The game was so popular in fact that it spawned its own video game genre, that of the “adventure game”– to say that the game was influential to the history of video games would be an understatement.Īs a modern-day gamer influenced by titles like Minecraft and The Binding of Isaac, my expectations were for Adventure to be a procedurally generated cave game with a set number of few room types whose specific attributes would be generated on the fly. One of very few programs available at launch, Adventure found an audience in many– including my parents. The PDP-10 is perhaps best known, however, for being the platform on which Bill Gates and Paul Allen developed the first BASIC interpreter thanks to the PDP-10, Gates and Allen were able to use BASIC as a launching point for their first company– Micro-Soft.Īs Adventure found its way into more PDP-10s, programmer named Don Woods added fantasy elements to the game come 1977 this early port sparked a frenzy of sorts, and Microsoft soon ported their own version for newly released IBM PCs in 1981. The PDP-10 was a notorious machine that enabled the development of other well-known early titles like Zork (1980) and Dungeon (1975). Played even by my parents at the time, Colossal Cave Adventure is a text-based adventure game originally developed by William Crowther for the PDP-10 mainframe computer in 1975. Colossal Cave Adventure: A Modern Critique

Colossal cave adventure