Crowther was also an ardent cave explorer. And his wife had achieved renown among cavers for having been part of a small group that discovered the first known link between the Mammoth and Flint Ridge caves in Kentucky. The combined 144-mile system was the longest known cave in the world. Crowther was the cartographer for the Cave Research Foundation. He used his off-hours to plot intricate subterranean maps on a BBN computer.
In early 1976 he and his wife divorced. Looking for something he could do with his two children, he hit upon an idea that united Will the programmer with Willie the imaginary thief: a simplified, computer version of Dungeons and Dragons called Adventure. Although the game did not use actual maps of the Kentucky caves, Crowther based the geometry of Adventure on stark images of those underground chambers. The iron grate through which players passed at the start of the game was modeled on those installed by the National Park Service at entrances to the Flint Ridge system. He even included a caving in-joke or two; the "Y2" inscribed on a rock at one point in the game is caver shorthand for a secondary entrance.
Crowther finished the program over the course of three or four weekends. His kids -- ages 7 and 5 -- loved it, and Crowther began showing it to friends. But the breakup of his marriage had sapped Crowther's spirit, and he never got around to refining the game.
Bob Taylor, the ARPA pioneer who had set the whole network project in motion in the 1960s, was now director of the computer science lab at Xerox Corp.'s Palo Alto Research Center ( PARC). Taylor persuaded Will Crowther to join him, and when Crowther moved to California in 1976 he left the Adventure program behind in a file on a BBN computer. Unpolished though the game was, word of it had filtered through the network community.
A Stanford graduate student named Don Woods heard about Adventure from a friend who had run across a copy on the Stanford Medical School computer, and he downloaded the game from there. But Woods had difficulty getting Adventure to run at first, and when he did he found it riddled with bugs. Still, he was hooked. "Adventure made users feel like they were interacting more with the computer," said Woods. "It seemed to be responding more to what you typed, rather than just making its own moves like a silent opponent. I think this attracted a lot of players who might otherwise have been turned off by the idea of playing `against' a computer. This was playing `with' a computer."
The game listed Will Crowther as the author, and Woods decided to track down Crowther to get the source code so he could start making repairs to the rudimentary little program. He sent e-mail to every host on the network looking for Crowther, and finally he found him at PARC. Crowther happily handed over the code. It took several months to rework, during which the simple program doubled in size. Woods created new obstacles, added a pirate, twisted the mazes further, and added several treasures that required some problem-solving before they were found.
When Adventure was done, Woods created a guest account on the computer at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory to let people play, and swarms of guests logged in. Adventure spread like Hula-Hoops, as people sent the program to one another over the network. Because Crowther had written it in FORTRAN, a commonly used programming language, it could be adapted to many different computers with relative ease. Both Crowther and Woods encouraged programmers to pirate the game and included their e-mail addresses for anyone looking for help installing, playing or copying the game.
People grew bleary-eyed searching for treasure into the small hours of the morning. "I've long ago lost count of the programmers who've told me that the experience that got them started using computers was playing Adventure," Woods said. The game inspired hundreds of knockoffs, which eventually spawned an entire industry.
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