#040: Fur Trader - The Ontario Trail

Release Date: July 1973

Platform: Mainframe (BASIC type-in)

Genre(s): Management Simulation

Developer(s): Dan G. Bachor

Publisher(s): Digital Equipment Corporation

This week's game is quite a fascinating one. Fur Trader is a historical-educational game of several firsts: the first Canadian-made video game, the first business simulation game... there's also some adventure game characteristics, and aspects reminiscent of The Oregon Trail, which Fur Trader also happens to have an interesting connection to... come join the fur trading expedition!

History

Authorship here is attributed to Dan G. Bachor (via Ann Brebner), of the Department of Psychology at the University of Calgary, in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. This also happens to be his only game credit, which is curious to me, as fur trading seems an odd topic for a psychology professor to make a game on. A brief scan of his available academic works also reveal that they have very little, if anything to do with the content of his game, so there's no help there in determining why he chose to make a game about fur trading. Currently, Dan Bachor is on staff at the University of Victoria in British Columbia.

As far as my list is concerned, this is only the second game from Canada - the first being Bertie the Brain, all the way back in 1950. Arguably, it's not technically a video game, meaning that Fur Trader is potentially the first ever Canadian-made video game. And fitting too, considering the game's content is distinctly Canadian.

I'm not really sure what's going on in the cartoon...

After this game was included in Ahl's 101 BASIC Computer Games, it was ported both to the Sol-20 and Commodore PET computers, the latter by Ahl's Creative Computing, and the former, interestingly, by MECC. For those who aren't clued in, MECC is the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium - the company responsible for developing the commercial version of The Oregon Trail. Fitting, as Fur Trader bears some slight similarities to The Oregon Trail. Outside of that info, crickets, though real-life fur trading role-playing games (furs not included) still appear to be rather popular in Canada as a means of teaching Canadian history to youngsters.

The Game

Fur Trader stands out initially as a type of game we haven't really seen much of up to this point in history: management simulation. There are some lost games that could potentially fall under the umbrella of business/management sims, but the closest games I've played to this would be Civil War and Hamurabi. Fur Trader still remains distinct from those two in that this is a game strictly about running a business and turning a profit. Those other two games certainly involve management, but as a means for a different purpose, rather than the management itself be the purpose of the game.

We ain't buying your clanker junk!

As I've been mentioning throughout the article, this game is also primarily concerned with Canadian history, also serving as something of an educational title. Fur Trader is set in the year 1776, and you play as the leader of a French Fur Trading expedition in the region surrounding Lake Ontario. This year's expedition has been declared a great success, and you are now returning to sell your wares at a select destination. There are three destination forts to choose from, each varying in several ways:

1. The first fort is Fort Hochelaga, in Montreal, and is the "easy" route of the game. The journey is a safe one, with the fort under the French Army's protection. On account of the ease of the return trip here, your furs sell for the least amount of the three forts, and the supply cost is the highest - no doubt to pay for the hungry soldiers.
2. The second fort is Fort Stadacona, in Quebec. This is the "medium" route. The fort here is also under the Army's protection, however the road there is more perilous, requiring your troop to make a portage and cross the Lachine Rapids. The value of your furs here is a middle ground between the other two forts, as is the cost of supplies. The soldiers must be more well-disciplined and less prone to gorging themselves on the available rations here.
3. The third and final fort is Fort New York. This is the game's "hard" route, with the Dutch controlling the fort, and the route necessitating traversing the lands of the Iroquois. One the flipside, this route gives the highest payout for furs, and has the cheapest supplies.

At these forts, your expedition has 190 furs to sell. You get to select how these 190 are distributed between the four different pelts: mink, beaver, ermine and fox. Each appears to have a different value, but the exactness of their value is something that the player can only figure out through doing some external calculations. My initial assumption was that mink would likely be the most valuable, which is generally in line with my playing experience - beaver also tends to sell quite well, while ermine was generally the poorest performing fur during my playtime. Fox pelts tended to have the most variance in value - sometimes as valuable as mink and beaver, and sometimes performing as poorly as ermine.

The starting situation.

On this, I also noticed that there seemed to be a vague formula the game uses to determine how much you get for your furs at each fort. This is purely anecdotal, so take it with a grain of salt, but it appeared to rely on the total amount of each fur selected, and (like the game suggests) the route chosen. At the easiest route (Fort Hochelaga), I tended to get paid around 66 - 75% of the total of each pelt I had, while at the hardest (New York), it tended to be 90 - 110% of the number of each pelt (again, with ermine typically being the worst performing). The middle route (Fort Stadacona) tended to have the most variance, with each fur netting between 75 - 110% of its total number - mink and beaver being the best performing.

