History VideoGame / ColossalCave

* AlienSky: On the beach.

* GuideDangIt: It would be quicker to list the puzzles that ''aren't'' illogically difficult.

* PuzzleBoss: The Dragon.

'Advent' is believed to be directly responsible for coining the term 'adventure game', and is known to have inspired Roberta Williams to develop her first computer game, Mystery House, which would, in turn, lead to the founding of On-Line Systems (later [[{{Sierra}} Sierra Online]]) with her husband Ken.

* InfiniteFlashlight: ...after you install fresh batteries. (Which require you to sacrifice some treasure to purchase, and therefore prevent you from getting the best ending.)
** Averted in some versions of the game. The fresh batteries eventually wear out as well, and the game narrator suggests that you start wrapping things up.

* RhetoricalQuestionBlunder: Exploited in one of the most difficult puzzles of the game. "With What? Your bare hands?" is the rhetorical question asked when you forget to specify a weapon in an attack. After a few weeks of utter frustration trying to find a weapon that will [[spoiler:slay the dragon]] the player angrily types "[[BluntYes Yes]]" more or less at random. Tada!

* RhetoricalQuestionBlunder: Exploited in one of the most difficult puzzles of the game. "With What? Your bare hands?" is the rhetorical question asked when you forget to specify a weapon in an attack. After a few weeks of utter frustration trying to find a weapon that will [[spoiler]]slay the dragon,[[/spoiler]] the player angrily types "[[BluntYes Yes]]" more or less at random. Tada!

* RhetoricalQuestionBlunder: Exploited in one of the most difficult puzzles of the game. "With What? Your bare hands?" is the rhetorical question asked when you forget to specify a weapon in an attack. After a few weeks of utter frustration trying to find a weapon that will slay the dragon, the player angrily types "[[BluntYes Yes]]" more or less at random. Tada!

* WallOfText: The volcano room ("At Breath-Taking View") has a surprisingly [[http://lparchive.org/Adventure/Update%20143/ long and verbose description]].

* ShoutOut: If you try to open the treasure vault with the wrong password, you're hunted down and killed by a Rover from ''Series/ThePrisoner''.

* ShoutOut:
** There are [[Literature/SnowWhite seven]] dwarves in the cave.
** If you try to open the treasure vault with the wrong password, you're hunted down and killed by a Rover from ''Series/ThePrisoner''.

* ArtisticLicenseGeology: Crowther's original version, drawn from first-hand knowledge, is set in a reasonably accurate version of a limestone cave system. Some of Woods's additions, not so much. Of particular note is the ''active volcano''.

* DarknessEqualsDeath: you fall in a pit, and break every bone in your body.
* DeadEndRoom: the aptly-named Witt's End. [[spoiler:Actually not quite an example -- you won't get out if you try going back the way you came (or in just about any other direction), but if you persist in heading north, ''eventually'' the game will relent and let you out.]]

* FunctionalMagic

* ShoutOut

* WallOfText: The volcano.

** The Bare Room. Which contains a large, hungry, initially very grumpy ... [[BearsAreBadNews well, guess.]]

-->''Welcome to Adventure!! Would you like instructions?''

-->"WELCOME TO ADVENTURE!! WOULD YOU LIKE INSTRUCTIONS?"

-->[[AC:A glistening pearl falls out of the clam and rolls away. Goodness, this must really be an oyster. (I never was very good at identifying bivalves.)]]

* RhetoricalQuestionBlunder: Exploited in one of the most difficult puzzles of the game. "With What? Your bare hands?" is the rhetorical question asked when you forget to specify a weapon in an attack. After a few weeks of utter frustration, the player angrily types, "Yes" more or less at random. Tada!

* DebugRoom: On timesharing computers, "Wizard Mode", if you wanted to use it, had to be typed as the first command given to the game. You then had to give the password and solve a computation to prove you are a Wizard. In Wizard Mode, you could shut down the game into single player mode, set the hours the game is allowed to be played (to keep people from running it when a lot of people want to use the computer, like during daytime hours of finals week on a university or college computer) or to set holidays when anyone could play with no restrictions (like Thanksgiving or Christmas). On [=PC=]s, this was removed (see DummiedOut below).

