On Jun 3, 2008, at 4:21 PM, Stephen Frazier wrote:
No, I meant 1970. It was one of the first games that ran on the computer centers TSO system. (It seems like it had another name before it was called TSO but I don't remember it.) Startrek and Football were the others. They all appeared about 1969. I don't remember which was first. Adventure was written in PL/I and Startrek was in Fortran. Football was in another language. (Cobol? or Basic? maybe) I wrote the OU version of adventure in my spare time while working on the help desk. The university version wasn't that much different it just had the names changed and a few new passages added. "You are in an administration building filled with twisty little passages all alike." I left the help desk in 1973 to work for DHS as a programmer.
I will be eternally grateful if anyone can come up with documentation showing Adventure to have been played before 1975. A dated printout of a session transcript would be ideal, or even a dated listing showing the file resident on some system.
I'm guessing that what's going on here is conflation of "Adventure" and something sorta-kinda-similar, like "Hunt the Wumpus" (Gregory Yob, Dartmouth BASIC, 1972 or earlier)--it had definitely migrated to "mainframes" by 1972 according to Wikipedia and was first published in 1973, so I would not be surprised if *it* were around in 1970. Bottomless pits, bats, and dodecahedrons? Wumpus. Bottomless pits, dwarves, and huge fierce green snakes that bar the way? Adventure.
Adam
