Colossal Cave Adventure

This is the real, full-blown Colossal Cave Adventure game, written by Will Crowther and Don Woods at Stanford AI Lab in the early '70s. It is the first interactive fiction game where the computer simulates and describes a situation, and the user types in what to do next, in simple English.

You are standing at the end of a road before a small brick building.
Around you is a forest.  A small stream flows out of the building and
down a gully.

> █

Quick start

A tiny Docker container image is available from GitHub:

docker pull ghcr.io/troglobit/adventure:latest

The save game feature work only if you map your $HOME to the container's /root and run:

docker run -it --rm -v $HOME:/root ghcr.io/troglobit/adventure:latest

This saves the game state to ~/.adventure when you issue the suspend command. To resume the game, append the -r option:

docker run -it --rm -v $HOME:/root ghcr.io/troglobit/adventure:latest -r

Tips

Before you begin, a few suggestions:

1. Make a map. There are two common ways to handle this. You can use a piece of butcher paper and a pencil and sketch in all the rooms as circles or whatever with directions marked for the lines between rooms. The other way to make a map is to make a word table with the room names down one side along with numbers you've assigned each room. Along the top of the table you put N, NW, W, SW, S, SE, E and so on. (Remember up and down). Then you can tell at a glance which directions you have tried and haven't tried.

2. Save the game every half hour or so, using the suspend command, unless you have spent a lot of moves getting nowhere, of course. Start with advent -r next time to resume from where you were.

3. Take your time. Gamers have been known to spend months on this one. They were spending 2 or 3 hours a day and they weren't beginners!

Try everything!

Note: sometimes you will have to go back to a previous location to be able to do something. The game parser uses only simple two word (verb-noun) commands, after all, this is the first text adventure game.

Build & Install

It is highly recommended to use released tarballs since they include a ready-made configure script which generates a portable Makefile. The only requirements for building released versions is make and a working C compiler:

./configure
make

The following command installs the game into /usr/local/bin, and the manual and other documents in /usr/local/share. You can change this by calling configure --prefix=PATH, to install elsewhere. For more help, see configure --help:

sudo make install-strip

Note: when checking out code from GIT, use ./autogen.sh to generate a configure script. It is a generated file and otherwise only included in released tarballs. This is the only time you need the autoconf and automake tools.

Origin & References

The original Fortran code was by William Crowther, with major features added by Don Woods. Conversion to BDS C by J. R. Jaeger and UNIX standardization by Jerry D. Pohl. The last port to QNX 4 and bug fixes by James Lummel. This last version should work without any change on HP-UX, Sun Solaris, *BSD and GNU/Linux systems.

The actual license of this program is unknown, although most people agree that it is likely to be considered to be under the public domain.

See the files in the doc/ directory for the original documentation, including cheat codes, some history, and a map.

Relevant Resources:

• https://rickadams.org/adventure/
• http://www.spitenet.com/cave/
• http://groups.google.com/group/rec.arts.int-fiction/browse_thread/thread/607acaf1a279d4dd/9181d75148500b30 (original code, uncovered)
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossal_Cave_Adventure

Other writings on this cult classic:

• http://www.wurb.com/if/game/1
• http://www.spitenet.com/cave/
• http://advent.jenandcal.familyds.org/
• https://github.com/Quuxplusone/Advent

-- Compiled on July 26th, 2009 and updated August 8th 2023 by Joachim Wiberg troglobit@gmail.com