Wumpus predates Unix. It was a basic game on the GE635 when I first saw it in the mid 1960s along with a horse racing game a blackjack game. I ran them on the ASR 33 in my Dads office it’s what got be interested in computers actually
Many games were on different systems and reimplemented. david Ahl eventually published a book called 101 basic computer games which was a collection that he brought together from a number of systems.
HP2000, TSS/8, DTSS and GCOS as well as TOPS and later RSTS all had games as well as Unix.
As for Moonlander, my friend the late Jack Burness wrote it as a contractor for DEC as a demo for the GT40 and was also not of Unix origin. Originally it was DOS11 later RT11. It’s an amazing piece of code - check out his 16 bit cordic integer trig routines. He sat in the MIT library for a weekend figuring out how to write them. Hand simulating everything. Went back to Maynard and typed up his routines. Very impressive
Rogue was Unix however but that was BSD.
All,
I just saw this over on dragonflydigest.com:
https://0j2zj3i75g.unbox.ifarchive.org/0j2zj3i75g/Article.html
It's an article from 2007 about the history and genesis of the
Colossal Cave Adventure game - replete with lots of pics. What I
found fascinating was that the game is based on the author's
actual cave explorations vis a vis the real Colossal Cave. Gives
you a whole new appreciation for the game.
My question is do y'all know of any interesting backstories about
games that were developed and or gained traction on unix? I like
some of the early stuff (wumpus, in particular), but know nothing
of origins. Or, was it all just mindless entertainment designed to
wile away the time? Spacewar, I know a bit about, but not the
story, if there is one... Maybe, somebody needed to develop a new
program to simulate the use of fuel in rockets against gravity
and... so... lunar lander was born? I dunno, as somebody who grew
up playing text games, I'd like to think there was more behind the
fun that mindless entertainment... So, how about it, was your
officemate at bell labs tooling away nights writing a game that
had the whole office addicted to playing it, while little did they
know the characters were characterizations of his annoying
neighbors?
If you don't mind, if you take the thread off into the distance
and away from unix game origins, please rename the thread quickly
:).
Thanks,
Will
Sent from a handheld expect more typos than usual