25
Adventure Time

In early 1976, a new game appeared on the few computers connected to the nationwide Department of Defense computer network called the ARPANET. The author of the program was William Crowther, a physics major with a degree from MIT who spent ten years at Lincoln Labs working on real-time control systems and then moved to defense contractor BBN, where he did important work on the ARPANET. Crowther was also an active rock climber and caver, as was his wife, Patricia, who gained a measure of fame in caving communities in 1972 by navigating a tiny, narrow passageway to prove the Flint Ridge Cave system in Kentucky connected to the Mammoth Cave, making it the largest cave complex in the world. Crowther integrated his caving with his computer work by spending evenings at BBN plotting out caving routes on a mainframe.¹

In mid-1975, the Crowthers divorced, and Will was separated from his two young daughters. Looking for a way to remain connected to them, he created a computer program combining his caving hobby with the new game he had been playing recently with a group of friends at BBN, Dungeons & Dragons.² Crowther developed a series of rooms based on the layout of the Colossal Cave in the Bedquilt Section of the Mammoth Cave complex and populated it with five treasures to collect, an axe-wielding dwarf that wandered the labyrinth, and three puzzles solvable by finding items within the caverns and using them in the right place and manner to proceed.³

¹ “Will Crowther,” oral history, March 1994.

² Ibid.

³ Dennis G. Jerz, “Somewhere Nearby Is Colossal Cave,” Digital Humanities Quarterly, vol. 1, no. 2, 2007, http://digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/001/2/000009/000009.html.

As computer terminals capable of more than character-based graphics were still rare in the mid-1970s, Crowther’s game was entirely text based. Each room featured a description of the environment and allowed the player to interact with certain objects by typing nouns and verbs into a text parser. Because it was created for use by his daughters rather than fellow computer programmers, Crowther used plain language commands such as “Go South” and “Get Lamp” rather than the more complex inputs usually required to accomplish anything on a computer. Crowther wrote his game in FORTRAN on a DEC PDP-10 computer, a mainframe released in 1966 that gained popularity in the 1970s due to its time-sharing operating system, TOPS-10. Due to filename length restrictions, he named the game ADVENT. It also went by Colossal Cave after the location in which the game takes place. It has gone down in history as Adventure.

When Crowther completed Adventure, he uploaded a copy to the ARPANET at BBN and left on a month-long vacation.⁴ In his absence, the game started spreading around the country. One location that took to Adventure right away was Stanford, where the Medical Center owned a PDP-10 connected to the ARPANET. One of the many graduate students who tried his luck at the game was John Gilbert, who then brought his friend Don Woods to the center to play the game.⁵ The son of a computer designer and a programming prodigy who sold his first computer program to Honeywell at 12 years old,⁶ Woods was intrigued by the game and converted it to work on the time-sharing system at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. In the great tradition of computer hackers going back to Spacewar! at MIT, Woods felt that while Adventure was an interesting program, there was room for improvement.

Crowther conceived of Adventure as a game of treasure collecting and puzzle solving, but he placed the greatest emphasis on exploration as befit his caving activities. He also likely abandoned the game before completion, as several exits from the later rooms did not work, and one even had an “under construction” sign placed next to it.⁷ Woods decided to complete the game and bring the treasure collection to the fore by implementing a point system for completing tasks and developing a new primary objective of acquiring 15 treasures through a combination of exploration and inventory-based puzzle solving and returning them to the small brick structure in the forest at which the player begins his descent into the labyrinth.

⁴ Crowther, 1994.

⁵ Ibid.

⁶ “The Adventure Begins: Origin of the Text Adventure Game,” Retro Gamer, no. 31, 2006, 54–55.

⁷ “Observations About Crowther’s Original Adventure (1975),” Renga in Blue, March 7, 2011, https://bluerenga.blog/2011/03/07/observations-about-crowthers-original-adventure-1975.

