"Colossal Cave Adventure" (1976) - Will Crowther and Don Woods Author the First-Ever Work of Interactive Fiction

[DonRocks]

Does anyone remember "Adventure?" (that's what I used to call it, anyway). I used to play it in the late 1970s, and thought it was about the most fun thing I'd ever done.

In the early 1970s, my parents bought me a game from Sears called "Odyssey" which was played on your TV screen using mylar overlays. In truth, the best part of Odyssey was "Pong," which was the inspiration for Atari's arcade game of the same name. The worst overlay (these were like sheets of plastic wrap that stuck to your TV screen due to static electricity) was the "Skiing Game," during which the player would guide his dot down a ski slope. There were no penalties for leaving the slope (the overlay was just a solid piece of purple plastic with a transparent "ski slope" running down it), and no rewards for successful navigation: There were no points, there was no clock; It just ... was. This skiing overlay was so lame that I can't even explain it properly. 

Come to think of it, *I* wrote an interactive-fiction game when I was 14 for my Computer Math class when I was in 9th grade. Players were  flying through space, and the game would give them options - I even had a graphic monster, and in some instances, the players spaceship would fly into an asteroid and blow up (this was all text-based, of course - even the graphic monster).