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Colossal Cave Adventure (1976)

Will Crowther

PDP-10 · PDP-11

3.36 from 25 ratings

71 members have it in their collection · 2 playing now · 11 backlogged · 26 wish listed

How long? · 100% 7h (from 1 logged playthrough)

Colossal Cave Adventure is a text adventure game, developed originally in 1976, by Will Crowther for the PDP-10 mainframe. The game was expanded upon in 1977, with help from Don Woods, and other programmers created variations on the game and ports to other systems in the following years. In the game, the player controls a character through simple text commands … Read more
Colossal Cave Adventure is a text adventure game, developed originally in 1976, by Will Crowther for the PDP-10 mainframe. The game was expanded upon in 1977, with help from Don Woods, and other programmers created variations on the game and ports to other systems in the following years. In the game, the player controls a character through simple text commands to explore a cave rumored to be filled with wealth. Players earn predetermined points for acquiring treasure and escaping the cave alive, with the goal to earn the maximum amount of points offered. The concept bore out from Crowther's background as a caving enthusiast, with the game's cave structured loosely around the Mammoth Cave system in Kentucky. Read less
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Details

Developers
Will Crowther
Publishers
Digital Equipment Corporation, Will Crowther
Genres
Adventure
Themes
Fantasy

Release dates

  • Q1 1976 (Full Release) (North_America) PDP-10
  • 1977 (Full Release) (North_America) PDP-11

Also available on

Related

Remakes

  • Colossal Cave (Jan 2023) · LIN, MAC, NSW, PC, PS4, PS5, XONE, XSX
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Rating distribution

5 stars
3
4 stars
9
3 stars
9
2 stars
2
1 star
2
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Community All Reviews Statuses

giopep

Review giopep 4/5 · Nov 25, 2024

Obviously it’s an incredible milestone that influenced all adventure games until at least the mid-Eighties. Today it’s a very limited game but it still is fascinating in the setup, in certain descriptions, in how some puzzles are bizarrely constructed and in all the “oh so meta” conclusive part. I played the emulated version available on the Windows Store, which is …

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Obviously it’s an incredible milestone that influenced all adventure games until at least the mid-Eighties. Today it’s a very limited game but it still is fascinating in the setup, in certain descriptions, in how some puzzles are bizarrely constructed and in all the “oh so meta” conclusive part. I played the emulated version available on the Windows Store, which is not the very first one, but it’s fine. It feels at the same time like a game from the Seventies, a game from the Eighties and in certain aspects a game frome decades later.

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1 Comment
scoopings

Status scoopings Nov 10, 2021

as frustrating as this game is, after reading about its connections to mammoth cave in kentucky, which I have been to, and about stephen bishop's relation to the cave and its mapping, this, this game is great. yea, text adventures are a liked genre now. yay the chronology experiment strikes again

2 Comment Permalink
scoopings

Review scoopings 5/5 · Nov 2, 2021

An Impressive, Albeit Frustrating, Influence on a genre you can only learn to love by playing

Play: 8/10 I can't deny I wound up quite addicted to this once I broke down and used a guide. This thing's tough, if like me, you are a completionist. I'm not a big fan of text adventures at this point, but I may grow to love them. This is the closest I've gotten to loving a text adventure so …

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Play: 8/10 I can't deny I wound up quite addicted to this once I broke down and used a guide. This thing's tough, if like me, you are a completionist. I'm not a big fan of text adventures at this point, but I may grow to love them. This is the closest I've gotten to loving a text adventure so far (mind you, I'm going chronologically for games, so there's not much competition yet, heh). But in the end, the frustration of the RNG (perhaps only due to the way I can access the game) and the recurrent dwarves/pirates made me not go through with my completionist goal. Maybe someday. Hot tip: ALWAYS type "get axe" right after you throw axe, no matter the situation

Feel: 9/10 Again, I got quite sucked into the game for a while, as I got to know the map and remember room descriptions like the misty room, swiss cheese room, the fissure room, etc.... the Y2 room, commands like plugh plover etc, and things I only knew thanks to guides (like the slab, pit, bedquilt commands at least for the 350-point version I played). Though the frustrations won out over the fun of the game, I dunno, the fact I already have such an attachment and urge with this game to go for completionism (not to mention, altogether rare for its time... and the difficulty to do so...) bumped it up to an 8. I liked the humor, I loved the descriptions, and honestly this game could grow on me over time as I have more perspective on the genre and derivative works. I once went on a field trip to Mammoth Cave in Kentucky, and yeah, to discover this game was inspired by its mapping. And then I read up on Stephen Bishop. Wow. Love it

Attachment: 9/10 I probly will be replaying this in the future to see if I can get better RNG or find a better way to play the game than a browser app heh. The fact that I still have the urge to replay the game right now, and most likely in the future, because I want that completionist goal says a lot. After playing more text adventures, and understanding this game's influence, this decidedly is a game I will return to.

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2 Comment