While Crowther’s Adventure contained some fantastic elements like the dwarf, Woods incorporated additional fantasy tropes based on his love of author J.R.R. Tolkien. He also modified a few basic gameplay systems, added many new rooms, and designed several new antagonists. Some of his more notable additions were the need to replace the batteries in the lamp that is crucial to navigating the dark caves, a thief who wanders the caves and picks up items the player needs, and a dragon the player must slay in his quest to collect all the treasures.⁸

Woods started improving on the Crowther version of the game in early 1977 and released it into the wild a few months later.⁹ The game’s mix of exploration and puzzle solving proved unlike anything most computer programmers had seen before, and it soon became a phenomenon at computer centers across the United States.¹⁰ Anecdotal stories have been told of development projects being set back by several weeks as programmers abandoned their work until they had solved Adventure by gathering all 15 treasures and accumulating all 350 available points. By the end of 1977, Adventure was just as ubiquitous as Star Trek and Lunar Lander on time-sharing networks. Over the next two years, the game played a key role in the development of the new computer software industry emerging on the microcomputer platforms.

***

The earliest Adventure-style game for a microcomputer was created by Lance Micklus, a studio engineer for Vermont’s public television station who first experienced Adventure on a computer at the University of Vermont, with which the station was affiliated. He noticed the game was popular with the students, but only played it a little himself. When he purchased a TRS-80, he began recreating the games he saw at the university and developed a simple Adventure derivative called Treasure Hunt that he submitted to the TRS-80 Software Exchange, a mail order service maintained by the TRS-80-focused SoftSide Magazine, in October 1978.¹¹ Micklus submitted several more games to the exchange, but never turned game design into a career. The man who created the first widely disseminated microcomputer adventure game, Scott Adams, did.

⁸ Jerz, 2007. The dragon puzzle is perhaps the most infamous in the game. The player must type “kill dragon,” after which the game displays the phrase “With what? Your bare hands?” If the player answers “Yes” to what appears to be merely a sarcastic retort, he slays the dragon.

⁹ Ibid. Earlier sources put the release of the game in 1975 or 1976, but Jerz and Woods discovered Crowthe’s original dated source code, and Woods now concurs with this timeline.

¹⁰ There is one known program that predated Adventure and featured exploration of a series of rooms using simple commands called WANDER. As the original 1974 source code is lost, it is impossible to ascertain how the program functioned at launch, and it is possible the later versions that are preserved were influenced by Adventure. Regardless, it only achieved limited distribution, and Crowther has confirmed he did not see it before creating his game.

¹¹ Jimmy Maher, “A Few Questions for Lance Micklus,” The Digital Antiquarian, July 1, 2011, https://www.filfre.net/2011/07/a-few-questions-for-lance-micklus, and “TRS-80 Software Exchange Market Basket,” SoftSide, October 1978, 53. Note that while the game was clearly inspired by Adventure, it was exceedingly primitive and did not implement a real parser.

Born July 10, 1952, Adams beheld his first computer on a class field trip to the University of Miami when he was 8 years old.¹² Adams was only able to view this machine through glass doors, but it left an impression. He later attended North Miami High School while it was participating in a pilot program with the University of Miami in which a single time-sharing terminal was placed in the math department of the school. Adams was allowed to use the terminal and fell in love with programming.¹³ Before long, he started coming to school early and staying late to work with the machine.

After graduating high school in 1970, Adams attended the Florida Institute of Technology (FIT). Requiring a job for extra income, Adams hoped for a placement in the school’s computer lab, but could only secure an appointment as a clerk. Once his programming experience became known, however, he rose to become the chief programmer on the school’s accounting system. In 1975, Adams left school to work for RCA as a space object information analyst and was posted to a satellite facility on Ascension Island off the coast of Africa. Adams took a leave of to complete his B.S. in computer science at FIT in 1976.¹⁴ After completing his degree, Adams was assigned to another radar station on Antigua in the West Indies. The computer at the station was only needed during the day, so at night Adams would fool around on it and play games, including a version of the Mayfield Star Trek game. Adams converted this game so that rather than using a teletype to display the galaxy, he could use the radar screens hooked up to the computer instead.¹⁵

After nine months on Antigua, Adams returned to Florida to work at RCA’s Cape Canaveral division before taking a job at a small systems programming company in nearby Melbourne, Florida. While there, he met Alexis, a psychology major at Miami-Dade Community College. The duo met because Alexis was helping run a computer-driven dating service to which Scott submitted his information. Three months later, they were married. The couple moved to Central Florida, where Scott got a job as a programmer with telecommunications manufacturer Stromberg Carlson.¹⁶

¹² Ron Mitchell, “Scott Adams: Adventuring with Atari,” Antic, July 1983, 12.

