"You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike."
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I first saw it on a Prime 400 at Rutherford Labs in 1978 when I was on the "Industry" part of a "thick sandwich" degree course. When I left to return to Uni, they gave me a complete copy of the FORTRAN source code on microfiche since I had spent so much time on the game! :-O
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony "Common sense is so rare these days, it should be classified as a super power" - Random T-shirt AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
I was at Manchester doing a PhD in Nuclear Structure Physics at about the same time (late 70s) and I think is was either the Rutherford or Daresbury computers I was playing it on. For a while, I also had the FORTRAN source code. :)
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One of my University friends frequently comment that being a sophomore was the three best years of his life. (You had to pass all freshman/sophomore exams to advance to junior level.) Well above two of those three years, he spent on the (ASCII text only) version of Adventure, and he was the very first Great Adventurer Grandmaster of our University. The game was so that if you dragged all the fortunes you had capture to the exit, that cost you resources, i.e. points. He was the first to realize that the dynamite you had found had very little value in itself. But some of fortunes was found in cave quite close to the outside mountain wall. If you detonated the dynamite there, it would break a hole into free air, where you could escape with all your treasures and earn the very highest grade. If you tried to set the dynamite off in other caves, you were usually told that "Unfortunately, you are now dead. I can incarnate you, but that will cost you 500 points." Although the game was command line interpreter based, and could be played on an teletype, the version we had checked whether the terminal was a CRT, with escapes for things like inverse video (black on green rather than green on black). So when the dynamite blast went off, the program sent the escape sequences to the screen to turn the entire 25 by 80 characters inverse video, then back to normal, another flash of inverse video and back. The first one of the students setting off the dynamite was totally unprepared and fell of his chair from the shock :-) Drawing maps of the little twisting passages, all alike (or was that twisting little passages? Or little twisty passages? Or twisty little passages? or passages, all twisty and alike?) came at a very early stage, and was in fact a collaborate effort among a group of eager adventurers. Not all of it was playing, though. We managed to obtain the Adventure source code (in Fortran!), and this study mate of mine spent a lot of his time expanding the cave with new passages, new fortunes to be found, and did major restructuring of the data structures to hold the the treasures you collected, information about your path and he made improvements to the input analyzer. So it was far from a complete waste of time - he learned a lot of programming that way. He graduated as an EE engineer, but from that day he has been a full time programmer, and still is. My study mate's three sophomore years lasted from the fall of 1979 to the spring of 1982. I believe that we got hold of the source code in the spring of 1980.
trønderen wrote:
Drawing maps of the little twisting passages, all alike (or was that twisting little passages? Or little twisty passages? Or twisty little passages? or passages, all twisty and alike?) came at a very early stage, and was in fact a collaborate effort among a group of eager adventurers.
I think it was Zork which a had an ice maze which you entered by sliding down an unclimbable slope and had descriptions like... You are in a little maze of twisty passages, all different. You are in a twisty little maze of passages, all different. You are in a maze of little twisty passages, all different. You are in a twisty passage of a little maze, all different. etc... **SPOILER** :) When mapped. the result was the word THURB, upside down, which was the magic word to exit the maze.
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This is one of the standard comments Matthew makes when he's giving me tips on some of the more...dusty...areas of the CodeProject codebase.
cheers Chris Maunder
web2Stop shaking Chris; it couldn't have been that bad.Software Zen:
delete this; -
OriginalGriff wrote:
FORTRAN source code on microfiche
Although I know one can do AWS Lambda in COBOL I am unsure about FORTRAN. But presumably possible. So then one would just need to figure out how to get it off the microfiche.
I've never tried it - I'm not a masochist - but apparently you can get both Cobol and Fortran in .NET flavours. Which is a horrific idea if you think about it for too long. X|
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony "Common sense is so rare these days, it should be classified as a super power" - Random T-shirt AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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trønderen wrote:
Drawing maps of the little twisting passages, all alike (or was that twisting little passages? Or little twisty passages? Or twisty little passages? or passages, all twisty and alike?) came at a very early stage, and was in fact a collaborate effort among a group of eager adventurers.