No! My precious beaver pelts!

All this discussing furs a their value is well and good, but it doesn't mean much if you can't actually get them to their destination. Fur Trader makes the difficulty distinction between routes evident by having random events that can occur on each separate route that can cause harm to the year's expedition. Events can affect your overall expedition, or can be specific to one type of fur. For instance, at Fort Stadacona, there is a chance your beaver pelts may be too heavy to make the rapid crossing. Alternatively, your canoe might flip during the crossing, causing you to lose all your furs. At the most extreme point, your game can end early if, on the Fort New York route, your party is ambushed and killed by an Iroquois raiding party. Game over. Yikes. That certainly raises the stakes a bit, eh?

I'll admit, I didn't come across that event on my first playthrough, and it came through experimenting with the different routes, seeing what could potentially happen on each. From my testing, it seems that nothing bad ever happens on the easy route (Hochelaga), and the risk increases from there. The other two routes seem to have two, maybe three bad events that can occur - I'm not sure if I saw them all. One thing I did see was a random game crash, though, and that's also a bad event, but an unintended one.

RIP. Game over.

It's an intriguing game, is Fur Trader. As mentioned earlier, there's definitely some similarities to The Oregon Trail. Perilous river crossings, the threat of native raiding parties... although, Fur Trader is far more simplistic in its gameplay, by obvious comparison. I also detect within some nascent adventure game elements, with the game being more narrative driven than gameplay driven, in some sense. There isn't really a story here, though. It's more a historical setting in which your own story can develop - or, at least, that's what the idea seems to be. That's a gameplay-narrative integration concept that will be more fully explored later down the road, but we can see the seeds of the concept being sown here in Fur Trader.

Anyway, that's a lot of chat for what I've been regularly describing as a "simple" game. There just so happens to be a lot to talk about with Fur Trader, which is a nice change of pace. We still have the scores to talk about, too, so let's do that.

Scores

Time Played: 30 minutes

Difficulty: N/A (Variable)

More or less determined by the player and what fort they choose to go to, although the result of the choice of fort is random to some degree.

Gameplay: 2/20
I can only give Fur Trader a 2, unfortunately, as there's very, very little proper gameplay here, and much is reliant on the semi-random outcomes of your fort choice. The most "gameplay" aspect I can see is figuring out which of the furs has the best value and using that to determine how many of each you take each year. There's also no endgame to speak of, and no real point or objective to the game other than "make money". Unless you die, that is. You can also figure out fairly quickly which of the furs make the most money, and capitalise on them, which trivialises almost the entire point of the game.

I'm being slightly more generous with the score here, because I can give props to the game for its simple attempt at trying to immerse the player in a historical setting. I argued with myself as to whether the immersion constituted a story, and whether I should include the story metric for Fur Trader, but ultimately decided against it. Fur Trader seems more in-line with Civil War or Hamurabi in the sense that it's not exactly trying to tell a narrative, but has narrative elements built into the gameplay. If Fur Trader didn't have this narrative/immersion aspect, I'd probably have given it a 1, to be perfectly frank.

Controls: 5/10
Nothing unusual or out of the ordinary here.

Visual: 1/10
It's not formatted very well at all. There's large chunks of unformatted text that are cluttered and hard to read, like the descriptions of the different forts; the numbered list isn't formatted correctly. The code was ported over to the '78 edition of BASIC Computer Games, so the poor formatting suggests the author wasn't overly familiar with programming BASIC, as we've seen far more well-formatted games predating Fur Trader.

Functionality: 4/5
The game can randomly crash at certain points, but seems to be a rare occurrence.

Accessibility: 3/5
While a lot of reading is required, it's not overly wordy, and the game is intended somewhat for educational purposes. No actual knowledge of Canadian history is required to understand what's going on, either, so I'm comfortable with giving this a standard text-based game score.

Fun Factor: 3/20
I think there's some merit to exploring the possible outcomes the game provides for each fort, and for experimenting with how much of each pelt to take, so it has some replay value and interest beyond its incredibly basic gameplay. The historical setting also intrigues me, but I'm biased as a history nerd.

Overall, Fur Trader only ends up with a score of 18 - just enough to keep it out of the F-tier, and put it at the bottom of E-tier. I do feel kind of bad for the score, as a solid amount of effort has been put in to make something rather interesting. However, it just doesn't fare well from a game design perspective. There's little player agency, and there's just not really much point to the game outside of teaching some Canadian history. Feels like a lot of words for what I'd objectively call a "bad" game. At least it's an interesting kind of bad.

