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Hunt the Wumpus
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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.
About the game
The original text-based version of Hunt the Wumpus uses a command line text interface.
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Encyclopedia
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.
About the 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 shoot arrows along crooked paths through several adjoining rooms. There are twenty rooms, each connecting to three others, arranged like the vertices of a dodecahedron (or the faces of an icosahedron). 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. 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 slay it. The player wins if he slays 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 is in the same room as the Wumpus or a bottomless pit.
Originally written by Gregory Yob in BASIC while attending University of Massachusetts Dartmouth and noticed on mainframes at least by 1972, Hunt the Wumpus was first published in the People's Computer Company journal in 1973, again in 1975 in Creative Computing, and finally in 1979 in the book MORE BASIC Computer Games. Out of frustration with all the grid-based hunting games he had seen (Snark, Mugwump, and Hurkle included), Yob decided to create a map-based game. Yob injected adversarial humor into the computer's hints, prefiguring the "voice" of the Infocom narrator. Later versions of the game offered more hazards and other cave layouts. 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 operating systems, (where it's known as "wump").
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.
Hunt the Wumpus in other games
The card game Magic: The Gathering has featured several "Wumpus" cards. The Wumpus seen on Magic cards is a beast with a characteristically-shaped head, jaw and mane. Mercadian Masques featured (reprinted in several core sets, including 10th Edition) as well as . Planar Chaos, a set concentrating on new takes on popular cards, contained .
The Wumpus is also found in the open source game NetHack and the game M.U.L.E, with capture of the wumpus in the latter game leading to an in-game cash prize for the player.
The Wumpus is mentioned in the "Thy Dungeon Man" games in Homestarrunner.com.
The Wumpus gets his revenge on Wumpus hunters in the audio only game .
External links
- Gregory Yob's 1975 in Creative Computing.
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- Fully playable PC version
- Graphical port to the Atari 2600.
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- by Joseph J. Strout. A graphical adaptation for Mac OS 7.5 and newer.
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