Open Adventure ships

Colossal Cave Adventure, that venerable classic, is back and better than ever! The page for downloads is here.

The game is fully playable. It would be astonishing if it were otherwise, since it has been stable since 1995. One minor cosmetic change a lot of people used to the non-mainline variants will appreciate is that there’s a command prompt.

The most substantial thing Jason Ninneman and I have done to the code itself is that the binary is now completely self-contained, with no need for it to refer to an external adventure.text file. That file is now compiled to C structures that are linked to the rest of the game at build time.

The other major thing we’ve done is that the distribution now includes a pretty comprehensive regression-test suite. We do coverage analysis to verify that it visits most of the code. This clears the way to do serious code cleanup (gotos and stale FORTRAN idioms must die!) while being sure we’re not breaking things,

We gratefully acknowledge the support of the game’s original authors, Don Woods and Will Crowther.