#023 - Lost in the Caves: The Adventures of "Dave of the Caves"

Release Date: May, 1973

Platform: Mainframe (BASIC type-in)

Genre: Puzzle

Developer(s): David "Dave of the Caves" Kaufman

Publisher(s): People's Computer Company

Now we can get back on track slightly. We're back to 1973, with the game that triggered the reshuffle in the first place.

I'll be breaking formula slightly and will be talking about the release date first, because that's where all the shenanigans started. MobyGames has our topic today, Lost in the Caves, listed as a September '73 release, along with author David Kaufman's other 1973 games. For this game and another game, this date can be shown to be incorrect. In Lost in the Caves' instance, the People's Computer Company Games booklet from 1974 lists the earliest appearance in a newsletter for every game included - and Lost in the Caves' (called Caves1 there) first appearance is listed as the May 1973 newsletter. 

Figure 1: PCC Games, 1974.

I went over to that particular edition to confirm, and it indeed is the case. 

Figure 2: Corroborating evidence, PCC newsletter, May 1973.

What's also interesting about the May '73 newsletter is that it references Lost in the Caves' sequels, despite them not appearing in the newsletter until the September '73 edition. Lost in the Caves does also appear in that edition alongside its sequels.

Doubling back to PCC Games, it has a number of other Caves games, including Caves4 and Trees, which were not available at the time of publishing, however may also be unreleased games. Trees appeared to be a game-making program, allowing the user to make their own Caves game (there is a Tree Subroutines program in PCC Games which could be said Trees program.) There are other programs also listed that allow for the making of one's own Caves game. I believe this is the first instance of game-making software.

That now brings us to the programmer behind this family of innovative games and software, David "Dave of the Caves" Kaufman. He was a regular contributor at People's Computer Company, most notable for his contribution to the writing of PCC's seminal 1975 book What to Do After You Hit Return. That book is kind of like PCC's equivalent of David Ahl's BASIC Computer Games, and an expanded version of the PCC Games booklet for 1974. It features many of PCC's BASIC type-in programs featured in their newsletter from 1972 - 1975. I also discovered that he wrote the game I just covered, Beyond Bagels, from the May '74 edition of the PCC newsletter. Apparently, he was also planning on writing a book about the Caves series. It seems to have never eventuated, or perhaps it morphed into What to Do After You Hit Return.

Kaufman's letter is bottom-middle.

Despite Kaufman's significant contributions to PCC, and early video games as a whole, there's not much information about who he was that I can find. Doing a simple Google search primarily gives results for the actor David Kaufman. I also found a university professor from Canada who seemed to write a lot about game theory. No tangible leads for Dave of the Caves, however. It's honestly quite bizarre to me how he seemed to have just... disappeared. Plenty of people have written about his games, but no one actually seems to know who he is. I even broke one of my own unwritten rules, enlisting the services of AI to hunt down any information on him, but even ChatGPT doesn't know anything else about him. It just tells me what I already knew.

Lost in the Caves itself is well-preserved once again on the Internet Archive, along with its brethren in the "modern or classic" DOSBox format. You know what mode I chose.

Flavour text!

I love seeing the progression games are making, even in the little things. Instead of the plan "do you want instructions" type of affair pretty much every text-based game has run with so far, Lost in the Caves decides to play around with the wording. It asks "is this your first visit?" 

We get a story synopsis to start out the game's introduction. Yeah, that's right, this game has a story. You play as an explorer, lost in the "famous Duzzledorf caves." I've never heard of them, so they can't be that famous. Regardless, you're out of food and beginning to starve. You need to find the way out. Too bad failing to escape in time isn't implemented in the game. Would've been a great piece of gameplay-story integration, and it could've been done, based on what I've seen earlier games do with loss conditions. It ends up being a solid story premise, but lack of gameplay execution is disappointing.

The way the network of caves functions in the Caves series is on what Kaufman called a "tree" system. Each cave that doesn't lead to a dead end splits off into three options - at least one of them will lead to another branch of the cave system. Sometimes multiple branches lead to dead ends, requiring backtracking multiple rooms to try again. Kaufman encourages making maps to track your progress. I'd consider this the first true instance of encouraging a now-lost art of video games - map making. Yes, Mugwump encouraged a form of it, but that was for educational purposes and doesn't work the same way.

