Hunt the Wumpus

Hunt the Wumpus was an important early computer game. It was based on a simple hide-and-seek format, featuring a mysterious monster (the Wumpus) that lurked deep inside a network of rooms. Using a command line text interface, the player would enter commands to move through the rooms, or shoot arrows along crooked paths through several adjoining rooms. There were twenty rooms, each connecting to three others, arranged like the vertices of a dodecahedron (or the faces of an icosahedron). Hazards included bottomless pits, super bats (which would drop the player in a random location) and the Wumpus itself. When the player had deduced from hints which chamber the Wumpus was in without entering it, he would fire an arrow into the Wumpus' chamber to slay it. However, firing the arrow into the wrong chamber would startle the Wumpus, which might then devour the player.

Related Topics:
Computer game - Command line - Dodecahedron - Icosahedron

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Originally written by Gregory Yob in BASIC while attending the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, and noticed on mainframes at least by 1972, Hunt the Wumpus was first published in the magazine "People's Computer Company" in 1973, again in 1975 in "Creative Computing", and finally in 1980 in the book "Basic Computer Games". Building on several "grid" based games of the "Battleship" variety, Yob injected adversarial humor into the computer's hints, prefiguring the "voice" of the Infocom narrator. 1 Later versions of the game offered more hazards and other cave layouts.

Related Topics:
Gregory Yob - BASIC - University of Massachusetts Dartmouth - 1972 - People's Computer Company - 1973 - 1975 - Creative Computing - 1980 - Basic Computer Games - Battleship - Infocom

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