#Colossal cave sesame street driver

If you’re interested in hearing more about text adventures, there’s a great episode of The Retro Hour podcast exploring their history and some recent creations in the genre.ġ. The superb soundtrack is also available on Spotify. You can play Kentucky Route Zero on PC, PlayStation and XBox. A scene from Kentucky Route ZeroĪbout his 2013 game The Cave, Ron Gilbert said: “People have really dark secrets, and going into a cave which is really dark and deep… that metaphor really resonated with me.” I imagine Crowther and Elliot would relate to that. Jake Elliot, part of the three-man team at Cardboard Computer responsible for Kentucky Route Zero, told EGM in an interview taking place in Mammoth Cave that he had played the text adventure since the age of five and that it had been an influence on the game’s design. Like Murakami, Kentucky Route Zero spends time dwelling on the beauty and humour that can be found in everyday minutiae and mundanity.Ī scene in act three of the game (Xanadu) directly pays homage to Colossal Cave with an in-game text adventure featuring a forest, a cabin and a cave. What follows is a slow-paced, idiosyncratic ride with surreal turns of which Haruki Murakami would probably approve, along with poignant reflections on the soul-crushing power of financial debt and bureaucracy. A journey across a mysterious highway (‘The Zero’) unfolds.

#Colossal cave sesame street driver

You begin Kentucky Route Zero as a delivery driver searching for an address, but soon find yourself swapping perspectives with other characters. Some locations in the game are inspired by Mammoth Cave – the same cave on which Crowther had based Colossal Cave Adventure. But descriptive prose and dialogue choices are front and centre of the gameplay.Ī magic-realist road trip set across five episodes, Kentucky Route Zero takes you through desolate scenes of atmospheric Americana. Beautifully illustrated graphics and a lush ambient and bluegrass soundtrack wash over every scene. Kentucky Route Zero has elements of a modern text adventure. One of these is a game that Polygon and Wired labelled “game of the decade” – Kentucky Route Zero. The popularity of the point-and-click genre waned from the late 1990s, but its influence can be traced to many recent adventure games. We played that all the time, so I was very aware of text adventures.” 2 I guess it wasn’t Colossal Cave, so it wasn’t the original original, but you know. “When I was in college they had a big mainframe computer and all of us played Adventure, the original. The link from that legendary era of games to Colossal Cave Adventure was made by Monkey Island creator Ron Gilbert in an interview with Bitmap Books. Later came LucasArts and its classic point-and-click titles such as The Secret of Monkey Island. Mystery HouseĪdventure on the Atari – famed for having gaming’s first hidden message or ‘Easter egg’, as celebrated in Ready Player One by Ernst Cline – was conceived as a graphics-based build on Colossal Cave Adventure. Online Systems (which would later become Sierra) moved things forward in 1980 by adding graphics to the mix in Mystery House. You can see for yourself whether you can beat the fiendish beast by trying Colossal Cave Adventure in your internet browser.Ĭolossal Cave Adventure sparked an industry of text adventures for home computers. Once the game became available to play on the giant PDP-10 computer at MIT, whether or not you had made it past the snake was apparently a hot topic in the university corridors. The cave is filled with high-fantasy creatures and characters, from cheeky dwarves to a giant snake. Typing these allows you to navigate a (you guessed it) colossal cave. MIT student Don Woods helped Crowther expand the initial game design into one that would earn its place in gaming history.Įntirely text-based, Colossal Cave Adventure hinges on two-word phrases such as ‘go south’ and ‘get keys’. “I decided I would fool around and write a programme that was a re-creation in fantasy of my caving, and also would be a game for the kids, and perhaps some aspects of the Dungeons and Dragons that I had been playing.” 1Ĭrowther’s daughters had a blast, as did students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) from which he had graduated.

With time on his hands after finishing a contract with a defence firm in 1975, Will Crowther applied his skills to creating a programme that he hoped his two daughters might enjoy while visiting him. Decades later, the same environment formed the setting for the haunting modern classic Kentucky Route Zero. Widely regarded to be one of the most important computer games of all time, Colossal Cave Adventure was inspired by programmer Will Crowther’s explorations through caves and caverns in his home state of Kentucky.