Hunt the Wumpus
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Hunt the Wumpus was an important early computer game. It was based on a simple hide-and-seek format, featuring a mysterious monster (the Wumpus) that lurked deep inside a network of rooms. Using a command line text interface, the player would enter commands to move through the rooms, or shoot arrows along crooked paths through several adjoining rooms. There were twenty rooms, each connecting to three others, arranged like the vertices of a dodecahedron (or the faces of an icosahedron). Hazards included bottomless pits, super bats (which would drop the player in a random location) and the Wumpus itself. When the player had deduced from hints which chamber the Wumpus was in without entering it, he would fire an arrow into the Wumpus' chamber to slay it. However, firing the arrow into the wrong chamber would startle the Wumpus, which might then devour the player.
Originally written by Gregory Yob in BASIC while attending the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, and noticed on mainframes at least by 1972, Hunt the Wumpus was first published in the magazine "People's Computer Company" in 1973, again in 1975 in "Creative Computing", and finally in 1980 in the book "Basic Computer Games". Building on several "grid" based games of the "Battleship" variety, Yob injected adversarial humor into the computer's hints, prefiguring the "voice" of the Infocom narrator. 1 (http://jerz.setonhill.edu/if/canon/Hunt_the_Wumpus.htm) Later versions of the game offered more hazards and other cave layouts.
A simple version of the game has also become a classic way of illustrating the concept of Knowledge Based Agents (a kind of computer program) in the field of Artificial Intelligence. (Where the program would take the role of the player, and usually play very well.)
Versions of Hunt the Wumpus are currently available all over the Internet, for almost all operating systems and machines, including GNU/Linux, Palm Pilot handheld computers, and mobile phones. The first bot on IRC was a multiplayer Hunt the Wumpus game, in which firing an arrow into a room with other players caused another player to be killed: "Foo is hit in the back with an arrow!" Unfortunately, the "Wumpus-o-Matic" player never made it off the drawing board. See also Rog-O-Matic.
Wumpus have also made an appearance in the TCG Magic: the Gathering, specifically in the 1999 Mercadian Masques expansion. They appear mainly in the art for green cards in the set, though one is a playable creature: the appropriately named Hunted Wumpus.
External links
- Gregory Yob's 1975 description (http://www.atariarchives.org/bcc1/showpage.php?page=247) in Creative Computing.
- http://wurb.com/if/game/442 – resource where it is possible to download and/or play the game online
- Scans of description and BASIC source code for Hunt the Wumpus (http://www.atariarchives.org/morebasicgames/showpage.php?page=178)
- Scans of description and BASIC source code for Hunt the Wumpus 2 (http://www.atariarchives.org/morebasicgames/showpage.php?page=181)ru:Вампус