Adventure Family Tree (2024)

#9

Post by fleahunter » Mon, May 11, 2026, 5:22 PM UTC

[flagged]

Re: The Adventure Family Tree (2024)

#10

Post by quuxplusone » Mon, May 11, 2026, 5:24 PM UTC

wduquette wrote: post #6

We had a copy of the Fortran source for the PDP-11 when I was a teenager. My buddy and I managed to add a room: in the first room of the Maze of Twisty Little Passages All The Same, if you gave the command "out" (as one tried), you discovered that you were "Nowhere". "There is nothing in all directions." You could then enter "in" to go back to the Maze, or "get nothing" to add "nothing" to your inventory. There was a…

Are you talking about the Volcano View? ("You are on the edge of a breath-taking view. Far below you is an active volcano, from which great gouts of molten lava come surging out, cascading back down into the depths. The glowing rock fills the farthest reaches of the cavern with a blood-red glare...")

Or did you and your friend also add the lava room? Or (this would be the really interesting case, family-tree-wise) was there already a lava room present in your version?

I can't immediately think of a lava obstacle in any version. (Well, the volcanic rift in GOET0580 and IIRC the very endgame of ROBE0665, in a sense. And the Volcano View is crossable in PLAT0550 and its descendants.)

Infocom's "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" (1984) includes an object named "no tea", which is in your inventory for much of the game.