News: What Was the First Adventure Game?

What Was the First Adventure Game?

Adventure gamers would love to know what was the first adventure game. Well, it was a 1970s computer game titled "Colossal Cave Adventure", also known as "Adventure". Designed by Will Crowther, the game was in FORTRAN and initially had 700 lines of code and data, which was later expanded to 3,000 lines of code and more than 1000 lines of data. 

Colossal Cave Adventure was the source of inspiration for several text-based adventure games released in the early 1980s. The game was initially developed for the Programmed Data Processor Model 10. Later versions were released for several platforms, including Osborne 1, PRIMOS and MS-DOS.

The first "interactive fiction" allowed players to explore the text world of the Kentucky cave. The fantasy cave bears a remarkable significance to the real-life cave and is filled with strange creatures, magical items and many more things to explore and interact with. You can download different versions of the game by visiting rickadams.org 

Some of the most memorable lines and phrases from the textual adventure game are:

• "Maze of Twisty Little Passages"
• "Xyzzy" (magic word to teleport the player from one location to another)
• "Fee, Fie, Foe, Foo"

Image of Colossal Cave Adventure Running on an Osborne II Computer Credit: Celcom under Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0