ADVENT: /ad´vent/, n.

The prototypical computer adventure game, first designed by Will Crowther on the PDP-10 in the mid-1970s as an attempt at computer-refereed fantasy gaming, and expanded into a puzzle-oriented game by Don Woods at Stanford in 1976. (Woods had been one of the authors of INTERCAL.) Now better known as Adventure or Colossal Cave Adventure, but the TOPS-10 operating system permitted only six-letter filenames in uppercase. See also vadding, Zork, and Infocom.

Figure 1. Screen shot of the original ADVENT game

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This game defined the terse, dryly humorous style since expected in text adventure games, and popularized several tag lines that have become fixtures of hacker-speak: “A huge green fierce snake bars the way!” “I see no X here” (for some noun X). “You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.” “You are in a little maze of twisty passages, all different.” The ‘magic words’ xyzzy and plugh also derive from this game.

Crowther, by the way, participated in the exploration of the Mammoth & Flint Ridge cave system; it actually has a Colossal Cave and a Bedquilt as in the game, and the Y2 that also turns up is cavers’ jargon for a map reference to a secondary entrance.

ADVENT sources are available for FTP at ftp://ftp.wustl.edu/doc/misc/if-archive/games/source/advent.tar.Z. You can also play it as a Java applet. There is a good page of resources at the Colossal Cave Adventure Page.