¹³ “GameSetInterview: Adventure International’s Scott Adams,” GameSetWatch, July 19, 2006, http://www.gamesetwatch.com/2006/07/gamesetinterview_adventure_int.php.

¹⁴ Mitchell, 1983.

¹⁵ “ANTIC Interview 25: Scott Adams, Adventure International,” ANTIC, Podcast audio, March 16, 2015, http://ataripodcast.libsyn.com/antic-interview-25-the-atari-8-bit-podcast-scott-adams.

¹⁶ Mitchell, 1983.

Adams was involved with the hobbyist microcomputer scene early on and purchased a Sphere computer for which he programmed an adaption of the Atari coin-op hit Tank and built custom controllers to play it. After joining Stromberg Carlson, he graduated to the TRS-80 and formed a local user group dedicated to the computer. Adams liked making his own games on the system and was considering creating a program requiring the player to use language in some fashion. At that point, a copy of Adventure appeared on the mainframe at his employer. Adams stayed after work for an entire week to beat the game and decided to create something similar on the TRS-80.¹⁷

Shoehorning a game like Adventure onto a microcomputer with just 16K of memory was not an easy task and required a few sacrifices. While the structure of Adams’s game, which he also called Adventure, follows the basic Crowther/Wood conceit of descending into an underground labyrinth to gather treasures, the landscape is much smaller. As with the original game, the player moves through rooms, interacts with objects, and solves puzzles through two-word commands, but the parser in the game is more limited than that found in the original Adventure. Furthermore, to cut down on memory requirements, the parser does not actually check for whole words, but just the first three letters.¹⁸ Despite these limitations, Adams was able to create reasonable approximation of Adventure on a TRS-80.

Adams showed off his Adventure to his user group, and the members suggested it was good enough to sell. As the few extant computer game companies on the West Coast were focused primarily on Apple II software, Adams submitted the program to SoftSide, which advertised Adventure in its January 1979 issue at a cost of $24.95.¹⁹ Creative Computing also began selling the game through its software label in its February 1979 issue at a more modest $14.95. The ads attracted the attention of a Radio Shack franchise owner in Chicago named Manny Garcia who contacted Adams directly to order 50 copies. Adams filled the order by packing each tape in a baby bottle liner with a business card stapled to the top.²⁰

¹⁷ RSS Bot, “Important People Who Shaped the TI 99/4A World – Scott Adams,” Atari Age Message Board, December 12, 2015, http://atariage.com/forums/topic/246996-important-people-who-shaped-the-ti-994a-world-scott-adams.

¹⁸ This quirk can lead to some humorous encounters. One of the game’s more infamous puzzles involves startling a bear so that it falls off a ledge. In later versions of the game, one way to do this is to “Scream” at the bear, after which “the bear is so startled he falls off the ledge.” As only the first three letters matter, the player can technically perform other acts instead such as “screw bear.”

¹⁹ “New Arrivals, TRS-80 Software Exchange,” SoftSide, January 1979, 28. Backgammon and 3-D Tic Tac Toe programs by Adams were advertised in the same issue at a cost of $7.95.

²⁰ Robert Levering, Michael Katz, and Milton Moskowitz, The Computer Entrepreneurs (New York: NAL Books, 1984), 117.

At first, Scott’s new venture did not sit well with Alexis. As he spent every weekend and evening working on his Adventure game, she finally snapped and placed all his disks in the oven and informed him his programming exploits were over until he spent some time with her. She had meant to destroy the disks but forgot to turn on the oven.²¹ Once the game was completed and looked to be saleable, Alexis reconciled with Scott and contributed ideas for his next game, Pirate Adventure, which was inspired by the books Treasure Island and Robinson Crusoe.²² Both the TRS-80 Software Exchange and Creative Computing Software began selling both games on a single cassette, so to differentiate the two, they started advertising them as Adventure, Pirate and Adventure, Land. Within months, the original game started going by the name Adventureland.