Next week is back to the simple, pen-and-paper type games - a common childhood game that, surprisingly, hadn't gotten the digital treatment as of 1973.

#023x: Get Yourself Lost in the Caves (Caves2 & Caves3)

Unfortunately, the Caves series has turned into something of an anti-climax. If you couldn't tell already, this is going to be another gaiden article, and a very short one at that. There's still an amount of interesting tidbits to discuss, as both Caves2 and Caves3 are innovative programs in their own rights.

It's a good time to talk about these now for a few reasons. One is that I'm experimenting with my work process and played ahead a few games. I got to these two, and saw that, in their source code, they're listed by Dave Kaufman as having been written in June of 1973. They were still released in September '73 by People's Computer Company, as that was the next newsletter published after Caves 2 and 3 were completed.

PCC Newsletter, September 1973.

Another reason is that, as it turns out, these "sequels" developed by Dave of the Caves are not new games. Rather, they are both, in essence, scenario editors for Lost in the Caves. Yes, that's right - now you too can make a cave system, all for the purposes of causing grievous mental confusion to a person or persons of your own choosing! (You can bet someone would've tried to make a "kaizo" cave back in the day. That's what game making programs are for, right?) 

I believe that this is the first instance of a scenario editor-type program ever made for a game - and we get two for the price of one!

Caves2's introduction.

The only difference between the two is that Caves2 does not allow for making loops in the cave system, such as making a loop of cavern #12 -> #13 -> #19 --> #12 (this is the example given in Caves3's instructions.) Caves2 can fit up to 128 caverns; I assume the same for Caves3, but no articles on it confirm that.

Caves3's introduction.

What I find curious is that both these programs allow for each cavern to have up to five exits, unlike the original game, which only allowed for three. Lost in the Caves could've been a lot more interesting if the harder difficulties went up to five exits per cavern. Personally, while I have a little interest in game design, I'm not really interested in making my own cave; I'd have no one to share it with, anyway.

While I find it disappointing that these aren't sequel games, I love the fact that Dave of the Caves thought it was a good idea to make these programs. He was, I think, trying to encourage people to get into a simple form of making their own games, without the need to learn BASIC progamming. I'm taken back to my youth when I used to mess around for hours in Age of Empires' scenario editor and make the most absurd, blow-everything-up types of maps. Those were fun times...

#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.

[Ed. I found in Caves2 and Caves3's source code that they have an authorship date of June 1973. This likely explains the mention of then here.]

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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#017: Hunt the Wumpus - Who Wants to Go on an Adventure?

Release Date: May 1973

Platform: Mainframe

Genre: Adventure

Developer(s): Gregory Yob

Publisher(s): People's Computer Company

Mugwump. Hurkle. Wumpus. 1973 had a thing for similarly-named mythical creatures, eh? Another thing 1973 had going for it was adventure. Yes, the beginnings of a new genre are taking place here in 1973, and one that would define much of early popular computer gaming, alongside CRPGs. Before being eaten by a Grue, one had to be eaten by a Wumpus.

I'm going to be spending more time on the authorship and history section of this article because there's a ton of information available about Hunt the Wumpus (also simply titled Wumpus) and its creator, Gregory Yob.

Gregory Yob (who also went by the names Hara Ra and Gregory H. Coresun) was a sometimes-contributor to the People's Computer Company newsletter. He provided a substantial write-up for the PILOT programming language in PCC's April '73 publication, and Hunt the Wumpus would later be included in the November edition the same year. I'm not sure where the May '73 date MobyGames has comes from.

PCC's Wumpus article. They let you come up with your own Wumpus design.

What I do know for certain is that Hunt the Wumpus succeeds Mugwump and Hurkle, because Yob himself confirms it. Those two games are effectively the reason why he made Hunt the Wumpus. While the game isn't in Ahl's BASIC Computer Games, it (and its sequel) are featured in that book's sequel, More BASIC Computer Games. On top of that, Yob himself did the write-up for it, explaining why he made the game. He records his reaction to seeing Mugwump and Hurkle for the first time as - and I quote - "EECH!!" 

Suffice it to say, he was not impressed. He hated the grid-based games, and wanted to see a game like them with the grid removed entirely. Later that day, he had an idea. The phrase "Hunt the Wumpus" came to him during meditation, and that's where the game began. The concept revolved around having a playing area made up of interconnected points, which Yob decided would be in the shape of a flattened dodecahedron because "it's my [Yob's] favorite Platonic solid." The shape would have 20 interconnected points, which would become different rooms in a cave system.