I think it was Zork which a had an ice maze which you entered by sliding down an unclimbable slope and had descriptions like... You are in a little maze of twisty passages, all different. You are in a twisty little maze of passages, all different. You are in a maze of little twisty passages, all different. You are in a twisty passage of a little maze, all different. etc... **SPOILER** :) When mapped. the result was the word THURB, upside down, which was the magic word to exit the maze.
The Adventure (aka Colossal Cave) maze did not have any magic word to exit it, it was "logical", so if you mapped it, you would be able to find your way out. I gave up getting out (and gave up the entire Adventure), maybe too quickly :-) It was sufficient entertainment watching a few of my study mates going completely crazy over it. Adventure preceded Zork, so I guess Zork picked up the maze idea from Adventure, rather than the other way around.
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Yesterday I got a question from one of the junior developers about using search to get something out of our in-house document repository. My reply was:
From MS Teams:
The starting point is usually one of tag tables... You are in a maze of twisty, little passages, all alike.
I had to explain the reference to him. Earlier today, I mentioned this to one of the senior developers, who also didn't recognise it, and, after I explained, commented that he was "minus ten years old" when the source of this was popular. Who else here remembers where this comes from and spent time on it?
Not only did I know (and play) ADVENTURE, but I still have a BASIC listing of the code for it.
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows. -- 6079 Smith W.
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web2Stop shaking Chris; it couldn't have been that bad.Software Zen:
delete this;Pure Evil.
cheers Chris Maunder
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Yesterday I got a question from one of the junior developers about using search to get something out of our in-house document repository. My reply was:
From MS Teams:
The starting point is usually one of tag tables... You are in a maze of twisty, little passages, all alike.
I had to explain the reference to him. Earlier today, I mentioned this to one of the senior developers, who also didn't recognise it, and, after I explained, commented that he was "minus ten years old" when the source of this was popular. Who else here remembers where this comes from and spent time on it?
There was another unlock word as well, but I cant remember what it actually did now. The word was "PLUGH". Does this ring a bell with anyone
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I had a whole stack of graph paper with the floor layouts
Be wary of strong drink. It can make you shoot at tax collectors - and miss. Lazarus Long, "Time Enough For Love" by Robert A. Heinlein
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I had a whole stack of graph paper with the floor layouts
Be wary of strong drink. It can make you shoot at tax collectors - and miss. Lazarus Long, "Time Enough For Love" by Robert A. Heinlein
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Yesterday I got a question from one of the junior developers about using search to get something out of our in-house document repository. My reply was:
From MS Teams:
The starting point is usually one of tag tables... You are in a maze of twisty, little passages, all alike.
I had to explain the reference to him. Earlier today, I mentioned this to one of the senior developers, who also didn't recognise it, and, after I explained, commented that he was "minus ten years old" when the source of this was popular. Who else here remembers where this comes from and spent time on it?
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Yesterday I got a question from one of the junior developers about using search to get something out of our in-house document repository. My reply was:
From MS Teams:
The starting point is usually one of tag tables... You are in a maze of twisty, little passages, all alike.
I had to explain the reference to him. Earlier today, I mentioned this to one of the senior developers, who also didn't recognise it, and, after I explained, commented that he was "minus ten years old" when the source of this was popular. Who else here remembers where this comes from and spent time on it?
I got to play this in 1976 when I spent the day at work with my uncle and never got to play it again. The next year when my Dad got a TRS-80, I tried (and failed miserably) to write my own version since I didn't have access to a mainframe to play it on.
Never trust a quote you see on the internet. - Ab Lincoln, 1492
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Yesterday I got a question from one of the junior developers about using search to get something out of our in-house document repository. My reply was:
From MS Teams:
The starting point is usually one of tag tables... You are in a maze of twisty, little passages, all alike.
