Colossal Cave Adventure

Hoping to reconnect with his estranged daughters following the collapse of his marriage, in 1976 programmer and spelunker Will Crowther rigged a text parser to interact with a narrated simulation of the Bedquilt region of Kentucky’s real-life Mammoth Cave system he and his wife Pat had explored and mapped together.

Starting with a faithful reproduction of geological formations he upped the gameplay potential (oh boy… rocks!) with an injection of period “Frodo Lives!” pseudofantasy tropes (including angry dwarfs and that first great video game magic word “xyzzy”) and stocked the cavern complex with a series of treasures to be collected and deposited back topside.

The formula was later built and improved upon by a host of others over some 30 (!) years now, most notably by Don Woods, but an August 2007 rediscovery of March 1977 backups of Crowther’s original source code reveals how many important elements of the game’s design were already present in the earliest versions.