Interactive fiction

Games developed for the first arcade and home consoles emphasized simplicity and action. This was partly out of necessity, because of the limitations of rudimentary display technologies, microprocessors, and other components and the limited memory available for programs. These traits also suited the goal of creating arcade games that would quickly swallow as many coins as possible. Still, while the designs of games such as Atari’s Breakout (1976) and Taito’s Space Invaders (1978) were elegantly streamlined, these arcade hits generally offered little in terms of strategic depth, narrative, or simulation value. By the end of the 1970s, however, several computer games seemed to offer different design possibilities from what could be achieved on home or arcade consoles. These games often relied on text, networking, or other capabilities available on computers in the academic laboratories where many of them were designed.

One of the first was Hunt the Wumpus, which appeared in several versions for different systems. Kenneth Thompson, a researcher at Bell Laboratories, wrote one version in C for the UNIX operating system, which he had codeveloped; Gregory Yob wrote another in BASIC that was distributed widely through listings in early computer game magazines. Both versions were probably written in 1972. Hunt the Wumpus and games like it introduced the notion of defining a virtual space. Players explored this space by inputting simple text commands—such as room numbers or coordinates—from their keyboards. They enjoyed considerable freedom of navigation in exploring the caves, dungeons, and castles that were typical of such text-based games. Moreover, computer software could be easily shared, modified, and extended by programmers, resulting in a great variety of similar games.

The defining computer game of the 1970s was Will Crowther’s Colossal Cave Adventure, probably completed in 1977. Text-based games of its ilk have since been known commonly as electronic adventure games. Crowther combined his experiences exploring Kentucky’s Mammoth Cave system and playing Dungeons & Dragons-style role-playing games with fantasy themes reminiscent of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. Written in FORTRAN for the PDP-10 computer, Adventure became the prototype for an entirely new category of games, usually called “interactive fiction,” that boasted a new narrative structure. Such games shaped the player’s experience with descriptions of rooms, characters, and items and a story that evolved in response to the player’s choices. In Adventure this meant wandering through a dungeon to collect items and defeat monsters, but later titles featured more elaborate narratives. In 1977 Don Woods of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory came across a copy of the source code for Crowther’s “ADVENT” program and carefully revised the game, adding new elements that increased its popularity. This version and its variants were widely distributed around the network of connected university and industrial computer laboratories and influenced other games, such as MIT’s Zork. By the late 1970s, home computers and video game consoles had also made commercial distribution of these games possible, and text-based or simple graphical versions of Adventure were provided for many of these systems. (See Sidebar: Zork.)