* DummiedOut: The 550- and 580- point versions contain functions to support running on a shared computer such as a mainframe, allowing time limited games or restricting play to between certain hours. On PC-hosted versions, all the code's still there, but the "is this a shared computer?" check is a dummy and so the rest of the code is never used. See DebugRoom above.

* DebugRoom: On timesharing computers, "Wizard Mode", if you wanted to use it, had to be typed as the first command given to the game. You then had to give the password and solve a computation to prove you are a Wizard. In Wizard Mode, you could shut down the game into single player mode, set the hours the game is allowed to be played (to keep people from running it when a lot of people want to use the computer, like during daytime hours of finals week on a university or college computer) or to set holidays when anyone could play with no restrictions (like Thanksgiving or Christmas). On PCs, this was removed (see DummiedOut below).

* DummiedOut: The 550- and 580- point versions contain functions to support running on a shared computer such as a mainframe, allowing time limited games or restricting play to between certain hours. On PC-hosted versions, all the code's still there, but the "is this a shared computer?" check is a dummy and so the rest of the code is never used.

* TheDevTeamThinksOfEverything: In some versions, swearing can have interesting results.

Many versions and descendants of the game have been released, mostly under the title ''Adventure'' or some variation thereof (e.g., Adventure II, Adventure 550, Adventureland, etc.) Even Microsoft published a version of the game, packaged with its original MS-DOS 1.0 for the IBM PC. The Creator/{{Infocom}} classic ''VideoGame/{{Zork}}'' began life as a remake of ''Adventure'', and both ''Zork'' and ''Adventure'' influenced ''VideoGame/{{Dunnet}}'', a cyberpunk text adventure buried as an EasterEgg in the Emacs text editor,[[note]]well, sort of. Emacs is a Lisp interpreter as well as a text editor, and it ships with a number of Lisp programs (earning it the nickname of the "operating system in want of a good editor"), Dunnet being one of them. It is nevertheless often considered an easter egg by OS X users.[[/note]]which is in turn included as standard with Mac OS X.

Many versions and descendants of the game have been released, mostly under the title ''Adventure'' or some variation thereof (e.g., Adventure II, Adventure 550, Adventureland, etc.) Even Microsoft published a version of the game, packaged with its original MS-DOS 1.0 for the IBM PC. The Creator/{{Infocom}} classic ''VideoGame/{{Zork}}'' began life as a remake of ''Adventure'', and both ''Zork'' and ''Adventure'' influenced ''VideoGame/{{Dunnet}}'', a cyberpunk text adventure buried as an EasterEgg in the Emacs text editor, which is in turn included as standard with Mac OS X.

Many versions of the game have been released, mostly under the title ''Adventure'' or some variation thereof (e.g., Adventure II, Adventure 550, Adventureland, etc.) Even Microsoft published a version of the game, packaged with its original MS-DOS 1.0 for the IBM PC.

Speaking of versions of ''Adventure'', the Creator/{{Infocom}} classic ''VideoGame/{{Zork}}'' began life as a remake of ''Adventure'', and both ''Zork'' and ''Adventure'' influenced ''VideoGame/{{Dunnet}}'', a cyberpunk text adventure buried as an EasterEgg in the Emacs text editor, which is in turn included as standard with Mac OS X.

Many versions of the game have been released, mostly under the title ''Adventure'' or some variation thereof (e.g., Adventure II, Adventure 550, Adventureland, etc.) Even Microsoft published a version of the game, packaged with its original MS-DOS 1.0 for the IBM PC, and a version of the game is buried as an EasterEgg in the Emacs text editor. The Creator/{{Infocom}} classic ''VideoGame/{{Zork}}'' began life as a remake of ''Adventure''.

Developed on BBN's [[MainframesAndMinicomputers PDP-10]], the game was written in FORTRAN and later ported to C under UsefulNotes/{{UNIX}}. Further iterations of the game were re-written in custom languages developed specifically to handle the unique features of text-based interactive adventure games.

* RandomEncounter: There are Dwarves wandering the caves, who will chase and throw knives at you. Some versions limit them to five. In the AGT version, there an infinite number, which randomly appear, block you from exiting a room, and can randomly throw their knife just as soon as they appear. This means you need to wear a magic cloak to prevent being insta-killed, and keep it for the whole game because there's an infinite number of them.