I discovered this game by accident while poking around an ancient Unix system. This system predated the concept of networking, or even graphics. The system had about 50 serial consoles, each with an ancient flickering green-on-black monitor and a keyboard where some keys worked, occasionally.
There were several games in **/usr/games** on the system, but only two ones which grabbed my attention. The first was fortune, which spit out a quote or a witty one-liner, though some very conscientious sysadmin had disabled the fortune -o variant at some point. The other was adventure.
adventure, also known as Collosal Cave Adventure has been around for a very long time, and is surprisingly available in modern unix and unix-like systems too, to keep the nostalgia alive for old fogies, no doubt. The game is a console turn-based game. The system presents the user with a scenario, and then prompts the user for an action. The action is textual phrase, and it can be a movement, like “north” or “southeast”, or a verb+noun combination, like “pick cage”, or “eat food”.
The user starts of on a road, next to an old building. Someways off is the entrance of the “collosal cave”, which has several chambers, with treasure, fierce adversaries and several puzzles to solve. You are free to move around, as long as you’re allowed by the aforementioned adversaries, and explore the cave, performing magic and collecting treasures. Don’t get caught in the maze of twisty little passages, though. I have never figured out how to escape that mess.
A sample description would be like:
YOU ARE IN A SPLENDID CHAMBER THIRTY FEET HIGH. THE WALLS ARE FROZEN
RIVERS OF ORANGE STONE. AN AWKWARD CANYON AND A GOOD PASSAGE EXIT
FROM EAST AND WEST SIDES OF THE CHAMBER.
A CHEERFUL LITTLE BIRD IS SITTING HERE SINGING.
>
One possible action to the above would be “catch bird”, but that will work only if you have collected a wicker cage in a previous location. And so on…
We had 24 hour access to the unix system, and this game provided several hours of escapism for late night insomniacs. But for all that, I don’t believe I progressed too far beyond the first few rooms of the collosal cave. A wonderful, simple game.