One of the first jobs I had was at Hughes Aircraft Space and Communications. They had a DEC PDP11-45 and the IT guy had compiled and installed a copy of a program called Adventure written by William Crowther and Don Woods. It was also called Colossal Cave or ADVENT. This was one of the very first text based games. It had incredibly simple syntax and pages of descriptive text about your surroundings and dangers. It has been ported to almost any computing device and has spawned a million successors 🙂

It was about this time that the hobby computer was taking off. I had an Altair 8800 (#298) with a video card I had designed and wire wrapped. The processor was a 1MHz 8080 and it had a very large and heavy homebuilt linear power supply. The cabinet was also custom made of wood and aluminum. At some point, someone ported adventure to basic and was able to play at home with Linda.

We created elaborate maps to navigate through and yes it was possible to lose in this adventure. One of the nastier and more infamous areas was the Maze of Twisty Little Passages. I recreated from the original Fortran, just the maze parts taking a few liberties with the text here and there. It can be found here..