April Edition Live Magazine - April 2014 Issue. | Page 16

feature

Retro Games that Spawned Gaming Genres

Puzzle game - ‘Tetris’
(1984, Alexey Pajitnov, Nintendo, Spectrum Holobyte)

Text-based adventure - ‘Colossal Cave
Adventure’ (1976, William Crowther, CRL)
All adventure game sub-genres
can be traced back to Colossal
Cave Adventure, a text-based
cave-exploring game from computer programmer and cave enthusiast William Crowther. The layout
of the in-game cave was based on
the Mammoth Cave system found
in Kentucky. Crowther designed
the in-game cave so well, that new
“cavers” could explore the beginning caves in the Mammoth Cave
system in real life after getting familiar with the cave in Colossal
Cave Adventure.
Gameplay in Colossal Cave Adventure is based on logic, and textbased, meaning that you are presented with a series of sentences
and paragraphs similar to a book,
and you must then type in the action you wish to take next into
the text bar at the bottom of the
screen. While it can be difficult for
a modern gamer or a non-gamer to
grasp, the game itself was a major hit with computer programmers

and computer enthusiasts from the
1970s through to the late 80s (and
is still somewhat popular today).
Colossal Cave Adventure (often
referred to simply as Adventure)
has been ported numerous times
across a variety of systems. Some
versions even expand upon the
original game, and the game is
often presented in schools and F