You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike
Very cool - on Slashdot today is news that the original Fortran code for Adventure has been found on a backup tape. I just finished up Soul of a New Machine recently, and one of the amusing parts of the book was the fact that one of the main testers wouldn't feel that a new computer was complete unless it could run Adventure... It seems that Data General had launched a machine previously in the 70s that had a bug that basically only popped up in certain programs (obviously) including in Adventure, so from now on it was played for several hours before a machine would be considered "done." (Though I'm not sure if it was the original Fortran version or later C based ones...) Pretty amazing that a text-based game could be considered something that would thoroughly test out a system, no?
I actually have never played Adventure - though I remember Zork and other Infocom games quite well, the "Colossal Cave Adventure" was a bit before my time. So while I was reading the book I decided to go look for a copy of the game, and found the Flash version I embedded above. Pretty amusing.
-Russ