Hunt the Wumpus

"Wumpus" redirects here. For the fictional predator in the Star Wars universe, see Wampa. For the series of children's books, see Elleston Trevor.
Hunt the Wumpus

TI-99/4A boxart showing the visualization of the Wumpus and the graphics-based labyrinth
Developer(s) Gregory Yob
Platform(s) BASIC, TI-99/4A
Release date(s) Original BASIC Version
1972
TI-99/4A Version
1980
Genre(s) Adventure game
Mode(s) Single-player

Hunt the Wumpus is an early computer game, based on a simple hide and seek format featuring a mysterious monster (the Wumpus) that lurks deep inside a network of rooms. It was originally a text-based game written in BASIC. It has since been ported to various programming languages and platforms including graphical versions.

Development

4.3 BSD man page for Hunt the Wumpus ("wump")

Hunt the Wumpus was originally written by Gregory Yob in BASIC while attending the Dartmouth campus of the University of Massachusetts in 1972 or 1973. Out of frustration with all the grid-based hunting games he had seen, such as Snark, Mugwump, and Hurkle, Yob decided to create a map-based game.[1] Hunt the Wumpus was first published in the People's Computer Company[2] journal Vol. 2 No. 1 in mid-1973, and again in Creative Computing in its October, 1975, issue. This article was later reprinted in the book The Best of Creative Computing, Volume 1.[3] Yob later developed Wumpus 2 and Wumpus 3, which offered more hazards and other cave layouts.[4]

By the release of Version 6 Unix (1975), the game had been ported to Unix C. An implementation of Hunt the Wumpus was typically included with MBASIC, Microsoft's BASIC interpreter for CP/M and one of the company's first products. Hunt the Wumpus was adapted as an early game for the Commodore PET entitled Twonky, which was distributed in the late 1970s with Cursor Magazine. A version of the game can still be found as part of the bsdgames package on modern BSD and Linux operating systems, where it is known as "wump."

Among the many computers it was ported to is the HP-41C calculator.[5] The 1980 port of the game for the TI-99/4A differs quite a bit from the original while retaining the same concept. It is a graphical rather than text-based game, and uses a regular grid equivalent to a torus rather than an icosahedron. In this version, the Wumpus is depicted as a large red head with a pair of legs growing out of its sides.[6]

Gameplay

(This describes Yob's original program. Later variants had different features.)

The vertices of a dodecahedron illustrate one common shape of the labyrinth in the Hunt the Wumpus game.

The original text-based version of Hunt the Wumpus uses a command line text interface. A player of the game enters commands to move through the rooms or to shoot "crooked arrows" along a tunnel into one of the adjoining rooms. There are twenty rooms, each connecting to three others, arranged like the vertices of a dodecahedron or the faces of an icosahedron (which are identical in layout). Hazards include bottomless pits, super bats (which drop the player in a random location, a feature duplicated in later, commercially published adventure games, such as Zork I, Valley of the Minotaur, and Adventure), and the Wumpus itself. The Wumpus is described as having sucker feet (to escape the bottomless pits) and being too heavy for a super bat to lift. When the player has deduced from hints which chamber the Wumpus is in without entering the chamber, he fires an arrow into the Wumpus's chamber to kill it. The player wins the game if he kills the Wumpus. However, firing the arrow into the wrong chamber startles the Wumpus, which may cause it to move to an adjacent room. The player loses if he or she is in the same room as the Wumpus (which then eats him or her) or a bottomless pit.

Legacy

Notes

References

External links

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