Hunt the Wumpus

Hunt the Wumpus is an early computer game based on a simple game of hide and seek about a mysterious monster (the Wumpus) lurking deep within a network of rooms. It was originally a text-based game written in BASIC and has since been ported to various programming languages and platforms, including graphical versions. The original text-based version of Hunt the Wumpus uses a command-line text interface. The player enters commands to move through the rooms or shoot "crooked arrows" through a tunnel into one of the adjacent rooms. There are twenty rooms, each of which is connected to three others. They are arranged like the vertices of a dodecahedron or the faces of an icosahedron (which are identical in layout). Hazards include bottomless pits, super bats (which drop the player in a random location, a feature repeated in later commercially released adventure games such as Zork I, Valley of the Minotaur and Adventure) and the Wumpus itself. The Wumpus has suction feet (to escape the bottomless pits) and is too heavy for a super bat to lift. If the player has found out from clues which chamber the Wumpus is in without entering the chamber, he fires an arrow into the Wumpus' chamber to kill it. The player wins the game if he kills the Wumpus. However, if he shoots the arrow into the wrong chamber, he frightens the Wumpus, which can cause it to move into a neighboring room. The player loses if he/she is in the same room as the Wumpus (which then eats him/her) or in a bottomless pit.