Pseudo_Intellectual (66360) on 11/15/2017 5:21 PM · Permalink · Report

We track ... a lot of versions and variants of Adventure. Here's a game group compiling some of them: http://www.mobygames.com/game-group/adventure-versions

Historically, this site didn't support Unix as a platform. (Actually, I think it still doesn't ... we would file it as a game for the PDP-10 minicomputer "mainframe". Ah, and I see that is just what we have done -- http://www.mobygames.com/game/adventure_/techinfo) Mostly what Mobygames was intended for initially was to document boxed software packages that people had bought in computer stores. It has since been extended quite a bit, but Adventure is a mighty and influential edge case.

Clearly we haven't merged all these versions together, though surely many of them reuse source code and the same basic game design. (My old test of "should we lump these entries?" was "can the different games both be completed using the same walkthrough? If so, then they can be considered the same game.")

I am highly confident that every version in circulation other than the very earliest, exhumed by Dennis Jerz, includes and builds on substantial contributions by Don Woods.

Many, many authors have tried their hand at porting this game and "improving" it, leaving their mark with an extra puzzle or three or thirty. Here's a brief family tree of some of the more noteworthy forks: https://bluerenga.files.wordpress.com/2016/08/advchart.png

Really, all of them that are embellishments and not merely straight ports warrant their own entries, but it can be very difficult establishing the relationships between versions.

...

This is all a bit of an academic digression, since the contents of the bsdgames package (including Rogue, I believe) should be treated in a lump as a compilation, belonging primarily to the BSD platform (which I don't believe we yet support) and then secondarily to other *nixes. But you could document it as a Linux compilation for now.

If you're feeling really adventurous, I challenge you to document emacs as a Linux games compilation, with Dunnet, Hanoi, Doctor, Tetris etc. The trick is in figuring out in which versions of the software various games were incorporated, but surely if you hedged your snapshot in an "as of 2017" context, you wouldn't need to track all their histories independently.