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Colossal cave adventure walkthrough9/12/2023 ![]() ![]() If you look at it without that lens, you get a rather plain and sometimes frustrating adventure game that could perhaps get a pass if it was very nice to look at – which it absolutely is not. It works if you look at it as a new version of a historical text. The narration in the game is spoken like the text in the original, giving it that text adventure feel. You can play the 2023 Colossal Cave and go ‘look, you can pick up items and put them in your inventory, this game popularised that,’ like you’re going through a museum exhibit. While I know those games are still kicking around today and there’s some good and innovative stuff coming from that scene, they can be hard to understand at first if you’re more attuned to modern games. It’s certainly easier for players to get into than a text parser adventure. You see, in one way, Colossal Cave succeeds in what it sets out to do – offer a more accessible way to play an old game that helped shape the medium. In fact, I would say you absolutely need the context, because, without it, you're playing a new indie first-person adventure game that is not particularly good. It’s hard not to look at the new 3D version of Colossal Cave without that context. That is a very brief history behind the game I am reviewing here. Now, 25 years after Roberta’s final game for Sierra, King’s Quest: Mask of Eternity, the Williams’ (aged 68/69) have come out of game dev retirement and gone back to their roots by remaking the 48-year-old ground zero for adventure games. Williams’ first game, 1980’s Mystery House for the Apple II, is credited as being the first graphical adventure game. It inspired her to make her own adventure games. Roberta and Ken Williams’ video game journey started with a teletype edition of Colossal Cave. Neither of these men stuck with games, preferring to stay with computer programming, but their work was an important early step toward the world of video games we know today. Eventually, Don Woods (also not a big name) made some important additions, and other savvy programmers would port it to newer computers with monitors. To play the game, you would type your command and the text would print out as you went. Notice I didn’t say video game, because to begin with, Colossal Cave Adventure was programmed in 1975 on a PDP-10 mainframe computer, and you played the game by using a teletype because monitors weren’t standard yet. Programmer and spelunking enthusiast Crowther designed the original version of Colossal Cave Adventure (also known as just Adventure), which was the first popular adventure game and piece of interactive fiction. ‘Who created the first text adventure game?’ to be more precise. Will Crowther is not a household name, he’s really more of a trivia question. They’re rightly considered part of the game developer Pantheon but could potentially walk through the PAX floor unnoticed. They left the games industry and settled into semi-retirement. Ken and Roberta left Sierra in 19 respectively, jumping ship before the whole thing sank. The reason CUC could offer so much was that they were greatly overestimating their income and eventually were caught in what is one of the biggest accounting scandals ever. It was an offer too good to be true, so they took it. Sierra Online imploded rather dramatically when CUC International, a huge conglomerate, bought them out for $1 billion in stock. Roberta’s King’s Quest series was the leader in graphical point-and-click adventures until Lucasarts took things a step further in the 90s. Their company, Sierra On-Line, was one of the biggest names in PC games in the 80s. To call Roberta Williams the godmother of adventure games isn’t hyperbole. ![]() It’s hard to overstate the influence this couple has had on the games industry. Roberta and Ken Williams are good examples of this. ![]() What I’m getting at here, is that video games are old enough that some of the pioneers of the industry and their games are largely forgotten, especially if they haven’t stayed in the public eye. The young, brash game and console designers interviewed in Atari 50 are now in their seventies. And they’re not 50 in the same way that Nintendo is 133 years old or Sega is 62 - they didn’t start with playing cards or coin-operated machines, they started with video games. Last year, Atari turned 50, and they threw a big party to celebrate (by party, I mean an excellent compilation game/retrospective). They’re always seen as the young upstart in the world of entertainment, but that young upstart is middle-aged now. ![]()
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