Colossal Cave Adventure

Make smaller games that speak to people.

Before the video game industry existed, when people were creating Colossal Cave Adventure and the earliest game, like the original Rogue, not Roguelike, but Rogue, these people were all creating personal games, because they were creating...

The fantasies they had sitting around the table playing D&D or imagining controlling a spaceship into space during the Cold War.

This all came out of nowhere because there was no model to follow.

Josh Mandel, who knows Ken and Roberta Williams and Marcus.

So like when he got his, he's like, dude, you got to hire this guy because they were looking for someone to do the PC edition of Colossal Cave.

And like Josh was like, you need to check this guy out.

He's really good.

days.

Let me give you a close-up so we can really see it.

This is the chest edition for the Colossal Cave stuff.

I built this.

And he wants to connect with his kids.

And so he designs a kind of dungeon-crawling adventure game called Adventure, which is all set in the map of it.

He was a spelunker, and he based the map on the Colossal Cave network of caves in Kentucky.

And so it's Colossal Cave Adventure.

This other guy finds it, and he wants to add to it and expand it.

And so few people have...

He doesn't even have the guy's email address, but he has his name, and so he just types that name at all of the URLs that there are to find the guy.

And he does, and then he agrees, and then he rewrites it, and so then this game becomes Colossal Cave Adventure.

Okay.

And I've been wanting to do an implementation of Colossal Cave Adventure because...

I think that would be funny.

You could do like an infinite loop tape to load the text.

Oh, Colossal Cave.

Or Colossal Cave Adventure.

That's...

That's not Crystal Cave.

Yeah.

And rather than coding, you used it to play Colossal Cave Adventure.

Yeah.

[laughs]