There was only one game. Appropriately for us neighborhood-explorers, for us mapmakers, it was launched by typing ADVENTURE.

The game began you at a house by the woods, with a mailbox, a trail to a grate, not unlike the wandering explorations we undertook on our own in our simple neighborhood. It explicated all of this entirely as text, of course. It understood typed commands, ordinal directions and simple instructions, GET, DROP, OPEN. At the time I was about six or seven years old, and I believed I was training to be an adventurer of some kind, a discoverer of hidden lands, or maybe even a scientist like Charlotte’s father, capable of communing with primeval programming, of drawing maps on dot matrix printer paper of the worlds within the machine that only I could read. —Gaming Made Me: Colossal Cave Adventure | Rock, Paper, Shotgun.