Hunt the Wumpus

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Hunt the Wumpus was an early computer game. It was based on a simple hide-and-seek format, featuring a mysterious monster (the Wumpus) that lurked deep inside a network of rooms.

1 About the game
2 Hunt the Wumpus in popular culture
3 Notes
4 References
5 External links

[edit] About the game

Using a command line text interface, a player of Hunt the Wumpus would enter commands to move through the rooms, or shoot arrows along crooked paths through several adjoining rooms. There were twenty rooms, each connecting to three others, arranged like the vertices of a dodecahedron (or the faces of an icosahedron). Hazards included bottomless pits, super bats (which would drop the player in a random location) and the Wumpus itself. When the player had deduced from hints which chamber the Wumpus was in without entering it, he would fire an arrow into the Wumpus' chamber to slay it. However, firing the arrow into the wrong chamber would startle the Wumpus, which would then devour the player.

Originally written by Gregory Yob in BASIC while attending Dartmouth College, and noticed on mainframes at least by 1972, Hunt the Wumpus was first published in the "Peoples Computer Company"^[1] journal in 1973, again in 1975 in "Creative Computing", and finally in 1979 in the book MORE BASIC Computer Games. Building on several grid-based games of the "Battleship" variety, Yob injected adversarial humor into the computer's hints, prefiguring the "voice" of the Infocom narrator. 1 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.

The Wumpus is also found in the open source game Nethack.

[edit] Hunt the Wumpus in popular culture

The game was referenced in a song, "Hunt the Wumpus,"[1] by the Dartmouth College ska-funk band Skaboodah and the Skalaktites[2][3][4] on their 1995 album The Sound of Stink.

It was also referenced in the Mercadian Masques expansion of the game Magic: The Gathering in the card Hunted Wumpus.

[edit] Notes

^ Peoples Computer Company, founded in October 1971, was a small non-profit group of independent educators who met in a small storefront on Menalto Rd. in Menlo Park, California during the 1970s. The first issue of their journal, Peoples Computer Company, was published in October 1972.