Adams released six more “Adventure” games before the end of 1979, by which time “adventure” was fast becoming the label for a whole genre of games that combined text commands entered via a parser, exploration, item collection, and inventory-based puzzle solving. Mission Impossible, The Count, and Strange Odyssey were all written by Adams himself, while Voodoo Castle and Mystery Fun House were collaborations between himself and Alexis. The sixth game, Pyramids of Doom, was a fan submission by a programmer named Alvin Files who reverse-engineered Adams’s game engine. Pyramids was a traditional treasure hunt in the Adventure mold, while Voodoo Castle introduced a rudimentary story with an objective to lift a curse affecting a count. Mission Impossible added the wrinkle of a finite time limit to complete objectives, while The Count broke new ground by introducing a day-night cycle in addition to a time limit and having certain key plot developments occur only at specified times over the course of the four-day game.

Adams continued selling all his games through the magazine publishers, but he also started to receive an increasing number of direct requests from retailers to ship them units wholesale. This finally forced the couple to relocate operations in October 1979 from a spare bedroom in the Adams house to a small retail location. Since they now operated from a building with a storefront, Scott and Alexis decided to undertake software operations in the rear of the space and run a retail store called the Adventure International Computer Center out front to sell both their own games as well as those from other programmers. Scott concentrated on churning out new product, while Alexis, who before her marriage had managed a chain of restaurants in Miami and sold cookbooks and recipes via mail order, managed the business.²³

²¹ Ibid, 116–117.

²² Paul Drury, “The Making of Pirate Adventure,” Retro Gamer, no. 89, 2011, 48.

²³ Levering et al., 1984, 117.

***

While Scott Adams was bringing the exploration and puzzle-solving of Adventure to microcomputers, several other programmers began supplying dungeon crawls directly inspired by Dungeons & Dragons. The earliest commercial microcomputer game bearing any resemblance to Dungeons & Dragons was Devil’s Dungeon by Charles Engel. A professor of math education at the University of South Florida in Tampa, Engel released a booklet containing type-in listings for ten programs called Stimulating Simulations in 1977 and followed it up in early 1978 with a 15-page booklet containing Devil’s Dungeon. In this text-based game, the player proceeds through a series of numbered rooms to fight monsters to earn gold and experience points. Only two stats are tracked, strength and speed, which can be improved by spending points.²⁴

As it was text-based and contained almost no character development, The Devil’s Dungeon barely qualifies as an offshoot of D&D. In late 1978, a programmer named Don Worth created a more complex take on the game called Beneath Apple Manor. Worth first learned how to program as an undergraduate at the University of California, San Diego in 1967. In 1968, he transferred to UCLA and got a job writing software for an IBM System/360 connected to the APRANET. During that time, Worth and his friends developed a turn-based space strategy game called FRON to play on the computer. After graduation, Worth took a job with the university. An avid wargamer from a young age, Worth took to Dungeons & Dragons upon its release and became the dungeon master of his group of friends. In 1978, he split the cost of buying an Apple II with a friend with whom he would trade the computer back and forth every two weeks. During his time with the machine, Worth learned Integer BASIC and began work on a game that emulated the dungeon exploration of Dungeons & Dragons.²⁵

²⁴ Smith, 2015.

²⁵ David Craddock, Dungeon Hacks: How NetHack, Angband, and Other Roguelikes Changed the Course of Video Games (Canton, OH: Press Start Press, 2015), kindle, chap. 1.

In crafting his game, Worth was inspired by Gary Shannon’s Dragon Maze, which was included as a type-in program in the reference manual for the Apple II. Worth borrowed the random maze generation and exploration elements of that game but crafted a multi-level dungeon containing chests with equipment and treasure guarded by a variety of monsters with different attributes and capabilities. The player’s abilities are defined by the strength, dexterity, and intelligence traits of D&D, but they serve as ability pools that are depleted by performing certain actions. Strength, for example, can be spent to bash open locked doors or fight monsters, while casting spells depletes intelligence. Play proceeds in turns, with the player taking an action such as moving or attacking and then all the monsters taking their own actions. Players can restore their ability pools by resting, but the monsters continue to move around the dungeon as the player does so. The goal of the game is to locate the golden apple on one of the lower floors of the dungeon. Worth released Beneath Apple Manor in November 1978 through a company he founded called The Software Factory.²⁶ It was the first of two dungeon crawls released for the Apple II at the tail end of 1978. The other was developed by a Seattle-based programmer named Bill Clardy.

