The Prehistory of Adventure
Jan. 10th, 2008 07:45 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerLately, I've managed to encounter a few "lost original versions" of certain things... and in each case, I seem to wind up concluding from them that they were more interesting because they had been "lost" than through any "sacredness" imbued to something being "original" and unrevised from what other people had first encountered. First of all, perhaps, I spent a fair sum of money to get legitimate DVDs of the Star Wars "Vintage Editions"... and found that the brief "original scenes" everything churns about without end seemed very much outweighed by the obvious nature of the old-fashioned optical compositing, and gave the DVDs away after one viewing, if wishing I could just keep their new photocomposite covers. A while after that, some uncertain waiting paid off at last when the 1920s version of E.E. "Doc" Smith's "The Skylark of Space" showed up on Project Gutenberg, and I was interested to see that the story had been rewritten, not just revised, into the version you can actually find in the used-book market these days. Now, I've had the chance to move back in time again, if from a version I don't think has ever really been criticised for being "revised" at all. After having already playing the classic version of Will Crowther and Don Woods's form-establishing text adventure "Adventure," I had the chance to play the long-lost first version that Will Crowther wrote alone.
It took me a while to learn that there was a noble background to the adventure game programs listed in computer magazines, games I would struggle with but not win that often. Their pedigree ran back to a first text adventure that had run on computer-lab machines more complex (and expensive) than home computers. After just perhaps having become obsessed with the catalog of Infocom text adventures (or "interactive fiction," as the nobler name went) only after that company was out of business and the one game by them that my family had seemed to be the only game by them I'd ever get to play, and then managing to get the somewhat more inelegant yet playable enough re-release collections a few years after that, I went online for the first time and learned that there was a small community now writing their own works of interactive fiction, and maintaining playable versions of "Adventure" itself.
However, in hearing about how "Adventure" had been written, I took note of how it had begun as a simulation written by Will Crowther of an actual cave he'd explored himself, with a few treasures and puzzles, and then had been taken over by Don Woods, who added extra "rooms" (or chambers), more treasures, and still more puzzles. Comments about a certain tension between Crowther's "magic realism" and Woods's "fantasy" made me start wondering what the program would have been like at first, but apparently that version had vanished into the past... and then, years later, I noticed a bit of news that Crowther's source code had been discovered in a three decade-old backup, and felt just a little amazed. Then, a little while later, I heard that somebody had managed to compile it. I had to smuggle the simple program into work and run it on my computer there, but at long last I could play that original version of the original adventure, "standing at the end of a road before a small brick building"... and for all that sense of history and inception, it did indeed seem half-finished, petering away at the far edges of the cave. For all that it was interesting to just explore Crowther's work (and not have to worry quite so much about thinking exactly like the adventure game's author), I found myself understanding and appreciating Woods's additions that much more.
It took me a while to learn that there was a noble background to the adventure game programs listed in computer magazines, games I would struggle with but not win that often. Their pedigree ran back to a first text adventure that had run on computer-lab machines more complex (and expensive) than home computers. After just perhaps having become obsessed with the catalog of Infocom text adventures (or "interactive fiction," as the nobler name went) only after that company was out of business and the one game by them that my family had seemed to be the only game by them I'd ever get to play, and then managing to get the somewhat more inelegant yet playable enough re-release collections a few years after that, I went online for the first time and learned that there was a small community now writing their own works of interactive fiction, and maintaining playable versions of "Adventure" itself.
However, in hearing about how "Adventure" had been written, I took note of how it had begun as a simulation written by Will Crowther of an actual cave he'd explored himself, with a few treasures and puzzles, and then had been taken over by Don Woods, who added extra "rooms" (or chambers), more treasures, and still more puzzles. Comments about a certain tension between Crowther's "magic realism" and Woods's "fantasy" made me start wondering what the program would have been like at first, but apparently that version had vanished into the past... and then, years later, I noticed a bit of news that Crowther's source code had been discovered in a three decade-old backup, and felt just a little amazed. Then, a little while later, I heard that somebody had managed to compile it. I had to smuggle the simple program into work and run it on my computer there, but at long last I could play that original version of the original adventure, "standing at the end of a road before a small brick building"... and for all that sense of history and inception, it did indeed seem half-finished, petering away at the far edges of the cave. For all that it was interesting to just explore Crowther's work (and not have to worry quite so much about thinking exactly like the adventure game's author), I found myself understanding and appreciating Woods's additions that much more.