Adventure

Will Crowther and Don Woods (1976)

Adventure (1976)
Will Crowther and Don Woods
Ported by Arthur O'Dwyer

Crowther and Woods' Adventure is the granddaddy of all interactive fiction. Originally written by Will Crowther in his spare time at BBN, it made its way onto the fledgling ARPAnet, where it was discovered by Don Woods at the Stanford AI Lab. With Crowther's permission, Woods expanded the game to encompass more than double the number of rooms and puzzles. Adventure has been translated, ported, and imitated hundreds of times in the 36 years since its creation.

This particular version of Adventure was written by Arthur O'Dwyer in C, closely following a version written by Don Knuth in CWEB, which in turn was based on Crowther and Woods' original Fortran source code.

Play online now

This version of Adventure was created using vbccz, a C compiler for the Z-machine. To play a work like this one, you need an interpreter program: many are available, among them Zoom for Mac OS X and for Unix; Windows Frotz or Windows Glulxe for Windows. Or you can use the Parchment interpreter, without downloading anything, by following the 'Play online now' link. You'll need to have Javascript enabled on your web browser.