01.17.26

How to get to the Colossal Cave and have an ADVENTURE

terminal screen: WELCOME TO ADVENTURE!! WOULD YOU LIKE INSTRUCTIONS? > yes SOMEWHERE NEARBY IS COLOSSAL CAVE, WHERE OTHERS HAVE FOUND FORTUNES IN TREASURE AND GOLD, THOUGH IT IS RUMORED THAT SOME WHO ENTER ARE NEVER SEEN AGAIN. MAGIC IS SAID TO WORK IN THE CAVE. I WILL BE YOUR EYES AND HANDS. DIRECT ME WITH COMMANDS OF 1 OR 2 WORDS. I SHOULD WARN YOU THAT I LOOK AT ONLY THE FIRST FIVE LETTERS OF EACH WORD, SO YOU'LL HAVE TO ENTER "NORTHEAST" AS "NE" TO DISTINGUISH IT FROM "NORTH". (SHOULD YOU GET STUCK, TYPE "HELP" FOR SOME GENERAL HINTS. FOR INFOR- MATION ON HOW TO END YOUR ADVENTURE, ETC., TYPE "INFO".) - - - THIS PROGRAM WAS ORIGINALLY DEVELOPED BY WILLIE CROWTHER. MOST OF THE FEATURES OF THE CURRENT PROGRAM WERE ADDED BY DON WOODS (DON @ SU-AI). CONTACT DON IF YOU HAVE ANY QUESTIONS, COMMENTS, ETC. YOU ARE STANDING AT THE END OF A ROAD BEFORE A SMALL BRICK BUILDING. AROUND YOU IS A FOREST. A SMALL STREAM FLOWS OUT OF THE BUILDING AND DOWN A GULLY. >

So we were configuring the grenzland.club tilde instance I was talking about, and I decided to put some basic commands that might be of interest to people logging on for the first time into the MOTD.
I wrote some scripts to start classic games (e.g. dungeon) and added some programs from the Debian packages.
It turns out there’s not one, but three different (at least marginally) versions of the classic Colossal Cave Adventure game in the Debian repositories. 

One is colossal-cave-adventure, which will give you what is intended to be the earliest functional version of adventure. This is supposed to give you the 350 point game from Crowther and Woods as it was released in 1976, and it goes out of the way to mimic slow terminals and uses only capitals.

apt install colossal-cave-adventure


The other is open-adventure, which is giving you a port of the LAST official release (the 430 point version) from the original creators of the game in 1995.

apt install open-adventure


As both are effectively the same game, the first one starts the game with adventure, while the latter uses the classic shorthand advent.
I feel this should be the other way around, but who am I to criticize that?

But wait, you might wonder, I thought you mentioned three versions?


Yes, there is another different version available in the package bsdgames, which contains (among others) bsdgames-adventure.

apt install bsdgames

This is yet another port of the 430 point version created in the 1980s, and which has been included in BSD releases and the linux bsgames package since the 90s.

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