Hunt the Wumpus

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Hunt the Wumpus was an important early computer game. It was based on a simple hide-and-seek format, featuring a mysterious monster (the Wumpus) that lurked deep inside a network of rooms. Using a command line text interface, the player would enter commands to move through the rooms, or shoot arrows along crooked paths through several adjoining rooms. There were twenty rooms, each connecting to three others, arranged like the vertices of a dodecahedron (or the faces of an icosahedron). Hazards included bottomless pits, super bats (which would drop the player in a random location) and the Wumpus itself. When the player had deduced from hints which chamber the Wumpus was in without entering it, he would fire an arrow into the Wumpus' chamber to slay it. However, firing the arrow into the wrong chamber would startle the Wumpus, which might then devour the player.

Originally written by Gregory Yob in BASIC while attending the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, and noticed on mainframes at least by 1972, Hunt the Wumpus was first published in the "Peoples Computer Company"Template:Fn journal in 1973, again in 1975 in "Creative Computing", and finally in 1979 in the book MORE BASIC Computer Games. Building on several grid-based games of the "Battleship" variety, Yob injected adversarial humor into the computer's hints, prefiguring the "voice" of the Infocom narrator. 1 Later versions of the game offered more hazards and other cave layouts. An implementation of Hunt the Wumpus was typically included with MBASIC, Microsoft's BASIC interpreter for CP/M and one of the company's first products.

1 Other versions
2 GM
3 Notes
4 References
5 External links

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Other versions

A simple version of the game has also become a classic way of illustrating the concept of Knowledge Based Agents, a kind of computer program in the field of Artificial Intelligence, where the program would take the role of the player, and usually play very well.

An early home computer version of Hunt the Wumpus with color graphics and randomized cave layouts appeared on the TI-99/4A in 1981.

Versions of Hunt the Wumpus are currently available all over the Internet, for almost all operating systems and machines, including Linux, the iPod, Palm Pilot handheld computers, and mobile phones. The first IRC bot, named "GM" (for "game master") was a multiplayer Hunt the Wumpus game, in which firing an arrow into a room with other players caused another player to be killed: "Foo is hit in the back with an arrow!" Unfortunately, the "Wumpus-o-Matic" player never made it off the drawing board. See also Rog-O-Matic.

Wumpus have made an appearance in the collectible card game Magic: The Gathering, specifically in the 1999 Mercadian Masques expansion. They appear mainly in the art for green cards in the set, though two are playable creatures: the appropriately named Hunted Wumpus [1] and the Thrashing Wumpus [2]. Wumpus are also featured in the Rogue-like game Nethack as a ceiling-clinging monster, and as the elusive Mountain Wumpus in the classic M.U.L.E., being a nod from one very old game to another.

A version of Hunt the Wumpus appeared in Google Talk August 2005, as a bot found by a clue in an easter egg. However, during the day of 24 August it was online sporadically. The game has been offline since then, because the Wumpus bot currently needs to keep all players on its roster, which is limited in size.

Andrew Plotkin used Hunt the Wumpus as the inspiration for his award-winning 1999 interactive fiction game Hunter, in Darkness.

In 2005 Microsoft challenged high school students across the world to recreate Hunt The Wumpus in .NET. The winners were from Mr. Joe Croney’s class in the US Virgin Islands. The group included Anton Doos, Zach Hunter, Peter Roussev, Justin Aronstein, and Yannick Polius.

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GM

The first IRC bot, GM, played a game of Hunt the Wumpus with users who communicated with it over IRC. GM was written by Greg Lindahl.

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Notes

Template:Fnb Peoples Computer Company, founded in October 1971, was a small non-profit group of independent educators who met in a small storefront on Menalto Rd. in Menlo Park, California during the 1970s. The first issue of their journal, Peoples Computer Company, was published in October 1972.

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