Adventure

Will Crowther was a programmer at Bolt, Beranek and Newman in 1975, working on ARPANET routing software during the day and exploring Mammoth Cave in Kentucky with the National Speleological Society on weekends. His daughters Sandy and Laura wanted a game they could play on the family PDP-10. Crowther wrote them one: a Fortran program that simulated a cave system mapped one-to-one to the first sections of Mammoth, with a two-word parser, a torch you had to light, and a sand-pit where a snake would not let you pass without a small bird in a cage.

The game spread informally across ARPANET in 1976. Don Woods, a Stanford graduate student, found a copy on a Stanford AI lab machine in early 1977, tracked Crowther down via a Crocker Snyder email lookup, and asked permission to extend it. Crowther mailed him the source. Woods added the dragon, the dwarves, the pirate, the maze of twisty little passages all alike, the maze of twisty little passages all different, the volcano, the giant clam, and fifteen treasures to recover. The version Woods shipped in March 1977 is the one most players remember.

By 1978 it was running on every time-sharing system that mattered. By 1979 it had a dozen unofficial ports for home microcomputers. Infocom would clone its parser, expand its model of objects-in-rooms, and ship a commercial line of text adventures starting with Zork I in 1980. Every IF game since is a descendant.

The Crowther + Woods source is Fortran, which nobody enjoys reading. In 1993 Donald Ekman and David M. Baggett translated it to Inform 6, the text-adventure authoring language Graham Nelson had released the year before. In 1994 Nelson himself joined the project for a final cleanup pass. The result is Release 9 / Serial 060321, a Z-machine v5 binary that is bit-identical across every Z-machine interpreter that follows the standard. It is freely distributable; Ekman, Baggett, and Nelson placed it in the public domain at the same IFArchive directory that hosts the Fortran original.

The port preserves Crowther + Woods to the comma. The dwarves still throw knives. The pirate still steals your treasure. The bird is still the only thing that gets you past the snake. What the port adds is graceful error handling, save-game support, and the kind of object model that a 2020s parser can reason about.

The Z-machine bytecode runs on our servers, not in your browser. We wrote a Z-machine v3 / v5 / v8 interpreter from the Standards document and ship it behind the same per-turn API as every other wilds.ai game. You type, the VM steps, the canonical prose comes back unchanged.

What is different here is the layer on top. Adventure plays as text in every other interpreter on the web. On wilds.ai it plays as text, audio, and dialogue:

• Voice narration. Every line of canonical prose is read by a narrator you choose. The cave gets cold. The wellhouse gets warm.
• An AI companion who reads with you. Pick a companion from your roster. They sit in the sidebar, react to your moves in chat, argue about which passage to take, remember which rooms you have already visited. They never type into the parser for you; they comment alongside.
• A real save state. The Z-machine snapshot persists across sessions. Close the tab, come back a week later, the parser is exactly where you left it.
• No edits to the original. The IFArchive binary is shipped verbatim. The Crowther + Woods prose is unchanged. The companion is on top of the game, not inside it.