Colossal Cave Adventure

Colossal Cave Adventure

This article relates to Homebound

In Portia Elan's debut novel Homebound, protagonist Becks and her late uncle share a love of coding computer games, and because Becks's story takes place in 1983, these look pretty different from the video games we know today. Known as teletype games, these early computer games involved no graphics; instead, they were more like a conversation between computer and player, in which the player would type certain cues to prompt the next step in the game. The first adventure game, which inspired many that would follow—including Zork and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy—was Colossal Cave Adventure, released in 1976 by Will Crowther.

Colossal Cave Adventure (known colloquially as just Adventure) allows the player to explore a cave supposedly filled with treasure, a reasonable enough objective—but remember, the player couldn't see anything around them or click on images on the screen. Instead, they had to type commands such as "get lamp" or "walk e" (for east) to prompt more information from the game. While some of this may seem intuitive now, at the time Adventure was the first to create many of these now-ubiquitous game commands; as such, it's considered one of the 50 most important computer games of all time by PC Gamer.

Much like the fictional computer game Homebound that appears in Elan's novel of the same name, Adventure was born out of a desire to stay close to loved ones: divorced dad Will Crowther initially developed the game as a way to entertain his daughters and as a way to relive treasured spelunking memories with his ex-wife. Though he was inspired by the real-life Mammoth Cave outside of Bowling Green, Kentucky, the cave in Adventure is much less realistic, with even more magical elements added in later editions (Crowther was also inspired by Dungeons and Dragons). For those interested in playing more modern versions of Adventure, the game is available for free on computer programmer Rick Adams, Jr.'s website.

Image by Autopilot, CC BY-SA 3.0 Unported.

Filed under Medicine, Science and Tech

This article relates to Homebound. It first ran in the May 6, 2026 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.