"Hunt the Wumpus" came from the People's Computer Company in San
Francisco. Wikipedia article on him is nice; we corresponded a bit.
CHM has all the old PCC newsletters, it seems, at
https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/102661095
What about Peter Langston's empire? It was distributed as object code, but
someone (CMU?) decompiled it to C, and we built it on Pyramid's. It created
its world by having meteors smash into it to distribute the trace and heavy
metals IIRC.
On Tue, Jan 31, 2023 at 9:32 PM Will Senn <will.senn(a)gmail.com> wrote:
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