![]() Xyzzy was a magic word found in the game. A lengthy development meeting determined that plugh stood for “Procedure List Used to Get Here”. The command passed all internal reviews for release until a technical writer refused to allow a funny word that didn’t mean anything to be included in the product. They added a command to show a stack trace, and called the command “plugh”. Some games recognize "plugh" and will respond to it, usually by making a joke.ĭown the hall from Platt in those days, three programmers were developing a debugger for a commercial operating system (CP6). (The 581-point version was on SIGM011 from the CP/M Users Group, 1984.) If you said "plugh" here you found yourself transported to a Precarious Chair suspended in midair above the molten lava. Eventually, you descended into a maze of catacombs and a "fake Y2". The magic word takes you between the rooms "inside building" and "Y2".Īll vocabulary words of the original game were truncated at five characters, and it is sometimes claimed that "plugh" is actually the truncated "plughole", which would be in keeping with the speleological theme of the game.ĭave Platt and Ralph Witt's 550-point version of Colossal Cave - perhaps the most famous variant of this game other than the original, itself a jumping-off point for many other versions including Michael Goetz's 581 point CP/M version - included a long extension on the other side of the Volcano View. When you first arrive at an area known as "Y2", you receive the message A hollow voice says "plugh". In this maze, the phrase maze of twisty little passages is varied into twelve slightly different formulations, one for each location: In another part of the game, the player is in a maze of passages that are different, not alike. "You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike" is a memorable line from the game.Īmong hackers it is sometimes modified to refer to something other than passages that one can be lost in. Spoiler warning: Plot or ending details follow. Platt's version was also notable for providing a randomised variety of responses when informing the player that, e.g., there was no exit in the nominated direction, for introducing a number of rare "cameo" events, and for committing some outrageous puns. These were then distributed together with a generic A-code F77 "executive", also written in F77, which effectively "ran" the tokenised pseudo-binary. ![]() The A-code source was pre-processed by an F77 "munger" program, which translated A-code into a text database, and a tokenised pseudo-binary. Instead, Platt developed A-code - a language for adventure programming - and wrote his extended version in that language. It broke away from coding the game directly in a programming language such as Fortran or C. The AMP MUD had a multi-player Colossal Cave.ĭave Platt's influential 550 points version was innovative in a number of ways. Extended versions with extra puzzles go up to 770 points or more. Russel Dalenberg's Adventure Family Tree ( ) page provides the best (though still incomplete) summary of different versions and their relationships.īecause Crowther's original version is apparently lost ( ), the 350 point version is held to be the "definitive original". Adventure II, Adventure 550, Adventure4+.). Many versions of Colossal Cave have been released over the years, mostly entitled simply Adventure, or adding a tag of some sort to the original name (e.g. Later versions of the game no longer used general purpose programming languages such as C or Fortran, but were written instead using special interactive fiction frameworks or languages. In 1976, Jim Gillogly of the RAND Corporation spent several weeks on porting the code from Fortran to C under Unix, with the agreement of both Woods and Crowther. The program required almost 300 KB of main memory in order to run, which was tremendous at that time. This wasn't the ideal language due to weaknesses in its treatment of character strings, but it was the only language available on BBN's PDP-10 and so was the one used. ![]() The original Colossal Cave Adventure was written in Fortran. ![]() A big fan of Tolkien, he introduced several elements from his stories, such as elves, trolls, and a volcano. The version that is known today was created in 1976 by Don Woods, another programmer, who discovered the game on his company's machine and made a number of improvements to it, with Crowther's blessing. ![]() ( ) Crowther had explored the Mammoth Cave in 1972, and created a vector map based on surveys of parts of the real cave, but the text game is a completely separate entity, created around 1975 and featuring more fantasy elements, such as axe-throwing dwarves. Crowther was a caver, who applied his experience in Mammoth Cave (in Kentucky) to create a game that he could enjoy with his young daughters. Will Crowther was a programmer at the legendary Bolt, Beranek & Newman, who developed the ARPANET (the forerunner of the Internet). ![]()
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