He didn't really know what this "Wumpus" creature was to look like, exactly. It's appeared in several forms in later media - including being the mascot of Discord (hint: shameless plug) - but at the time Yob was inviting readers to come up with their own ideas of what the Wumpus looked like. It took a few years for the general design of the Wumpus to be formed, but it was settled by at least the time the TI-99 computer came out in 1979.

The Wumpus as depicted in the TI-99 version of Hunt the Wumpus. Horror game material?

As for the objective of the game, it involved the player exploring the caves in hunt of the Wumpus. When they thought they were in a room near or adjacent to the Wumpus, which you would know from its pungent body odour, they'd shoot it with bow and arrow. Just to make things more interesting, however, Yob added some hazards into this cave system. Two, to be exact: bottomless pits and what he called "Superbats." Bottomless pits are obvious, but "Superbats" would grab the player and take them to a random room elsewhere in the cave system. The starting positions of player, Wumpus and hazards were all randomised at the start of the game.

The Wumpus could also move around the caves. It would move whenever the player shot an arrow or entered its current room in the cave. Yob even thought about some lore for how the Wumpus avoided the hazards - it was to heavy to be lifted by the bats, and had "sucker feet." It also had a thing for human flesh, as if the player ended up in the same room as the Wumpus after it moved, they became lunch. Very few games did this sort of thing at the time, and it creates a tension between hunter and prey, where the hunter could become the hunted. Some have argued that this is the genesis of horror/survival horror games, and I can see their point to some extent. Your character can meet a gruesome end, either from pit or coming face to face with the Wumpus, which can make exploring the caves somewhat unnerving.

The in-game instructions probably explain it better than I do.

What I will say for certain is that Hunt the Wumpus is the first adventure game. It has the working parts of an adventure game, even if not fully fleshed out. The bulk of the game is taken up with exploring this cave system, with the occasional descriptor appearing, sometimes functioning as hints to what's in the connected rooms, other times describing the player's unfortunate demise. We'll see this format expanded on later on in the decade in games like Wander and, eventually, Zork.

The descriptors/hints/warnings/whatever you want to call them. Also sequels!

Later in 1973, Yob presented his complete game to the People's Computer Company, where it was included in the November edition of the newsletter as I mentioned earlier in the article. Yob recalls attending a conference about a month after submitting the game, where almost every terminal was filled with people playing Hunt the Wumpus. It seemed like Yob had a hit on his hands. Creative Computing got their hands on the game in 1975, and Yob capitalised on his unexpected success by creating a number of sequels in an example of an early series/IP (we could say Pong was the first real video game series.) Yob created at least three more Wumpus games. 

Creative Computing's Robo-Wumpus. Definitely horror game material.

Now, I've played a form of Hunt the Wumpus previously on the Apple I (emulated, of course, because nobody actually owns an Apple I.) I recall that version not working too well - it may have been bugged to the point that the Wumpus didn't actually appear! I remember spending a long time wandering about in those caves with no sign of a Wumpus anywhere!

This time, I'm playing a DOS port from the Internet Archive. It's another one of those "modern or classic mode" versions where I always pick classic because I'm a purist snob like that. I can confirm that the Wumpus does indeed appear in this version. I know because I shot it and the game cackled at me, declaring "THE WUMPUS'LL GETCHA NEXT TIME!!"

Instructions are standard fare in Hunt the Wumpus, telling you all the things you need to know about how the game works, hazards, win and lose conditions, etc. One loss condition is shooting yourself with your own arrow. If you somehow manage to loop the arrow around multiple rooms back into your current room, you can kill yourself accidentally. I did this back on the Apple I version when I had no idea what I was doing. What a noob.

Having practiced archery, I don't know how one can shoot a "crooked" arrow.

Hunt the Wumpus dumps you straight into the caves, and now it's up to you to explore and try not to die. Having thought about it some, I realised that this is one of the only games up to this point in time where exploration is central to gameplay. The only other game I can think of that does this is Mike Mayfield's Star Trek. While it won't be obvious immediately, this emphasis on exploration marks a significant shift in game design. We have a few more early adventure games coming up (the Caves series) but, come 1974, we'll get Wander, another milestone in adventure games, and from there the floodgates open for exploration-based games (exclusively in the computer game sphere; arcades and consoles take a long, long time to catch up.)

I found that it's critical to memorise the locations of hazards within the cave system. I also think I got lucky with my first layout, as the first move I made allowed me to easily deduce the locations of one pit and one super bat.

Avoiding rooms 11 and 18.

Back to room 20 to go the other way. I slowly work my way through the other rooms without incident, until I get to room 12, where I'm able to determine the location of the other pit, in room 3.

