Exciting news for video game history buffs: Not only has the original Fortran source code for the original Colossal Cave Adventure game been found (here) … Dennis G. Jerz has gone all the way and traveled to the original cave, and analyzed the program. It’s in this paper: Somewhere Nearby is Colossal Cave: Examining Will Crowther’s Original “Adventure” in Code and in Kentucky.
So here we are, the cave:
YOU ARE IN AN AWKWARD SLOPING EAST/WEST CANYON
*
And the source code:
C ADVENTURES
IMPLICIT INTEGER(A-Z)
REAL RAN
COMMON RTEXT,LLINE
DIMENSION IOBJ(300),ICHAIN(100),IPLACE(100)
1 ,IFIXED(100),COND(300),PROP(100),ABB(300),LLINE(1000,22)
2 ,LTEXT(300),STEXT(300),KEY(300),DEFAULT(300),TRAVEL(1000)
3 ,TK(25),KTAB(1000),ATAB(1000),BTEXT(200),DSEEN(10)
4 ,DLOC(10),ODLOC(10),DTRAV(20),RTEXT(100),JSPKT(100)
5 ,IPLT(100),IFIXT(100)C READ THE PARAMETERS
IF(SETUP.NE.0) GOTO 1
SETUP=1
KEYS=1
LAMP=2
GRATE=3
ROD=5
BIRD=7
NUGGET=10
SNAKE=11
FOOD=19
WATER=20
AXE=21
DATA(JSPKT(I),I=1,16)/24,29,0,31,0,31,38,38,42,42,43,46,77,71
1 ,73,75/
DATA(IPLT(I),I=1,20)/3,3,8,10,11,14,13,9,15,18,19,17,27,28,29
1 ,30,0,0,3,3/
DATA(IFIXT(I),I=1,20)/0,0,1,0,0,1,0,1,1,0,1,1,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0/
DATA(DTRAV(I),I=1,15)/36,28,19,30,62,60,41,27,17,15,19,28,36
1 ,300,300/
DO 1001 I=1,300
STEXT(I)=0
IF(I.LE.200) BTEXT(I)=0
IF(I.LE.100)RTEXT(I)=0