- en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossa... Will Crowther's 1976 Colossal Cave Adventure, the OG text adventure game. He was an avid caver, he and his wife hung out all the time in the Mammoth Cave of Kentucky, doing surveys of it and exploring it and doing pretty much the first computer-assisted cave maps
Feb 4, 2026 09:32
- In 1975 he got divorced, and decided to make a game that he could play with his daughters when they came to visit. He took his work with mapping caves, added stuff from Dungeons and Dragons (he was one of the OG D&D players), and created that game. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William...
- OD&D had literally just come out in 1974, his gaming group was one of the very first ever. Between the divorce, missing his kids, missing caving, he channeled all that pent up energy into creating a video game for his kids, creating a whole damn genre.
- The game's map is heavily based on Mammoth Cave, there are whole sections that map basically 1:1, using surveying he was literally the first person to do. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mammoth...
- It's interesting to think of how a programmer nowadays who has never taken any humanities, has no actual hobbies, works 80 hour weeks, only consumes absolute fucking slop, is just completely incapable of doing anything remotely similar. They're a hollow fucking void.
- Crowther created a whole damn genre of game, influencing every game afterwards, because he had time to have hobbies, interests outside work, children who he actually talked to, etc. A perpetual-crunch chatbot user could simply never, they've hollowed themselves out too much.
