In the late 1970s, Microsoft employee Gordon Letwin ported Colossal Cave Adventure game to the Radio Shack TRS-80 home computer, although he did the work independently under the name “Softwin Associates.” Microsoft released Letwin’s port as Microsoft Adventure for the TRS-80 in 1979, making it the first game ever published by the firm.Ĭuriously, Microsoft declined to credit Crowther and Woods in the Microsoft Adventure game and manual, possibly considering Adventure public domain, since it freely made the rounds on mainframes at at time. MobyGamesĪt first, Colossal Cave adventure wasn’t a commercial product its authors distributed it for free. The Microsoft Adventure binder, disk, and splash screen for IBM PC.
Still, Adventure is one of the seminal classics in computer game history, inspiring later text adventure games like Zork and even graphical adventure video games later on. Some consider Colossal Cave (commonly called “ ADVENT” or “ Adventure” for short) to be the first interactive fiction game, although in 2015, someone discovered a slightly earlier contender called Wander. You play it by typing verb-object commands such as “go north” and “get lamp” into a special command prompt within the game. It’s an entirely text-based game with no graphics. Microsoft Adventure is a port of Colossal Cave Adventure, an interactive fiction computer game created between 19 by William Crowther and Don Woods for the DEC PDP-10 minicomputer. Here’s why it’s important-and how you can play it today.
As a port of a mainframe classic that spawned the adventure game genre (and Microsoft’s first published game), its release represents a historical milestone.
COLOSSAL CAVE ADVENTURE EMULATOR MAC PC
40 years ago, IBM published the world’s first commercial IBM PC game, Microsoft Adventure.