The Classic Dungeon Adventure Game

This isn't the game that started the Adventure Game craze, the "Colossal Cave Adventure" started that. However, this is the game that spawned commercial computer games around 1980.

When this game appeared at work, seemingly everyone stayed into the evening and was amazed at the detail and puzzles. Forget Myst. This game stretches the imagination and has interesting puzzles.

As was customary at the time, computer games were free. The source code for this one bears an Infocom copyright, however it allows free noncommercial distribution. I obtained it in 1991 and compiled it for MS/DOS. Of course it will run under Windows! The program was written in Fortran, and I'm not providing the source, lest it spoil the game!

Back around 1980, the folks at Infocom wrote a game interpreter and rewrote Zork to run on it, making it possible to play the game on Apples, TRS-80's, CP/M boxes, and other systems of the day rather than being limited to mainframes. THIS program is the original mainframe version. It is equivalent to Zork I + about half of Zork II + the endgame of Zork III.

If by some chance the only version of the game you ever played was on a mainframe, this version may be somewhat of a treat as it is the last mainframe version and has the Bank of Zork and Maze puzzles which didn't appear in early versions.

For all these versions, just unzip the files somewhere and run from that location. These programs run from the command line.

Dungeon Adventure Game (AKA "Zork") for DOS and Windows (194k)

Dungeon Adventure Game (AKA "Zork") for Mac OS X Intel 64-bit (270k)

Dungeon Adventure Game (AKA "Zork") for Mac OS X Apple Silicon(320k)

Dungeon Adventure Game (AKA "Zork") for Linux (201k). -- built for 32-bit Linux. If you have a 64-bit distribution you will need to add 32-bit support.

SPOILER -- MAP OF DUNGEON (from 1982) (3361x2056 pixels, 7.2MB) Thanks to Jeremy Kapp for providing this much nicer image.

Colossal Cave Adventure

So I had been thinking about this old game. The Fortran source code for it is so archaic that porting it would be problematic, so I grabbed the 430 point (original was 350/351) version. This was written by one of the original authors, Don Woods, to add more puzzles and correct some deficiencies of the original.

Don Woods did a conversion from Fortran to C, but was K&R C and not ANSI C. I had to clean it up, get rid of its use of gets() and also modify to use sizeof(long) instead of 4 as it assumed longs to be 4 bytes. The downloadable file here has sources that should compile on anything with perhaps slight modification to the Makefile. The source code is somewhat of a spoiler, especially the text file with all the strings, but the code itself is quite opaque! Included is an executable for Apple Silicon (64-bit M series CPUs). Running it is basically the same as running Zork.

Colossal Caves Adventure with source. (180k)