Install open-adventure with Homebrew, Nix, apt

Project links

• Homepage
• Package manager page

Commands and aliases

• advent

Project history

Colossal Cave Adventure began with Will Crowther's 1976 FORTRAN program for the PDP-10 and Don Woods's 1977 expansion, which added more puzzles and a 350-point scoring system. That 350-point version became the iconic version behind many ports, but the original authors' development line later culminated in the 430-point Adventure 2.5 in 1995.

Eric S. Raymond released Open Adventure with the approval and encouragement of Crowther and Woods, using a BSD 2-clause license and a separate project name to avoid confusion with unofficial Adventure branches and higher-numbered variants. The GitLab project describes the code as a forward port of the 1995 Crowther/Woods Adventure 2.5, the last version in that main line.

The modernization work is partly historical preservation and partly code archaeology. Public writeups describe the 1995 source as C produced from FORTRAN-like code; the Open Adventure effort added build-system improvements, regression tests, documentation, cleanup, and hardening while retaining the original game behavior as the central artifact.

Adoption history

Open Adventure entered package-manager ecosystems as a playable command-line game and a source-history artifact. FreeBSD added a games/open-adventure port in October 2017, and this Homebrew batch records Homebrew, Nix, and Ubuntu packaging.

Its adoption is not measured like a normal developer library. The value comes from making an important historical program easy to build, install, and inspect on modern systems. Red Hat's developer article and Opensource.com coverage both used the project as a way to revisit early game history through a contemporary open-source repository.

How it is used

Users run the advent executable, answer the opening instruction prompt, and play by entering one- or two-word commands such as inventory, get, west, and quit. The game remains a command-line interactive fiction experience where mapping, score, inventory, and terse parser behavior are part of the original design.

Developers use the source as a study object for porting, tests around legacy behavior, build modernization, and careful refactoring of old translated C. That makes Open Adventure unusually interesting as both a game package and a preservation-oriented programming exercise.

Why package nerds care

Open Adventure is package-nerd catnip because the package is tiny but the provenance is huge. A modern package manager installs bin/advent, yet behind that executable is the licensing and preservation story of the official Crowther/Woods 430-point branch.

It also shows why package names matter. The project uses Open Adventure and the advent executable to distinguish itself from bsd-games adventure, other Colossal Cave ports, and the many unofficial score-expanded variants that share similar names.

Timeline

• 1976: Will Crowther created the original Adventure.
• 1977: Don Woods expanded the game into the famous 350-point version.
• 1995: the Crowther/Woods line reached Adventure 2.5, the 430-point version.
• 2017: Open Adventure was created on GitLab and publicized as an open-source release of the 1995 branch.
• 2017: FreeBSD added an open-adventure port.

Related projects

• Related projects include the bsd-games adventure port of the 350-point game, the Interactive Fiction Archive, IFComp, and many Adventure variants such as 430-point, 440-point, and other expanded editions. Open Adventure's role is narrower: it preserves and packages the official 1995 430-point line.

Sources

• https://developers.redhat.com/articles/build-run-colossal-cave-adventure-game
• https://gitlab.com/esr/open-adventure
• https://gitlab.com/esr/open-adventure/-/raw/master/README.adoc
• https://opensource.com/article/17/6/revisit-colossal-cave-adventure-open-adventure
• https://www.catb.org/~esr/open-adventure/history.html
• https://www.freshports.org/games/open-adventure/
• source_facts.executables
• source_facts.package-manager