Colossal Cave Adventure let’s talk about that. I’m supposed to tell you my experience with the game and what I think, but before I do that, I need to make sure that you understand what Colossal Cave Adventure is and a little bit of its history.
Colossal Cave Adventure is a text-based adventure game where you guide a character through a series or different areas such as a forest, building, river, and of course through a bunch of caves. This text-based video game was developed between the years 1975 and 1977 by a single man named will Crowther. The game was later expanded upon with the help of Don Woods later in the year the game was finished. In Colossal Cave Adventure you control a character using text commands entered in using your keyboard. There are no images in the original game just text on the screen describing your surroundings. From this description you can then decide what you want to do, and you input the text just as “go south” and the game will let you know if you can go that way. If you can’t you must find another way to go. As you wonder these caves, you’ll find magic words, treasure, and enemies.
I have sunk a couple of hours into it trying it on my own with nothing but the game hints to guide me. And a few more looking up a tutorial online. I never managed to run into any enemies, but I’ve seen talk of such enemies as dwarves and the like. I have managed to get lost a quite a lot in this game do to the nature of the way the surroundings are described. I got lost for a while even before I made it into the caves. This is because I didn’t know the commands and had no clue where to go. But when I really got lost was when the computer wouldn’t say anything about what I had just typed in. This would lead me to give it a break for a while and move onto other things. After about a day I came back to the Colossal Cave Adventure and decided to pull out a tutorial. With this I made it a considerable was into the game and decided that I had played enough to form my opinion on it.
In conclusion, Colossal Cave Story is a relic of the past. But let that not take away from the significance of its invention. It carved a path forward for the video games that we all enjoy so much in our lives. Obviously it doesn’t stand up well when you compare it to modern games, but that’s not what this is about. I believe that if I had this game when it was made, I would probably give up on it and go and read a good book instead. At this point and time video games can’t really compete with the story telling of books, TV, and movies. And without the help of someone teaching me what to do I believe that I would be completely lost and have no choice but to either waste hours trying to figuring out how the games work.
