About
Colossal Cave Adventure (also known simply as "Adventure") was originally written in Fortran IV by Will Crowther and extended by Don Woods; it went on to spawn numerous variants and expansions, including Adventure II, Adventure 3, and Adventure 5/6. This repository provides modern, modular C99 translations of four classic Adventure-family games — Crowther and Woods' original "Adventure," Luckett and Pike's 440-point "Adventure II," David Platt's 550-point "Adventure 3," and Doug McDonald's 551-point "Adventure 6" — and also archives the source code of many other historical variants, including the originals of all four. The C99 translations can additionally be compiled to run on the Z-machine, making them playable in a browser.
How it differs from the original
Unlike many later Adventure ports, which build on Baggett's TADS-based "Colossal Cave Revisited" rewrite, this project translates each game's own original source code (Fortran, RATFOR, or A-code) directly into C, aiming for faithfulness to each historical version rather than adding new content.
Getting started
Each translated game can be played directly in a browser through Z-machine builds linked from the project's site, with separate links for the original Adventure, Adventure 3, Adventure 6, and Adventure II. Compiling the C99 source for the Z-machine yourself requires a patched build of the vbcc compiler's Z-machine backend, applied and built via an included script.
History
The four translated games have decades of documented lineage: Crowther's original Fortran game was extended by Woods, ported to C by Gillogly in 1977, and rewritten in literate CWEB by Knuth in 1998, while Adventure II, Adventure 3, and Adventure 6 were separately developed by Pike/Luckett, Platt, and Long/McDonald between the late 1970s and 1990; the author ported each to C and the Z-machine between 2012 and 2014.
Additional notes
- Trivia
- David Long's 1980 "New Adventure" (a predecessor to Adventure 6) was thought lost after CompuServe shut down, until an executable copy was rediscovered in late 2025.