By all reports Crowther’s version was fairly rudimentary compared to later versions, but it caught on and spread from computer system to computer system.
He wrote the game in part so that his daughters could play it and in part to indulge his love for Dungeons & Dragons. It was set in a huge cave not unlike Mammoth Cave in Kentucky, which Crowther had explored. In the early to mid 1970s, when microcomputers were still barely a blip on the computer hobbyist horizon, mainframe programmer and part-time spelunker Will Crowther logged on to a DEC PDP-10 and used his FORTRAN skills to write a computer game called, simply, Adventure. And it’s possible they’re more popular than ever. But after four decades, they’re still here.
They’ve fallen in and out of fashion, they’ve gone through multiple visual and gameplay styles, and there have been periods when they’ve nearly disappeared altogether. Telltale Game’s Tales from the Borderlands: What adventure games look like in 2015.Īdventure games have gone through many permutations over the last 40 years.
