History of "Adventure" for the Atari 2600

According to Robinett – who graciously assisted me with information from his as-yet unpublished memoirs – he was inspired to make Adventure after getting to try out Colossal Cave Adventure during a visit to the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab early in 1978. For the unfamiliar, Colossal Cave Adventure is a text-based game built off of an earlier PDP-10 program written by Willie Crowther, simply called ADVENT or alternately either Colossal Cave or Adventure at the time, that had players exploring a real-world cave system. Crowther was a caver and a rock climber at the time, and looking to provide an activity for his children following his divorce, programmed a rendition of a portion of the Mammoth Cave system in Kentucky for them to explore. This included a variety of puzzles to solve and fantasy elements, and after Crowther shared it with his Dungeons & Dragons pals they provided some feedback and suggestions. Crowther abandoned the game once it had gotten to a functional state in ... Read full article.