Nowadays, it is enjoyed in a rather “inside baseball” way by contemporary members of the pro-am interactive fiction community. Later, it was wrongly reproduced and sold by many unscrupulous publishers who never paid Crowther and Woods a dime, thereby reaching a wider and less specialized number of home micro owners. Thanks to ARPANET, it was a very successful online entertainment enjoyed by its audience of hackers at universities and large corporations. It (especially the canonical version modified and enhanced by Don Woods) has given tremendous enjoyment to various audiences, specialized and otherwise. The truth is, audiences then and now have both been right, experts as they all have been with regard to their own tastes.ĪDVENT, for its part, is a revelation, building as it does something out of nothing. Tastes change, genres evolve, and, yes, theory emerges that may contradict the interests of a generation of players. I believe that the players of the 1980’s, who had no theory or essays with which to inform their experiences, preferred the wild exuberance of Zork‘s design as much as they preferred its technology. Of course, in its originating days, ADVENT would have been considered both the most and least organic IF geography to date, simultaneously the most austere and gonzo. In this blog, I will occasionally praise this game’s or that game’s map for its “organicism.” By this I will mean that is is connected in a natural, believable way based on some unifying principle. It is worth wondering if, in general, simulations are by their very nature better text adventures. Microsoft’s port of Adventure, which apparently never paid a dime in royalties to its authors. Most certainly, if simulation is a defining element of the “best,” then the prize must go to ADVENT. Many have written enthusiastically about the credibility of this simulated world: “Of this first crop of games, `Adventure’ remains the best, mainly because it has its roots in a simulation” (Nelson 5). This is the oft-discussed simulation element of ADVENT. However, unlike the setting of a typical Dungeon & Dragons campaign, ADVENT‘s geography was based on an actual location: Kentucky’s Bedquilt Cave. While ADVENT‘s parser was limited to two words, it remained revelatory. The technology that ADVENT and its descendants use to interpret human commands came to be known as a parser. In ADVENT‘s case, the program is not nearly as good at interpreting text as a human dungeon master would be, but that is a tough bar to reach. Just as in Dungeons & Dragons, a “dungeon master” provided text descriptions of areas, objects, and events to players, and the player likewise described via text their actions in the described world. An avid caver with an interest in Dungeons & Dragons, he combined these interests to create what was–so far as the world knew–a new type of simulation or game. He was a significant player in the deployment of ARPANET, a technology that would eventually evolve into what we now know as the internet. The “Imp” Team: ARPANET Pioneers (Will Crowther second from right)ĪDVENT was initially authored by Will Crowther. A playthrough of the entire Infocom canon will reveal a genre growing further and further away from its point of origination, even if some limitations of the form were never fully overcome. All of Zork I, Infocom’s most commercially successful title, is ported directly from Dungeon, and Dungeon was initially imagined as a way to improve upon ADVENT (sometimes also referred to as Adventure or Colossal Cave Adventure) in terms of both writing and technology. It cannot be denied that all Infocom games are in conversation with both ADVENT and Dungeon to varying degrees, and all serious discussions of Infocom games must, at some point, call forth their spectres. At times, ADVENT and Dungeon seem discussed less as text and more as historical facts. I have said that I would like to avoid historical discussion, but no one can outrun their fate. What is ADVENT/Adventure/Colossal Cave Adventure? Introducing ADVENT, the first widely-known text adventure and its famous, more craft-conscious imitator, Zork and/or Dungeon (henceforth to be referred to as Dungeon).
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