I had to explain the reference to him. Earlier today, I mentioned this to one of the senior developers, who also didn't recognise it, and, after I explained, commented that he was "minus ten years old" when the source of this was popular. Who else here remembers where this comes from and spent time on it?
I spent way too much time playing this on a PDP-10 in the 70s. The original Fortran code was an engine. The first time it was run after being linked, it read the contents of a map file (map, objects, actions, etc) into memory and encrypted it. Then it exited leaving the image in memory. You then typed save to create an executable with the map loaded. It would have been easy to change the map but we never did. There were two mazes. In one every room's description was "You are in a maze of twisty passages all alike". In the other maze, every room's description was "You are in a maze of twisty passages all different". You might go North from one room, but to return you might need to go East or West. To map the mazes you had to leave objects in each room so you could tell them apart. Only the first 5 characters of a word were checked because 5 7-bit Ascii characters fit in in a 36-bit word. I never got into Zork but we did have another adventure game called Sewer that was written as a TECO macro. XYZZY, PLUGH, and other words from Adventure along with various characters from "The Lord of the Ring" were among the known likely passwords the internet worm tried.
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Yesterday I got a question from one of the junior developers about using search to get something out of our in-house document repository. My reply was:
From MS Teams:
The starting point is usually one of tag tables... You are in a maze of twisty, little passages, all alike.
I had to explain the reference to him. Earlier today, I mentioned this to one of the senior developers, who also didn't recognise it, and, after I explained, commented that he was "minus ten years old" when the source of this was popular. Who else here remembers where this comes from and spent time on it?
Back in the late 1970's, the company I worked for hired a software programmer from Data General. He brought with him a tape that had the source code to Adventure on it. We got local company to extract the code and put in on an 8" floppy. We had just purchased Microsoft's Fortran compiler were able get Adventure up and running on our own version of a PC. Productivity took a nose dive for the next month or so. Byte magazine published the complete source code in a mouse point font. To win you had to fight the dragon with your bare hands If you tried any weapon you were killed. You had to answer yes to the question "Do you really want to kill the dragon with your bare hands?" Another game I remember spending hours making maps of 20 levels of 10x10 grids was OrbQuest.
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Yesterday I got a question from one of the junior developers about using search to get something out of our in-house document repository. My reply was:
From MS Teams:
The starting point is usually one of tag tables... You are in a maze of twisty, little passages, all alike.
I had to explain the reference to him. Earlier today, I mentioned this to one of the senior developers, who also didn't recognise it, and, after I explained, commented that he was "minus ten years old" when the source of this was popular. Who else here remembers where this comes from and spent time on it?
PLUGH
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Yesterday I got a question from one of the junior developers about using search to get something out of our in-house document repository. My reply was:
From MS Teams:
The starting point is usually one of tag tables... You are in a maze of twisty, little passages, all alike.
I had to explain the reference to him. Earlier today, I mentioned this to one of the senior developers, who also didn't recognise it, and, after I explained, commented that he was "minus ten years old" when the source of this was popular. Who else here remembers where this comes from and spent time on it?
When I was at Uni a friend had worked on the source for it and realised that the game was entirely deterministic and repeatable as long as you typed the exact same sequence of keystrokes. Since the version we had had no way to save a game and resume later, he wrote a simple C program which read a file to feed in to the program, and also added all the keys you typed to the end of the file, thus we could replay the game to wherever we had got to last time. And a hollow voice still says "Plugh!".
