Colossal Cave Adventure - Later Versions

Later Versions

Many versions of Colossal Cave have been released, generally titled simply Adventure, or adding a tag of some sort to the original name (e.g. Adventure II, Adventure 550, Adventure4+, ...). Large value numeric tags denoted the maximum score a player can achieve after playing a perfect game. Hence, Crowther/Woods Adventure, the first with a point scoring system, is also synonymous with Adventure 350. Russel Dalenberg's Adventure Family Tree page provides the best (though still incomplete) summary of different versions and their relationships.

Until Crowther's original version was found, the "definitive original" was generally considered to be the version that Don Woods expanded in 1977. As part of that expansion, Woods added a scoring system that went up to 350 points. Extended versions with extra puzzles go up to 1000 points or more. The AMP MUD had a multi-player Colossal Cave.

In 1977, Jim Gillogly of the RAND Corporation spent several weeks porting the code from FORTRAN to C under Unix, with the agreement of both Woods and Crowther. It can be found as part of the BSD Operating Systems distributions, or as part of the "bsdgames" package under most Linux distributions, under the command name "adventure".

The game was also ported to Prime Computer's super-mini running PRIMOS in the late 1970s, utilising FORTRAN IV, and to IBM mainframes running VM/CMS in late 1978, utilizing PL/I.

Microsoft released a version of Adventure in 1981 with its initial version of MS-DOS 1.0 for the IBM PC (on a single sided disk, requiring 32kB of RAM). This was released on a 5¼ inch disk and booted directly from the disk. It could not be opened from DOS. This version contained 130 rooms, 15 treasures, 40 useful objects and 12 problems to be solved. The progress of two games could be saved on a diskette.

Microsoft also released a version of Adventure in 1980 for the Apple II Plus computer as well as the TRS-80.

A generic version of the game was developed in 1981 by Graham Thomson for the ZX-81 as the Adventure-writing kit. This stripped down version had space for 50 rooms and 15 objects and was designed to allow the aspiring coder to modify the game and thus personalize it. The game's code was published in April 1982.

Dave Platt's influential 550 points version (released in 1984) was innovative in a number of ways. It broke away from coding the game directly in a programming language such as FORTRAN or C. Instead, Platt developed A-code – a language for adventure programming – and wrote his extended version in that language. The A-code source was pre-processed by an FORTRAN 77 (F77) "munger" program, which translated A-code into a text database, and a tokenised pseudo-binary. These were then distributed together with a generic A-code F77 "executive", also written in F77, which effectively "ran" the tokenised pseudo-binary.

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.