Electronic Games
While video-game systems are used solely for games, gaming is only one of the many uses for computers. In computer games, players can use a keyboard to type in commands, a mouse to move a cursor around the screen, or sometimes both. Many computer games also allow the use of a joystick or game controller.
In 1972 Gregory Yob of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst created the first text-based computer game, called Hunt the Wumpus. In this game players followed a narrative containing clues about the location of a creature in a series of caverns. Using clues in the text, the players’ objective was to locate the beast and shoot it.
In 1975 a programmer named Will Crowther created Adventure (also known as Advent and Colossal Cave), a highly influential text-based game later expanded by a researcher at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. In this game, players used one- and two-word commands to respond to situations in a story. For example, in a room with a treasure chest and a staircase, a player might type “open chest,” then “down stairs.” Wrong answers often resulted in an interactive death. Through the 1970s and into the early 1980s these text-based adventure games—another popular game in this mold was called Zork—dominated the field of computer games.
After playing Adventure on her husband’s computer, a California woman named Roberta Williams persuaded her husband, Ken, to help her make games. Wanting to go beyond text-based technology, Roberta created simple illustrations that Ken encoded into the game. Their game, Mystery House, released in 1980, was the first computer adventure game to combine text and graphics.
Contributed By:
Steven L. Kent
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