Hunt the Wumpus

games, history (Or "Wumpus") /huhnt th* wuhm'p*s/ A famous

family of computer games, dating back at least to 1972

(several years before ADVENT) on the Dartmouth Time-SharingSystem.

Hunt the Wumpus was created by Ken Thompson on an early

version of Unix. It was created from a game in a children's

magazine, and was made to give his young son something to do

on the computer.

The wumpus lived somewhere in a cave with the topology of an

dodecahedron's edge/vertex graph (later versions supported

other topologies, including an icosahedron and M"obius

strip). The player started somewhere at random in the cave

with five "crooked arrows"; these could be shot through up to

three connected rooms, and would kill the wumpus on a hit

(later versions introduced the wounded wumpus, which got very

angry). Unfortunately for players, the movement necessary to

map the maze was made hazardous not merely by the wumpus

(which would eat you if you stepped on him) but also by

bottomless pits and colonies of super bats that would pick you

up and drop you at a random location (later versions added

"anaerobic termites" that ate arrows, bat migrations and

earthquakes that randomly changed pit locations).

This game appears to have been the first to use a non-random

graph-structured map (as opposed to a rectangular grid like

the even older Star Trek games). In this respect, as in the

dungeon-like setting and its terse, amusing messages, it

prefigured ADVENT and Zork and was directly ancestral to

both (Zork acknowledged this heritage by including a super-bat

colony). A port was distributed with SunOS and as

freeware for the Macintosh. There is a freeware C

emulation of the original Basic game.

(1999-02-15)