Portugues
Colossal Cave Adventure
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About the game
You are standing at the end of a road before a small brick building. Around you is a forest, and a small stream flows out of the building and down a gully. Somewhere below lies a vast cave, rumoured to hold gold, jewels and stranger things, and the only way to find out is to go and look.
Will Crowther wrote the first version around 1976, drawing on his own caving trips in Kentucky, and Don Woods expanded it in 1977 with treasures, magic and a much larger map. It spread from computer to computer across universities and research labs, gave the whole genre its name and set the pattern that Zork and almost every text adventure since then would follow: rooms, objects, a terse parser and a world that rewards curiosity.
This is Adventure 2.5, the last version the two authors worked on, with 430 points to earn. The cave is large and full of famous moments: a bird that must be carried carefully, a snake blocking the way, a twisty little maze of passages, all alike, a pirate who steals your loot and a few words that do more than you would expect. It is old, hard and occasionally unfair, and exploring it is still a pleasure.
Playing it here
Click Play now and the game asks whether you would like instructions. Type
no (or yes, for the authors' own introduction) and press Enter. Every
command is one or two words, a verb and a noun, or just a direction. The
game only looks at the first five letters of each word, so inven works as
well as inventory.
Commands
| Command | What it does |
|---|---|
north, south, east, west, up, down (or n, s, e, w, u, d) |
walk; places also work, such as building, forest, downstream |
enter, in, out, back |
move into or out of somewhere |
get, drop, open, light, off something |
the everyday actions, as in get lamp or light lamp |
inventory (i) |
list what you are carrying |
look |
describe where you are in full again |
score |
see how many points you have |
brief |
stop repeating long descriptions |
help, info |
the authors' notes on how to play |
save / resume |
keep your progress in this browser (saving costs 5 points) and load it back later |
A few things worth knowing
Take the lamp. The cave is dark, and wandering in the dark is the quickest way to fall into a pit. The batteries do not last forever, so do not waste them on the surface.
Treasures belong in the building. You earn full points for a treasure only after you carry it back to the well house and leave it there.
Draw a map. Directions are not always reversible, and the mazes are designed to confuse. Dropping objects to mark rooms is the classic trick.
Try the strange words. Some words written on the walls are worth saying out loud.
Credits and licence
Colossal Cave Adventure was created by Will Crowther and expanded by Don Woods. The version served here is Eric S. Raymond's Open Adventure, a faithful forward-port of Adventure 2.5 from 1995 played in its original mode, compiled to Glulx by Daniel Fox Franke with his Wasm2Glulx tool. Open Adventure is distributed under the BSD 2-clause licence with the permission of the authors, and the port keeps the same terms. The licence text is linked from this page, and the source code of the port is in the author's repository.