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"Adventure." Floppy disk. From MS actually. A dragon on the packaging.
Pencil and paper to chart the maze. Like "mind" VR.
(Before that there was Star Trek; on the engineering computers; by modem; on thermal paper)
"Before entering on an understanding, I have meditated for a long time, and have foreseen what might happen. It is not genius which reveals to me suddenly, secretly, what I have to say or to do in a circumstance unexpected by other people; it is reflection, it is meditation." - Napoleon I
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That was the first computer game I ever played, it was on my dad's TRaSh-80 Model I. I loved it! Now I'm playing the modern graphical version created by Roberta Williams of Sierra Online fame (King's Quest series, Space Quest series, Leisure Suit Larry, etc.)
You are in a maze of little, twisty passages, all alike.
There are no solutions, only trade-offs. - Thomas Sowell
A day can really slip by when you're deliberately avoiding what you're supposed to do.
- Calvin (Bill Watterson, Calvin & Hobbes)
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Not only did I know (and play) ADVENTURE, but I still have a BASIC listing of the code for it.
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
-- 6079 Smith W.
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There was another unlock word as well, but I cant remember what it actually did now. The word was "PLUGH". Does this ring a bell with anyone
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I got to play this in 1976 when I spent the day at work with my uncle and never got to play it again. The next year when my Dad got a TRS-80, I tried (and failed miserably) to write my own version since I didn't have access to a mainframe to play it on.
Never trust a quote you see on the internet. - Ab Lincoln, 1492
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I had so much fun with these games.
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I spent way too much time playing this on a PDP-10 in the 70s. The original Fortran code was an engine. The first time it was run after being linked, it read the contents of a map file (map, objects, actions, etc) into memory and encrypted it. Then it exited leaving the image in memory. You then typed save to create an executable with the map loaded. It would have been easy to change the map but we never did. There were two mazes. In one every room's description was "You are in a maze of twisty passages all alike". In the other maze, every room's description was "You are in a maze of twisty passages all different". You might go North from one room, but to return you might need to go East or West. To map the mazes you had to leave objects in each room so you could tell them apart. Only the first 5 characters of a word were checked because 5 7-bit Ascii characters fit in in a 36-bit word. I never got into Zork but we did have another adventure game called Sewer that was written as a TECO macro. XYZZY, PLUGH, and other words from Adventure along with various characters from "The Lord of the Ring" were among the known likely passwords the internet worm tried.
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Back in the late 1970's, the company I worked for hired a software programmer from Data General. He brought with him a tape that had the source code to Adventure on it. We got local company to extract the code and put in on an 8" floppy. We had just purchased Microsoft's Fortran compiler were able get Adventure up and running on our own version of a PC. Productivity took a nose dive for the next month or so. Byte magazine published the complete source code in a mouse point font.
To win you had to fight the dragon with your bare hands If you tried any weapon you were killed. You had to answer yes to the question "Do you really want to kill the dragon with your bare hands?"
Another game I remember spending hours making maps of 20 levels of 10x10 grids was OrbQuest.
modified 31-Oct-23 9:15am.
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When I was at Uni a friend had worked on the source for it and realised that the game was entirely deterministic and repeatable as long as you typed the exact same sequence of keystrokes. Since the version we had had no way to save a game and resume later, he wrote a simple C program which read a file to feed in to the program, and also added all the keys you typed to the end of the file, thus we could replay the game to wherever we had got to last time.
And a hollow voice still says "Plugh!".
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Colossal Cave Adventure, Star Trek, Lunar Lander, even the original Oregon Trail. 1970-75-ish. All clackity clacking on an ASR-33 teletype. I remember it well. When we upgraded to a "portable" thermal print terminal in 1975, we lost all the clackity-ness for a quieter "Phhhffft, phhhffft".
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Yep, really enjoyed playing it!
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I first entered the Cave as a Freshman EE in 1975 on a 360 mainframe running TSO.
IMHO,
"You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike." is to computing as
"Go ahead, make my day." is to movies.
Perry
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Oh yes.. spent hours in the caves via a PDP-11/34 thanks to DECUS
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I don't recall this phrase exactly but it does harken back to the days of the Commodore-64/128 machines and all their adventure games..
Steve Naidamast
Sr. Software Engineer
Black Falcon Software, Inc.
blackfalconsoftware@outlook.com
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The best Part: 
"
You are on the edge of a breath-taking view. Far below you is an
active volcano, from which great gouts of molten lava come surging
out, cascading back down into the depths. The glowing rock fills the
farthest reaches of the cavern with a blood-red glare, giving every-
thing an eerie, macabre appearance. The air is filled with flickering
sparks of ash and a heavy smell of brimstone. The walls are hot to
the touch, and the thundering of the volcano drowns out all other
sounds. Embedded in the jagged roof far overhead are myriad twisted
formations composed of pure white alabaster, which scatter the murky
light into sinister apparitions upon the walls. To one side is a deep
gorge, filled with a bizarre chaos of tortured rock which seems to
have been crafted by the devil himself. An immense river of fire
crashes out from the depths of the volcano, burns its way through the
gorge, and plummets into a bottomless pit far off to your left. To
the right, an immense geyser of blistering steam erupts continuously
from a barren island in the center of a sulfurous lake, which bubbles
ominously. The far right wall is aflame with an incandescence of its
own, which lends an additional infernal splendor to the already
hellish scene. A dark, foreboding passage exits to the south.
"
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Me. 
Two words: Colossal cave.
'Nuff said.
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Takes me back 45+ years. Use XYZZY all the time in conversation and almost no one understands the reference but they use it too.
Adventure!
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I remember playing Colossal Cave on a DEC mainframe via 300 baud modem and a Soroc terminal! Those were the days!
What was “PLUGH” used for???
Old timer
modified 30-Oct-23 19:49pm.
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I met that phrase in the late 1970s. It also told me "Fie! You're no wizard!"
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Naturally I remember my first Adventure in Colossal Cave.
Not the date. Probably 1976 after 11 pm in the computer center.
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Been there, done that. Since 1979. Weirdly enough, so has my wife, who is an accountant, not a software person.
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In 1978, "Adventure" was the first game I ran on my (then) newly built Heathkit H8 computer -- built while I was an undergrad at a regional campus of Purdue. It's been so long that I can't remember where I got the executable that ran it. I'm not sure if I bought it or if it was freeware from some "dial-up" BBS downloaded at 300 baud on my acoustic coupler modem. Ever since I first set up my home Wi-Fi ages ago, its SSID has been "XYZZY." I'm quite sure none of my neighbors get the reference.
I feel so old. Of course, that's because... I am old. 
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Not seen any comments from Nagy for a while.
Hope he's ok...
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