Xyzzy Is The Magic Word: Adventures In Interactive Fiction
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As I started to put this piece together, I originally placed it in the Retro Gaming category. I immediately realised that I was doing the genre of Text Adventures, or more appropriately Interactive Fiction, an injustice by simply classifying them as "games". There is much more going on in the world of adventure gaming, stripped of all graphical bells and whistles, it's gaming of the mind rather than of the thumbs. A place where players immerse themselves in fully realised fictional story world, rather than a slick CGI one. Welcome to a world where all you often start with is a blinking cursor and your imagination. A world of the earliest computer nerds, sat in-front of mainframe terminals taping away at their keyboards late into the night, commands that have gone down in adventure gaming folklore. So sit-up, fingers poised over the keyboard, pause for a moment, consider your options, type... "Get Lamp"... Press ENTER and let's go adventuring.
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It all started back in the mid-1970s, with an unassuming computer programmer called Will Crowther. Crowther was a defense contractor working as part of a little team, on something called ARPANET. The first packet switching network, funded by the U.S. Department of Defense, for use by universities and research laboratories to communicate and share information and resources. Giving birth to what would become the greatest invention of the modern technological age, the Internet.
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While Will was making history, in his down-time he enjoyed caving. It was his love of caving and his desire to design a game to play with his children, that prompted Will to design ADVENT, the operating system file names being limited to six characters. Later to be called Adventure or Colossal Cave Adventure, as a nod to part of a cave system in Kentucky that he had vector mapped a few years earlier. The cave system inspired Will to create a text based adventure game, which featured some fantasy elements, during 1975 and 1976. But it wasn't until a Stanford University student Don Wood found Adventure on the university network that things came together.
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He took the game, and with Will Crowther's permission and source code, Don who was a big fan of fantasy fiction developed and expanded on the original game. He added more fantasy elements, and expanded the original 700 lines of FORTRAN code to 3000, with additional data, map locations, vocabulary and in game objects. Thus creating in 1977 what was considered the definitive version of the first ever text based adventure game, and spawning a whole new genre of gaming, which was much more than previous simple graphical based computer games like Pong. It had depth and gave players choices, it seemed to respond, and there was a story that unfolded as people played it. Adventure, for its time, was sophisticated gaming. And initially only available to the academic elite. Gradually over the latter years of the 1970s the game was ported over to other operating systems, but still remained on mainframe and minicomputer systems, and so only available to a select few who worked in the computer industry at the time. That was until Canadian pioneer of microcomputing Jim Butterfield created a version for the Commodore PET, which was later released for the Commodore 64. By the beginning of the 1980s as microcomputers became an accessible reality for both small business and the home, other version started to appear. Microsoft released a version of Adventure in 1981 with its initial version of MS-DOS 1.0 as a launch title for the IBM PC, making it the first game available for the new computer. Microsoft also released versions of Adventure in 1980 for the Apple II Plus and TRS-80 computers.
Will Crowther claims he simply made up the magic word in the game, but it has since gone down in computing history. Programmers and operating system designers have hidden it as a secret command over the years. In the built-in game Minesweeper in versions on Microsoft Windows, xyzzy was an easter egg cheat mode. The low-traffic Usenet newsgroup alt.xyzzy is used for test messages, to which other readers (if there are any) customarily respond, "Nothing happens" as a note that the test message was successfully received. Since 1996, there have been the Xyzzy Awards, which are awarded to the best examples of Interactive Fiction produced each year. Text based adventure games saw a peak in the early 80s, often accompanied with very basic graphics, but still essentially text based, typed command game play. As computing power increased from 8-bit to 16-bit and beyond into the 90s, this form of game playing witnessed a decline in popularity. Disappearing back into obscurity and the realms of geekdom that it still exists today.
Get Lamp (2010)
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