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One of my University friends frequently comment that being a sophomore was the three best years of his life. (You had to pass all freshman/sophomore exams to advance to junior level.) Well above two of those three years, he spent on the (ASCII text only) version of Adventure, and he was the very first Great Adventurer Grandmaster of our University. The game was so that if you dragged all the fortunes you had capture to the exit, that cost you resources, i.e. points. He was the first to realize that the dynamite you had found had very little value in itself. But some of fortunes was found in cave quite close to the outside mountain wall. If you detonated the dynamite there, it would break a hole into free air, where you could escape with all your treasures and earn the very highest grade. If you tried to set the dynamite off in other caves, you were usually told that "Unfortunately, you are now dead. I can incarnate you, but that will cost you 500 points." Although the game was command line interpreter based, and could be played on an teletype, the version we had checked whether the terminal was a CRT, with escapes for things like inverse video (black on green rather than green on black). So when the dynamite blast went off, the program sent the escape sequences to the screen to turn the entire 25 by 80 characters inverse video, then back to normal, another flash of inverse video and back. The first one of the students setting off the dynamite was totally unprepared and fell of his chair from the shock :-) Drawing maps of the little twisting passages, all alike (or was that twisting little passages? Or little twisty passages? Or twisty little passages? or passages, all twisty and alike?) came at a very early stage, and was in fact a collaborate effort among a group of eager adventurers. Not all of it was playing, though. We managed to obtain the Adventure source code (in Fortran!), and this study mate of mine spent a lot of his time expanding the cave with new passages, new fortunes to be found, and did major restructuring of the data structures to hold the the treasures you collected, information about your path and he made improvements to the input analyzer. So it was far from a complete waste of time - he learned a lot of programming that way. He graduated as an EE engineer, but from that day he has been a full time programmer, and still is. My study mate's three sophomore years lasted from the fall of 1979 to the spring of 1982. I believe that we got hold of the source code in the spring of 1980.
About that time, I went to an engineering open house at University of Illinois where I saw PLATO. It was used for class assignments and some entertainment. The vector graphic terminals were water cooled. Someone had controlled the solenoids controlling the valves and made a terminal shake in sync with the onscreen animations of a "Leisure Suit Larry" character.
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About that time, I went to an engineering open house at University of Illinois where I saw PLATO. It was used for class assignments and some entertainment. The vector graphic terminals were water cooled. Someone had controlled the solenoids controlling the valves and made a terminal shake in sync with the onscreen animations of a "Leisure Suit Larry" character.
bryanren wrote:
University of Illinois where I saw PLATO
Online multi-player gaming. Players could be in one game across the US. Star Trek. Up to 32 players. Federation, Orion, Klingon, Romulans. Ship type for each was different. I heard, but never actually saw, a claim that someone hooked one keyboard to multiple machines to make a 'fleet' that maneuvered the same. Probably wore out keyboards because you had to rapidly hit a key (space?) during any battle to keep your shields up. ------------------------------- Also 'tracking' users. Games/applications ran in a space and if someone accessed that one could track their usage (seems like more than just the name.)
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Yesterday I got a question from one of the junior developers about using search to get something out of our in-house document repository. My reply was:
From MS Teams:
The starting point is usually one of tag tables... You are in a maze of twisty, little passages, all alike.
I had to explain the reference to him. Earlier today, I mentioned this to one of the senior developers, who also didn't recognise it, and, after I explained, commented that he was "minus ten years old" when the source of this was popular. Who else here remembers where this comes from and spent time on it?
Colossal Cave Adventure, Star Trek, Lunar Lander, even the original Oregon Trail. 1970-75-ish. All clackity clacking on an ASR-33 teletype. I remember it well. When we upgraded to a "portable" thermal print terminal in 1975, we lost all the clackity-ness for a quieter "Phhhffft, phhhffft".
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Yesterday I got a question from one of the junior developers about using search to get something out of our in-house document repository. My reply was:
From MS Teams:
The starting point is usually one of tag tables... You are in a maze of twisty, little passages, all alike.
I had to explain the reference to him. Earlier today, I mentioned this to one of the senior developers, who also didn't recognise it, and, after I explained, commented that he was "minus ten years old" when the source of this was popular. Who else here remembers where this comes from and spent time on it?
