Hunt the Wumpus

From Wikipedia, the free 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.

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 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) and the Wumpus itself. When the player has deduced from hints which chamber the Wumpus is in without entering it, he fires an arrow into the Wumpus' chamber to slay it. However, firing the arrow into the wrong chamber startles the Wumpus, which then devours the player.

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 "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. 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.

[edit] Hunt the Wumpus in popular culture

Image:Wumpus.jpg

150px

The game was referenced in the Mercadian Masques expansion of the game Magic: The Gathering in the card Hunted Wumpus, and also in its sister card Thrashing Wumpus

The parody text-based game "Thy Dungeonman" (created for homestarrunner.com) will alert you that "You smell a Wumpus" if you use the "smell" command.

The Wumpus is also found in the open source game NetHack and the game M.U.L.E.

Am-Rep band Calvin Krime had a song called Hunt the Wumpus on their second album "You're Feeling So Attractive".

The Illinois-based cult rock/comedy band "Sexstasy" titled their second album "Hunt the Wumpus", released in 2001.

DJ Bolivia recorded a demo entitled Hunt the Wumpus in 2006 as volume 5 of his Music to Code By series.

[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.