A dead end. Literally.

The only real choice to make here is to backtrack and move over into the single-digit rooms. I go back to room 4 and make the discovery I need - the Wumpus is near! All that I need to do is determine which room it's in, which is actually very easy to do. I just came from room 14, and I know that room 3 has a pit, so that leaves only room 5. I load up my bow, and fire into room 5...

Got him!

And it's a win for me. Again, I honestly think the random generation was quite kind to me here, so I wanted to try again with a different setup. Fortunately the game is quite kind and lets you generate a new game without having to close and reopen it. 

My second attempt was a bit trickier, as I encountered the Wumpus first. I quickly figured out that a good strategy to avoid the Wumpus was to move back a room and shoot from a safe distance. I missed the first time (I stuffed up the inputs on my first go) and the Wumpus moved further away. I chased it and tried the same thing again, and this time was successful at snagging him.

You can see my strategy at work here.

I had a few more goes, just to got a more rounded view of possible game scenarios. I had one where I got caught by a bat. When that happens, the game declares "ELSEWHEREVILLE FOR YOU!" There's certainly a peculiar quirkiness that runs through the game. My reading on Gregory Yob suggests that he was quite an odd individual, so it checks that his personality would feed into the game. Fun fact: when Yob died in 2005, he was cryogenically frozen in hopes of being revived far into the future. Presented without comment.

Gather round the campfire now, enjoy some flame-grilled Wumpus steaks (are they edible?) as I go through the scores.

Time Played: 20 minutes (approx.)

Difficulty: 2/10 (Very Easy)

I didn't die once in my entire time playing the game. It gives you a lot of assistance in identifying hazards, so they end up not really being much of a danger, even if you start with a slightly trickier configuration.

Gameplay: 12

Easily one of the better games I've played for the blog thus far. It has a lot going for it in terms of game design. The emphasis on exploration is novel for its time, but it also makes good use of the mechanic by introducing hazards to avoid. Sometimes, depending on the cave configuration, a calculated risk is necessary to proceed. On top of this, there's additional strategy required. Identifying the location of pits is essential, and it's also necessary to build a strategy for taking out the Wumpus once encountered to ensure you don't become it's dinner.

Hunt the Wumpus also succeeds in building a small degree of tension. The stakes are high, it's either the Wumpus or you, and there are several ways you can die, which really isn't something we've seen before. It helps in making the caves exciting, and somewhat nerve-wracking to traverse.

The only significant piece of criticism that I can give is that the game undoes a bit of its strategic and tension-building work with how easy it is. I think it gives a little bit too much assistance to the player, as I could always back up whenever there was a pit or bat in an upcoming room and go around, making them a non-issue most of the time. The Wumpus being a static target most of the time also doesn't help. I think that it may have made the game more tense and exciting if the Wumpus had a chance of moving with each action you made. You may eventually end up in the same room as it, creating a real moment of tension and fear.

Controls: 5

It's pretty much as standard as it gets with regards to controls. Single or double digit inputs all around.

Visual: 6

It gets an extra point not so much for its formatting (which is fine), but more its writing. Since I don't consider story for this game, I add the writing of the game into the visual category so that exceptional writing is rightly rewarded. There's a lot of personality and goofiness in the writing of Hunt the Wumpus, from the grumbling of the game when you get the Wumpus, to its evil cackling when you die, and the weirdness of being caught and moved by a Super Bat to "elsewhereville." It's fun and memorable.

Functionality: 5

No issues, unlike the Apple I version.

Accessibility: 4

I do think Hunt the Wumpus manages to be a bit more accessible than other text-based games. It doesn't require as much reading as other games, only more imagination, which I think is a benefit. 

On the practical level, the game was so popular that it's practically ubiquitous, so there shouldn't be any issues finding a version to play.

Fun Factor: 12

I'd easily want to play this ahead of anything else I've played so far, except for Star Trek. It's memorable and easy to replay thanks to every round being slightly different. Again, the only knock against it is that it's too easy, which dampens my enthusiasm to return to it.

I don't know about the Wumpus steaks, but the game is pretty good. It earns a score of 44, which makes it only the second game to land a C-tier placement thus far, and is also earns second overall on the list, behind only the mighty Star Trek.

One can definitely see why Hunt the Wumpus was such a hit back in the day. It was something very different to the norm, and having a titular fantasy creature as the main focus, alongside its emphasis on exploration, predicts much of the future of video game design. I'd definitely consider it a "milestone" game.

The next few games go back to the standard fare of the time, but there's another series of early adventure games coming up soon, courtesy of a man they call "Dave of the Caves." Stay tuned for those.

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