Computer games - The Computing Universe: A Journey through a Revolution - page 176

Fig. 9.3. Screen shot of Star Trek on the
Apple II.

other commercial versions. Daglow went on to become one of the leaders of
the new profession of computer game designers.
In the early 1970s, William Crowther ( B.9.3 ) worked at Bolt, Beranek and
Newman (BBN), a defense contractor that was developing the ARPANET, the
precursor to today's Internet. In his spare time, he created a text-based explora-
tion game in FORTRAN on BBN's PDP-10:

I had been involved in a non-computer role-playing game called Dungeons
and Dragons at the time, and also I had been actively exploring in caves -
Mammoth Cave in Kentucky in particular. . . . I decided I would fool around
and write a program that was a re-creation in fantasy of my caving, and also
would be a game for the kids, and perhaps some aspects of the Dungeons and
Dragons that I had been playing. My idea was that it would be a computer
game that would not be intimidating to non-computer people, and that was
one of the reasons why I made it so that the player directs the game with
natural language input, instead of more standardized commands. My kids
thought it was a lot of fun. 2

B.9.2. Don Daglow is an eminent
game designer who has been associ-
ated with many landmark computer
games, such as Star Trek , Dungeon,
Baseball, and Utopia.

He called his game Colossal Cave Adventure, or just Adventure. The player
explores a virtual cave system by entering simple two-word commands and
then reading the new text that the command generates. Crowther released
the game on the ARPANET in 1975, and it rapidly became popular among the
ARPANET community. Crowther's Adventure was perhaps the first interactive fic-
tion game, in which the player helps guide the action. Crowther was contacted
a year later by Don Woods ( B.9.4 ), a graduate student at Stanford University,
who asked for permission to make enhancements to the game. Adventure was
mainly an exploration game, and Woods added many more magical objects
as well as creatures like the elves and trolls of author J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle
Earth trilogy. This extension of Crowther's original Adventure game is probably
the first example of a “mod,” short for “modification.” Many games produced
for PCs are now designed so that technically able users can make modifica-
tions and thus add extra interest to the games. A team of students at MIT - Tim
Anderson, Marc Blank, Bruce Daniels, and Dave Lebling - were also inspired by
Adventure and created Zork, another early interactive fiction game. “Zork” was
MIT hacker slang for an unfinished program. Although the game was originally

B.9.3. William Crowther was
part of the BBN team that built
the ARPANET. He was an ardent
caver and wrote the Colossal Cave
Adventure computer game to enter-
tain his daughters.