A science enthusiast as a child, Clardy was introduced to computers when he took an introductory programming course in the summer of 1970 right after he graduated high school. For his class project, he wrote a Nim variation called 21 Matches. Clardy matriculated to Rice University in Texas as a double major in electrical engineering and mathematics because the school did not yet have a computer science department.²⁷ He discovered both Chainmail and Dungeons & Dragons while at the school and became particularly enamored with serving as a dungeon master. Upon graduating in 1974, Clardy worked for Boeing as an electrical engineer, but while he found the work interesting, his first love was programming. When the first microcomputers appeared, he fooled around with the TRS-80 and then bought an Apple II in August 1978.²⁸

Like Don Worth, Clardy was attracted to the type-in listing for Gary Shannon’s Dragon Maze. After entering the simple game into memory, Clardy began rewriting it to add more complexity and incorporate elements from Dungeons & Dragons.²⁹ The resulting game, dubbed Dungeon Campaign, was like Beneath Apple Manor in that it featured randomly generated dungeon mazes populated by treasure to find and monsters to fight. Unlike the dozens of levels of Beneath Apple Manor, however, Dungeon Campaign features just four per playthrough. The player’s objective is to reach the exit of the lowest level while collecting as much treasure as possible. As an additional challenge, the game retains the maze chase gameplay from Dragon Maze in the form of a boss monster on each level that pursues the player.

²⁶ Ibid.

²⁷ Robert Clardy, Cyber Jack: The Adventures of Robert Clardy and Synergistic Software (Apple Puget Sound Program Library Exchange, 2017), 1–2.

²⁸ Ibid, 7–11.

²⁹ Ibid, 13.

Rather than controlling a single character as in Worth’s game, players of Dungeon Campaign control a whole army consisting of 13 soldiers, an elf who can locate secret doors, and a dwarf who helps map the dungeon. The party members are not capable of independent actions, however, and merely serve as a stand in for hit points. If the player loses his entire party, the game ends. As in Dungeons & Dragons the characters improve their abilities over time, though their only attribute is strength. In December 1978, Clardy established Synergistic Software to market Dungeon Campaign and began pedaling it to computer stores in the Seattle area where he lived. After several months, it had sold a few dozen copies.³⁰

The first dungeon crawl to achieve significant sales was developed by a company called Automated Simulations. The founder of the company, Jim Connelley, began working with computers while studying math and physics at the University of Pittsburgh, where he also played some of the early mainframe games like Lunar Lander and Star Trek. After a stint in Naval Intelligence, he worked as a programmer and engineer in Silicon Valley at companies like Westinghouse and GTE. An avid wargamer, Connelley joined a gaming group in Mountain View and introduced it to a game he started playing in college, Dungeons & Dragons. Before long, he was serving as the dungeon master for a regular group of players.³¹

Connelley learned about the emerging microcomputer market from co-workers at GTE, but he was never interested in assembling a computer himself. When Commodore announced the fully assembled PET, however, he purchased one in early 1978 and created a program to help run his D&D campaign. He also programmed a few simple games on the system. After a time, he decided to create a game that combined his love of war games with the basic principles of the classic Star Trek game. Called Starfleet Orion, Connelley’s game aped the tactical combat of Star Trek with its need to balance energy between multiple systems but played out on a larger scale as two players pitted whole fleets of ships with different characteristics against each other.³²

³⁰ Ibid, 15–17.

³¹ Jim Connelley, interview with the author, July 6, 2018.

³² Ibid.

Connelley did all the programming on Starfleet Orion himself, but to design ships and create combat scenarios, he enlisted the help of a member of his D&D group named Jon Freeman, who had been working as a freelance writer for several years.³³ In fact, Freeman was introduced to Connelley’s D&D group because one of the other players, Susan Lee-Merrow, had worked with him to write a user manual for a chip fabrication company.³⁴ While he struggled in the profession at first and had to supplement his income by doing word processing, he managed to publish a science fiction novel and a reference work called A Player’s Guide to Table Games, which led to steady work as a frequent contributor to GAMES Magazine and a consultant to several game companies.³⁵ When Connelley learned of Freeman’s writing and design activities, the programmer brought him into the development of Starfleet Orion.

