A marvellous thing has just occurred.

Colossal Cave Adventure, the original progenitor of the D&D-like dungeon-crawling game genre from 1977 and fondly remembered as ADVENT by those of us who played it on PDP-10s, is one of the major artifacts of hacker history.

The earliest version by Crowther and Woods (sometimes known as 350-point Adenture) was ported to C by Jim Gillogly in ’77 just after it first shipped. That has been part of the bsd-games collection forever.

What I have have just received Crowther & Wood’s encouragement to polish up and ship under a modern open-source license is not the Gillogly port; it’s Crowther & Woods’s last version from 1995. It has 18 years of work in it that the Gillogly version doesn’t.

I feel rather as though I’d been given a priceless Old Master painting to restore and display. Behooves me to be careful stripping off the oxidized varnish.