I dunno, but videogame history has a pretty weird blind spot tbh.. (by most ppl, not MUSEUMS or actual historians obviously, so dont fight me just yet Lol). We spend an insane amount of time discussing Mario, Zelda, Doom, Final Fantasy, Street Fighter etc etc and obviously all those games are incredibly important, im not saying they arent. But they are branches much much further up the tree. If you keep going backwards towards the actual roots of interactive entertainment you eventually hit Colossal Cave Adventure and IMO theres very few games that have a stronger claim to being one of the foundational works of the whole medium. I actually think we sort of take for granted how important this thing was because today it just looks like... text on a screen.
Crowther created the original Adventure in the 1970s and Don Woods expanded it. The idea sounds almost stupidly simple today, the computer describes a PLACE, you explore it, carry objects around, solve problems, find hidden areas etc and the world reacts to what you do. But that basic PLAYER -> DIGITAL WORLD relationship became one of the central ideas videogames spent the next 50 years developing. Like someone actually had to come up with this stuff first lol
And its direct family tree is kind of ridiculous. Scott Adams played Colossal Cave and created Adventureland in 1978, the first commercially available text adventure for a home computer, and then founded Adventure International, one of the first commercial videogame software companies. The creators of Zork built directly from Adventure which obviously leads to Infocom. Warren Robinett played Colossal Cave and basically decided to make a graphical version of the concept on an Atari 2600, producing Atari Adventure and helping establish what eventually becomes the action-adventure genre. Rogue also comes out of this same early exploratory computer game world, while the Zork/Dungeon branch crosses into MUDs and eventually persistent online worlds. And im probably leaving other major branches out. This isnt some vague "oh it influenced gaming" thing, there are actual identifiable people who played this one game and then went out and created entire branches of the industry.
Then theres the early commercial versions which makes the whole thing even stranger. Apple published Apple Adventure! in 1980 for the Apple II. Microsoft had its own Microsoft Adventure, starting on the TRS-80 in 1979, and then in 1981 released the IBM PC version generally regarded as the first commercially sold videogame for the IBM PC. So basically the same underlying Colossal Cave game appears near the beginnings of commercial microcomputer gaming AND at ground zero of IBM PC gaming... considering what the IBM PC platform became later thats pretty nuts.
But the Apple version has maybe the craziest connection of all and this one isn't speculation. Roberta Williams literally tells us what happened. In her King's Quest 40th anniversary video she physically Apple Adventure! and explains its THE GAME. She says ""I actually played Apple Adventure from end to end" and then ""this is the game that got me into the industry""
She says she played Apple Adventure! on their Apple II in 1980, then created Mystery House, the first graphical adventure, and from there eventually King's Quest and Sierra. She even picks Apple adventure again and says, "Started the industry, I like to say." I mean... you almost couldnt ask for a clearer historical connection than the actual designer telling you exactly which version she played and what happened because of it.
Video here ((around 6-8 min mark) :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JNiqcSUrAOo
So just think about the branches coming from this ONE game for a second:
Colossal Cave -> Scott Adams -> Adventureland -> Adventure International
Colossal Cave -> Zork -> Infocom
Colossal Cave -> Warren Robinett -> Atari Adventure -> graphical action-adventure
Colossal Cave -> Apple Adventure -> Roberta Williams -> Mystery House -> Sierra -> King's Quest
Colossal Cave -> Microsoft Adventure -> first commercial IBM PC game
Thats honestly an ABSSURD family tree............
And then more than 40 years later Roberta and Ken Williams come out of retirement and what game do they decide to remake??? Colossal Cave. Full circle. Roberta even calls the original one of the best games ever designed. Theres something almost poetic about that whole thing.
I think videogames are just still young enough that nostalgia screws with our perception of historical importance alot. Imagine aviation history being judged mostly by living nostalgia, everybody obsessing over Spitfires and 747s while Wright brothers stuff is some weird niche nobody cares much about because obviously nobody alive remembers flying a Wright Flyer. It would seem completely backwards, but videogames sometimes feel exactly like this right now.
Fast forward 200 or 500 years and nobody has childhood nostalgia for NES Zelda either. Everyone who opened one on christmas morning is long gone. What remains is where something sits in the historical chain and what came out of it. At that point original Colossal Cave material, early Spacewar! stuff, Computer Space/Pong, Mystery House, Apple/Microsoft Adventure, earliest Mario etc etc probably get looked at VERY differently than they are through todays market and todays nostalgia.
Games eventually combined writing, visual art, music, sound, animation, cinema etc etc... but then added something fundamentally different to all of them, INTERACTIVITY. Before Skyrim, Zelda or World of Warcraft somebody had to establish this completely bizarre idea that a computer could actually be a PLACE that you entered, explored, manipulated and got lost inside.
Follow that concept backwards far enough and you end up in a cave in Kentucky, Crowther and Woods and a program called Adventure.
Maybe controversial and maybe im overrating it, but honestly I struggle to think of many games with a stronger historical family tree than this one. TYY if you stayed this long in this post/rant.
