advent(6) Manual Page

advent [-l logfile] [-o] [-r savefile] [-a savefile] [script…​]

The original Colossal Cave Adventure from 1976-1977 was the origin of all later text adventures, dungeon-crawl (computer) games, and computer-hosted roleplaying games.

This is the last version released by Crowther & Woods, its original authors, in 1995. It has been known as "adventure 2.5" and "430-point adventure". To learn more about the changes since the 350-point original, type 'news' at the command prompt.

There is an 'adventure' in the BSD games package that is a C port by Jim Gillogly of the 1977 version. To avoid a name collision, this game builds as 'advent', reflecting the fact that the PDP-10 on which the game originally ran limited filenames to 6 characters.

This version is released as open source with the permission and encouragement of the original authors.

Unlike the original, this version has a command prompt and supports use of your arrow keys to edit your command line in place. Basic Emacs keystrokes are supported, and your up/down arrows access a command history.

Some minor bugs and message typos have been fixed. Otherwise, the "version" command is almost the only way to tell you’re not running Don’s 1977 version until you get to the new cave sections added for 2.5.

To exit the game, type Ctrl-D (EOF).

There have been no gameplay changes.

Normally, game input is taken from standard input. If script file arguments are given, input is taken from them instead. A script file argument of '-' is taken as a directive to read from standard input.

The binary save file format is fragile, dependent on your machine’s endianness, and unlikely to survive through version bumps. There are version and endianness checks when attempting to restore from a save.

The input parser was the first attempt ever at natural-language parsing in a game and has some known deficiencies. While later text adventures distinguished between transitive and intransitive verbs, Adventure’s grammar distinguishes only between motion and action verbs. Motions are always immediate in their behavior, so both ACTION MOTION and MOTION ACTION (and even MOTION NOUN and MOTION MOTION) are invariably equivalent to MOTION (thus GO NORTH means NORTH and JUMP DOWN means JUMP). Whereas, with actions and nouns, the parser collects words until it’s seen one of each, and then dispatches; if it reaches the end of the command without seeing a noun, it’ll dispatch an "intransitive" action. This makes ACTION1 ACTION2 equivalent to ACTION2 (thus TAKE INVENTORY means INVENTORY), and NOUN ACTION equivalent to ACTION NOUN.

Thus you get anomalies like "eat building" interpreted as a command to move to the building. These should not be reported as bugs; instead, consider them historical curiosities.

Report bugs to Eric S. Raymond <esr@thyrsus.com>. The project page is at http://catb.org/~esr/open-adventure

wumpus(6), adventure(6), zork(6), rogue(6), nethack(6).