Colossal Cave Adventure Source Code

Jerz > Interactive Fiction > Adventure

advdat.77-03-11
advdat.77-03-31
advf4.77-03-11
advf4.77-03-23
advf4.77-03-31

Don Woods’s mirror

From Jerz, Dennis G. “Somewhere Nearby is Colossal Cave: Examining Will Crowther’s Original “Adventure” in Code and in KentuckyDigital Humanities Quarterly: 1 (2007).

In response to my request, Les Earnest ([Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab] executive officer, 1965-1980), Bruce Baumgart (former Stanford Ph.D. student, now an employee of the Internet Archive) and Martin Frost (systems manager of Stanford’s CS department) kindly gave Don Woods web-based access to a tape backup of his Stanford student account. Woods chose five files from that backup tape, which he identified as components of Crowther’s original FORTRAN 4 source code, and made them available for scholarly study (see Crowther and Woods, “Adventure”). The two oldest files (a pair representing the data and the code) are dated March 11, 1977. According to Woods, these files represent Crowther’s original work. The archive includes three more files from late March, showing some of the first changes Woods made in both the data and the code. For an analysis, see part 2 of this article, Exploring Colossal Cave in Code.

View Comments

  • Glad I ran across this. Played adventure on my dads CPM (maybe? It was his company Information Design in Bedford MA Hanscom AFB) machine in 1982 or so. Good times.

  • I have this built by an old Fortran compiler and running in a PDP-10 emulator.

  • It looks as though this source code isn't complete, and could not be compiled and run without the missing pieces. (I note a call to a subroutine called IFILE, which isn't part of this source code and doesn't appear to be part of the FORTRAN 4 standard either.)

  • Hello Jerzy.
    So you have archived a collossal cavern source reference.
    I am very interested.
    Can you tell me where to click?

    • Links to the source code itself and also a link to an analysis of the code are both on the page where you left this comment. The links are working when I checked them.

    • Not deleted... just temporarily unavailable. Sorry about that. They are available now.

1 2 3 6