What Is Adventure?

Ah, the good old days. When simple commands could take you to places, you'd never imagined! Colossal Cave Adventure is a command-line game that takes you into a series of caves in Kentucky. You start at the entrance and can explore your way through the caves by simply entering commands into a prompt. It's like being in a movie where everything is CGI, and no one has to do any acting—except its real life! The best part is that this game was written in 1976, so it's as old as my grandma (and probably yours). That means it was created before computer graphics, tablets, or smartphones. The whole thing was done with just text on a screen! In other words, if you can't play Colossal Cave Adventure on your phone today, you're doing it wrong! Crowther's Colossal Cave Adventure was a game like no other. It was one of the first text-based adventure games and established a format that would be used for decades. In this game, players explored a cave by typing in simple commands. For example, if you typed "LOOK" into the computer, you would get a description of your surroundings at that moment from the computer. If you ordered "GO NORTH," the game would tell you if there was a path to go north from where you were standing. If there weren't, it would ask you to try again later or keep exploring other areas around your current position until one of them turned up an available path northward. It's important to note that this game did not allow players to see where they were concerned with all other objects in the game—they had to figure it out based on what they could see or learn through interacting with different characters and objects within the environment. Later, some games added visuals and audio elements that allowed players to "see" where they were about other objects within the background (though these games still relied on text input rather than mouse input).