{"id":38649,"date":"2017-05-24T04:00:08","date_gmt":"2017-05-24T08:00:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=38649"},"modified":"2018-09-18T10:33:49","modified_gmt":"2018-09-18T14:33:49","slug":"esr-presents-open-adventure","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2017\/05\/24\/esr-presents-open-adventure\/","title":{"rendered":"ESR presents <em>Open Adventure<\/em>"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=7540\" target=\"_blank\">Eric S. Raymond<\/a> recently was entrusted with the original code for <em>ADVENT<\/em>, and he&#8217;s put it up on gitlab for anyone to access:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><em>Colossal Cave Adventure<\/em> was the origin of many things; the text adventure game, the dungeon-crawling D&#038;D (computer) game, the MOO, the roguelike genre. Computer gaming as we know it would not exist without <em>ADVENT<\/em> (as it was known in its original PDP-10 incarnation).<\/p>\n<p>Long ago, you might have played this game. Or maybe you\u2019ve just heard stories about it, or vaguely know that \u201c<code>xyzzy<\/code>\u201d is a magic word, or have heard people say \u201cYou are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike\u201d,<\/p>\n<p>Though there\u2019s a C port of the original 1977 game in the BSD game package, and the original FORTRAN sources could be found if you knew where to dig, Crowther &#038; Woods\u2019s final version \u2013 <em>Adventure<\/em> 2.5 from 1995 \u2013 has never been packaged for modern systems and distributed under an open-source license.<\/p>\n<p>Until now, that is.<\/p>\n<p>With the approval of its authors, I bring you <a href=\"https:\/\/gitlab.com\/esr\/open-adventure\" target=\"_blank\"><em>Open Adventure<\/em><\/a>. And with it some thoughts about what it means to be respectful of an important historical artifact when it happens to be software.<\/p>\n<p>This is code that fully deserves to be in any museum of the great artifacts of hacker history. But there\u2019s a very basic question about an artifact like this: should a museum preserve it in a static form as close to the original as possible, or is it more in the right spirit to encourage the folk process to continue improving the code?<\/p>\n<p>Modern version control makes this question easier; you can have it both ways, keeping a pristine archival version in the history and improving it. Anyway, I think the answer to the general question is clear; if heritage code like this is relevant at all, it\u2019s as a living and functional artifact. We respect our history and the hackers of the past best by carrying on their work and their playfulness.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Eric S. Raymond recently was entrusted with the original code for ADVENT, and he&#8217;s put it up on gitlab for anyone to access: Colossal Cave Adventure was the origin of many things; the text adventure game, the dungeon-crawling D&#038;D (computer) game, the MOO, the roguelike genre. Computer gaming as we know it would not exist [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[14,7],"tags":[263,1235,93,92],"class_list":["post-38649","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-gaming","category-history","tag-1970s","tag-esr","tag-opensource","tag-software"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-a3n","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38649","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=38649"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38649\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":38650,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38649\/revisions\/38650"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=38649"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=38649"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=38649"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}