Starfleet Orion was written between August and December 1978. Around Thanksgiving, Connelley formed Automated Simulations in anticipation of selling the game and granted shares in the company to Freeman. Although the game was originally created on the PET, it launched first on the TRS-80 due to that computer’s much larger install base. As both the PET and the TRS-80 only supported a character-based display, the graphics were primitive, with ship represented as numbered dots and explosions rendered as asterisks. The game sold decently based on the modest standards of the day, but sales were inhibited because it required two players. Incorporating a computer opponent had not even occurred to Connelley, because he considered a game to be a contest between two players. Once he realized his mistake, he collaborated with Freeman on an update to the game called Invasion Orion that allowed a single player to challenge the computer.³⁶

In 1979, Connelley and Freeman brought Starfleet Orion to a San Mateo, California, D&D convention called DunDraCon The attendees were nonplussed, because what they really wanted was a Dungeons & Dragons-style game. This spurred Connelley to develop a game engine for a dungeon crawl. Freeman once again provided the game design, while another member of the D&D group, a teacher named Jeff Johnson, pitched in on level and enemy design.³⁷

³³ Ibid.

³⁴ Susan Lee-Merrow, interview with the author, August 30, 2017.

³⁵ James Hague, “Jon Freeman & Anne Westfall,” Halcyon Days, March 1997, https://dadgum.com/halcyon/BOOK/FREEFALL.HTM.

³⁶ Connelley, 2018.

³⁷ Ibid.

As Dungeons & Dragons consists of a core rules system and individual modules that send players on professionally designed dungeon crawls, Connelley created a core game engine that could be used to script individual game scenarios. Connelley and Freeman envisioned designing a whole line of games using the engine, so they united their dungeon crawl products under the banner of a brand called “Dunjonquest.” The first game in the series was called Temple of Apshai.

In Apshai, the player creates a character using the standard D&D attributes and then descends into one of four levels to fight monsters, gather treasure, find new equipment, and gain experience. The action unfolds in a pseudo-real-time manner: the player and the monsters take turns performing actions, but if the player is idle too long, the monsters continue to take turns on their own. In addition to tracking health, the game also tracks player fatigue, which is expended by taking actions. If the player’s fatigue rating reaches zero, he must stop and rest, which can leave him at the mercy of the monsters.

Unlike Beneath Apple Manor and Dungeon Campaign, Apshai is modeled on a canned D&D module, so the levels are not randomly generated. Because the TRS-80 can only display primitive graphics assembled from basic characters and 64 blocky, abstract graphical tiles, the team also borrowed from the design of D&D modules by including descriptions of each room in the accompanying instruction book to provide ambience that could not be conveyed through graphics alone.

In many ways, Apshai was less a coherent game than a series of scenarios. The dungeon consists of four levels, but the player can play through them in any order, and they are not connected to each other. Instead, the player returns to the “Inn” between delvings, which doubles as the character creation area. Furthermore, due to the limitations of the hardware and the cassette medium on which the game was initially sold, the player is unable to save progress through the dungeon and must manually keep track of his statistics and equipment to enter again at the start of a new play session. Indeed, nothing stops the player from outfitting a character with the highest attribute scores and best equipment right from the start if he so desires.

Released in August 1979, Temple of Apshai quickly proved successful, and Automated Simulations released two additional dungeon crawls based on the same system before the end of the year: The Datestones of Ryn and Morloc’s Tower. As both were smaller games than Apshai, they were marketed as “MicroQuests” and sold for half price. The dungeon in Datestones consists of just a single level, but new urgency is added to the game by imposing a 20-minute time limit on the player. Morloc’s Tower consists of six small levels and imposes a 45-minute time limit.

***

By the middle of 1979, the computer game market remained tiny because the overall install base of Apple II, TRS-80, and PET computers remained small. In this time period, a game was considered a success if it sold just a few hundred or a few thousand copies. Most of the companies remained part-time ventures, as their owners could not afford to quit their jobs and support themselves and their families solely through making games. Nevertheless, computer game sales were outpacing those of other types of programs like business and productivity software, so it was clear that as the number of computer owners continued to increase, computer games would become another significant electronic entertainment field alongside coin-operated games and home consoles. In the meantime, video game consoles faced a new challenge at the low end of the electronic games market in the form of cheap portable games with LED displays that players could hold in their hands.