History
Will Crowther was a programmer at Bolt, Beranek & Newman, which developed the ARPANET (a forerunner of the Internet). Crowther was an experienced caver, who applied his experience in Mammoth Cave (in Kentucky) to create a game that he could enjoy with his young daughters.
Crowther had explored the Mammoth Cave in the early 1970s, and created a vector map based on surveys of parts of the real cave, but the text game is a completely separate entity, created during the 1975-76 academic year and featuring fantasy elements such as an axe-throwing dwarf and a magic bridge.
The version that is best known today was the result of a collaboration with Don Woods, a graduate student who discovered the game on a computer at Stanford University and made significant expansions and improvements, with Crowther's blessing. A big fan of Tolkien, he introduced additional fantasy elements, such as elves and a troll.
When Roberta Williams and her husband Ken discovered the game, and were subsequently unable to find anything similar, they were inspired to create their own software house, founding On-Line Software (later Sierra Online, and then Sierra Entertainment), which created the first graphical adventure game (Mystery House), and quickly became a dominant player in the entertainment software market for the next two decades, creating successful adventures such as King's Quest, Space Quest, and Leisure Suit Larry.
Read more about this topic: Colossal Cave Adventure
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The history of the genesis or the old mythology repeats itself in the experience of every child. He too is a demon or god thrown into a particular chaos, where he strives ever to lead things from disorder into order.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The history of the world is none other than the progress of the consciousness of freedom.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)
“To summarize the contentions of this paper then. Firstly, the phrase ‘the meaning of a word’ is a spurious phrase. Secondly and consequently, a re-examination is needed of phrases like the two which I discuss, ‘being a part of the meaning of’ and ‘having the same meaning.’ On these matters, dogmatists require prodding: although history indeed suggests that it may sometimes be better to let sleeping dogmatists lie.”
—J.L. (John Langshaw)