Adventure

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What Does Adventure Mean?

Colossal Cave Adventure, also known as ADVENT or simply Adventure, is an early computer game written in a command-line format that represented the most modern technology at the time. In Colossal Cave Adventure, the player enters simple commands into a command-line prompt, and the computer moves the player around within a virtual world corresponding to a series of caves in the state of Kentucky.

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Techopedia Explains Adventure

Colossal Cave Adventure was designed by Will Crowther in the late 1970s. It was written in the FORTRAN coding language, and took up about 300 kB of core memory. A later more developed version of the game swelled to about 3000 lines of code representing 140 map locations, nearly 300 vocabulary words, and a variety of “treasure objects.” Colossal Cave Adventure was made for a 36-bit PDP-10 machine.

After exploring a number of Kentucky caves, Crowther wrote the program as entertainment, adding mythical creatures and other interesting features partially based on the works of J.R.R. Tolkien. Eventually, Colossal Cave Adventure led to other sorts of similar “choose your own adventure” games where players enter simple commands, and get orienting responses from the computer. It is important to note that in these games, the player cannot “see” where he or she is in the game’s territory – the player figures it out based on the computer’s text directions. Later, the best-selling “Adventure” Atari 2600 game of the 1980s was allegedly built as a more visual form of the same game type.

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Margaret Rouse
Technology Expert
Margaret Rouse
Technology Expert

Margaret is an award-winning technical writer and teacher known for her ability to explain complex technical subjects to a non-technical business audience. Over the past twenty years, her IT definitions have been published by Que in an encyclopedia of technology terms and cited in articles by the New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, ZDNet, PC Magazine, and Discovery Magazine. She joined Techopedia in 2011. Margaret's idea of a fun day is helping IT and business professionals learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages.