The game went through numerous iterations as developers upgraded it to run on newer machines, and Microsoft eventually began shipping it with its MS-DOS machines in the early 1980s. He didn't create the game to make money, and it was shared for free even though the game contained many of the elements (puzzles, humor, and fantasy) that influenced subsequent generations of commercial video games. The legendary tabletop role-playing game debuted in 1974, just two years before Crowder wrote the first version of Colossal Cave Adventure. The story goes that Crowder was both an avid cave explorer, and a Dungeons & Dragons enthusiast. Read More: This 70-Year-Old Programmer Is Preserving an Ancient Coding Language on GitHub At the time, the game ran on the same primitive, gigantic room-filling computers that were being used to build out ARPANET. The game was the brainchild of programmer Will Crowther, who in 1976 was helping to create ARPANET (the government-funded computer network that eventually became the internet) from scratch. "But there's a very basic question about an artifact like this: should a museum preserve it in a static form as close to the original as possible, or is it more in the right spirit to encourage the folk process to continue improving the code?" He chose the latter.Ĭolossal Cave Adventure has the player explore a gigantic cave network through text-based commands.
"This is code that fully deserves to be in any museum of the great artifacts of hacker history," Raymond wrote on his blog.