Norway's first adventure games, part 1 - Spillhistorie.no

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The story of SVHA Adventure, and how it was saved after over 40 years of obscurity.

This is the first of two articles that tell the story of the earliest adventure games developed in Norway, and how we managed to rescue them. These are games that until now have been almost completely forgotten, and the few details we’ve had have been vague and in fact largely wrong.

The first game is known as SVHA Adventure, and is an expanded version of the original Colossal Cave Adventure. SVHA Adventure was developed for minicomputers from Norsk Data at NTH in Trondheim, in 1979. The other game is called Ringen, and is an original adventure taking place in the Mines of Moria known from Lord of the Rings. Ringen was originally developed at UiT in Tromsø a couple of years later, but its story continued for several years outside the University.

Until now, neither of these games have been available online. So it is with great pleasure that we are not only able to present the story behind these forgotten games, but also working copies you can experience for yourself.

When Don Woods’ completion and expansion of Willie Crowther’s original 1975-1976 Fortran IV version of Adventure/Colossal Cave began spreading like wildfire in 1977 across university campuses and other institutions which hosted the DEC PDP-10 mainframes that it was written on, one of the first things that happened was that numerous students, faculty members and employees who had become enamoured with the game began to convert it to run on the multitude of other mainframe and minicomputer systems that were in use at the time.

Adventure igjen, denne gangen spilt på en PDP-11/34 og vist på en VT100-konsoll. Bilde: Autopilot, Creative Commons.<br>" data-image-caption="Adventure igjen, denne gangen spilt på en PDP-11/34 og vist på en VT100-konsoll. Bilde: Autopilot, Creative Commons.<br>" data-large-file="https://i0.wp.com/spillhistorie.no/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/Colossal_Cave_Adventure_on_VT100_terminal.jpg?fit=770%2C578&ssl=1" class="size-mellomstor wp-image-4038" src="https://i0.wp.com/spillhistorie.no/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/Colossal_Cave_Adventure_on_VT100_terminal.jpg?resize=400%2C300&ssl=1" alt="Adventure igjen, denne gangen spilt på en PDP-11/34 og vist på en VT100-konsoll. Bilde: Autopilot, Creative Commons." width="400" height="300" srcset="https://i0.wp.com/spillhistorie.no/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/Colossal_Cave_Adventure_on_VT100_terminal.jpg?resize=400%2C300&ssl=1 400w, https://i0.wp.com/spillhistorie.no/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/Colossal_Cave_Adventure_on_VT100_terminal.jpg?resize=300%2C225&ssl=1 300w, https://i0.wp.com/spillhistorie.no/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/Colossal_Cave_Adventure_on_VT100_terminal.jpg?resize=1024%2C768&ssl=1 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/spillhistorie.no/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/Colossal_Cave_Adventure_on_VT100_terminal.jpg?w=1280&ssl=1 1280w" sizes="(max-width: 400px) 100vw, 400px" />Adventure played on a PDP-11/34 via a VT100 terminal. Photo: Autopilot, Creative Commons.<br>A digital Big Bang

While some creators were soon inspired to write their own original text adventures in these early days of the medium (most notably Zork/Dungeon), the novelty, addictiveness and relative ubiquity of Woods’ 350 point version meant that most of the energy generated by this digital Big Bang event went into what might be called a "conversion culture", which persisted at these types of institutions well into the 1980s, even as the genre was rapidly adapted to the increasingly affordable and widespread home microcomputer market.

Initially, the goal of these conversions was simply to get Adventure up and running on whatever system happened to be at hand, but before long, much like it was to Woods himself, the idea of adding to and "enhancing" the original became irresistible to many. Some of these versions featured only minor additions or changes: perhaps a handful of new rooms and an additional treasure or two, probably done just for personal amusement or to help learn new programming skills. But others took the task more seriously, and created much larger and more complex expansions of the game, some of which have lived on and served as the basis for further iterations which continue to appear today.

One of the earliest of these conversions was done by Kent Blackett of DEC in 1977, which was in turn converted to the PDP-11/70 by Bob Supnik in 1978. These early conversions didn’t attempt to add anything new to the game, but did help to facilitate its rapid spread. Supnik’s in particular started making its way around, and several conversions of Adventure with distinct added content were based on its code, a fact which I’ll return to shortly.

Utskrift av kode fra en versjon av teksteventyrspillet Dungeon, laget for en minimaskin fra Norsk Data av en student ved NTH. Bilde: Ronny Hansen.<br>"...