My first expedition in the caves was a short affair. There was only 13 caverns, and it took less than a minute to find my way out. How did we get lost in there for days, again? The escape is met with the celebration of sun and fresh air... and the media. Almost makes me want to run back into the cave.

Somehow, the paparazzi always show up.

Upon winning, the game asks if you'd like to try again with a more difficult cave layout. Another game with difficulty options. Except, unlike Slalom, these actually do something. I fumbled and typed "YES" instead of "1" like the game asks, and so I got an equivalent cave layout instead of a harder one. To be honest, I actually did this a couple of times before I got the memo. Feel free to laugh at my expense here.

Eventually, I got into more challenging and complex cave systems. These more complex cave systems can have close to forty caverns in them, with branches that lead to multiple other branches that all lead to dead ends. Making maps becomes very important for these. I didn't do this because I'm stubborn, and so I got stuck in one of these for a while, thinking I'd gotten softlocked in an unwinnable cave. I found my way out of this one after a minute or two of head-scratching and triple-checking every single cavern I'd explored. If you could starve in-game, I would have in this cave.

Seemingly endless dead ends that should've resulted in a dead explorer.

Fortunately, the other cave I did at this (which turns out to be the hardest difficulty) was far less painful to navigate. Still didn't make a map. I will learn, trust me. There are games coming where making a map is a near necessity.

Those reporters that met me as I escaped the cave asked me what I thought about the game. Here's what I told them.

Time Played: 10 minutes

It might take 1-2 minutes to clear a cave, depending on the complexity.

Difficulty: 3 (Easy)

It can't be given a much higher rating than this, since there's no loss condition. The more complex caves can prove troublesome at times.

Gameplay: 7

While there are good things to say about Lost in the Caves, it's not all that substantial from a game design standpoint. The fact that it has difficulty modes that work is great, and that makes it a better game than, say, Slalom. 

The problems outweigh the good, however. Shallow trial and error gameplay is what Lost in the Caves is built on. It's somewhat masked by the story scenario, but once I realised it was there I couldn't unsee it. The difficulty modes up the complexity, but don't increase the depth of gameplay. There's also missed opportunities for gameplay-story integration - a loss condition could've been introduced to emphasise the point the story makes of you having run out of food. Other games have had guess limits, which is functionally what I'm asking for, so I don't think it would've been unreasonable to include. Either that, or hazards akin to what's in Hunt the Wumpus could've worked.

Controls: 5

It's standard fare for text-based games of the era.

Visual: 7

Lost in the Caves excels in its presentation compared to its contemporaries. From the writing, to the formatting, to even little things like the way it presents its introduction and instructions, a lot of care was put into making Lost in the Caves a more immersive experience than the simple simulator games of the era.

Story: 4

Story rating! There's a sound story synopsis that's clear and lays out what's at stake for the player. Unfortunately, the game doesn't carry it out all the way, and thus we end up with a disconnect between story and gameplay where all the tension is eliminated. The "Reporters..." joke at the end is pretty funny though.

Functionality: 5

No bugs or glitches.

Accessibility: 3

I'm going to call it standard for text-based games. It requires reading and some comprehension.

Fun Factor: 6

Apart from the initial interest in the game scenario, I don't find the actual gameplay all that interesting. Even with harder game modes, each round feels almost indistinguishable from the last. There just isn't enough to hold my interest for very long.

I gave Lost in the Caves an overall score of 37, which lands it a mediocre spot at 11th overall in the D-tier. The reporters will probably, in typical fashion, sensationalise the story, saying that I "blasted" the game, or something like that. As you always should anyway, never trust the media.

Lost in the Caves isn't so much a good game, but a solid foundation for future text-based adventures to build upon. I think that's why I sound like I'm being so harsh towards it. Alongside Hunt the Wumpus, there's so much untapped potential to create something truly great from what these games laid out. I truly look forward to seeing what future games do with this foundation.

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