wumpus

wumpus
 /wuhm'p@s/, n.

   The central monster (and, in many versions, the name) of a famous
   family of very early computer games called Hunt The Wumpus. The
   original was invented in 1970 (several years before {ADVENT}) by
   Gregory Yob. The wumpus lived somewhere in a cave with the topology of
   an dodecahedron's edge/vertex graph (later versions supported other
   topologies, including an icosahedron and Mobius strip). The player
   started somewhere at random in the cave with five `crooked arrows';
   these could be shot through up to three connected rooms, and would
   kill the wumpus on a hit (later versions introduced the wounded
   wumpus, which got very angry). Unfortunately for players, the movement
   necessary to map the maze was made hazardous not merely by the wumpus
   (which would eat you if you stepped on him) but also by bottomless
   pits and colonies of super bats that would pick you up and drop you at
   a random location (later versions added `anaerobic termites' that ate
   arrows, bat migrations, and earthquakes that randomly changed pit
   locations).

   This game appears to have been the first to use a non-random
   graph-structured map (as opposed to a rectangular grid like the even
   older Star Trek games). In this respect, as in the dungeon-like
   setting and its terse, amusing messages, it prefigured {ADVENT} and
   {Zork} and was directly ancestral to the latter (Zork acknowledged
   this heritage by including a super-bat colony). A C emulation of the
   original Basic game is available at the Retrocomputing Museum,
   http://www.catb.org/retro/.
    

Hunt the Wumpus
Wumpus

   <games, history> (Or "Wumpus") /wuhm'p*s/ A famous fantasy
   computer game, created by {Gregory Yob} in about 1973.

   Hunt the Wumpus appeared in Creative Computing, Vol 1, No 5,
   Sep - Oct 1975, where Yob says he had come up with the game
   two years previously, after seeing the grid-based games
   Hurkle, Snark and Mugwump at {People's Computing Company}
   (PCC).  He later delivered Wumpus to PCC who published it in
   their newsletter.

   ESR says he saw a version including termites running on the
   {Dartmouth Time-Sharing System} in 1972-3.

   Magnus Olsson, in his 1992-07-07 {USENET} article
   <[email protected]>, posted the {BASIC} {source
   code} of what he believed was pretty much the version that was
   published in 1973 in David Ahl's "101 Basic Computer Games",
   by {Digital Equipment Corporation}.

   The wumpus lived somewhere in a cave with the topology of an
   dodecahedron's edge/vertex graph (later versions supported
   other topologies, including an icosahedron and M"obius
   strip). The player started somewhere at random in the cave
   with five "crooked arrows"; these could be shot through up to
   three connected rooms, and would kill the wumpus on a hit
   (later versions introduced the wounded wumpus, which got very
   angry).  Unfortunately for players, the movement necessary to
   map the maze was made hazardous not merely by the wumpus
   (which would eat you if you stepped on him) but also by
   bottomless pits and colonies of super bats that would pick you
   up and drop you at a random location (later versions added
   "anaerobic termites" that ate arrows, bat migrations and
   earthquakes that randomly changed pit locations).

   This game appears to have been the first to use a non-random
   graph-structured map (as opposed to a rectangular grid like
   the even older Star Trek games).  In this respect, as in the
   dungeon-like setting and its terse, amusing messages, it
   prefigured {ADVENT} and {Zork} and was directly ancestral to
   both (Zork acknowledged this heritage by including a super-bat
   colony).

   There have been many {ports} including one distributed with
   {SunOS}, a {freeware} one for the {Macintosh} and a {C}
   emulation by {ESR}.

   [Does "101 Basic Computer Games" give any history?]

   (2004-10-04)