1. wumpus
The central monster (and, in many versions, the name) of a famous
family of very early computer games called Hunt The
Wumpus. The original was invented in 1970 (several years
before ADVENT) by Gregory Yob. The wumpus lived
somewhere in a cave with the topology of an dodecahedron's edge/vertex
graph (later versions supported other topologies, including an icosahedron
and Möbius strip). The player started somewhere at random in the cave
with five ‘crooked arrows’; these could be shot through up to
three connected rooms, and would kill the wumpus on a hit (later versions
introduced the wounded wumpus, which got very angry). Unfortunately for
players, the movement necessary to map the maze was made hazardous not
merely by the wumpus (which would eat you if you stepped on him) but also
by bottomless pits and colonies of super bats that would pick you up and
drop you at a random location (later versions added ‘anaerobic
termites’ that ate arrows, bat migrations, and earthquakes that
randomly changed pit locations).This game appears to have been the first to use a non-random
graph-structured map (as opposed to a rectangular grid like the even older
Star Trek games). In this respect, as in the dungeon-like setting and its
terse, amusing messages, it prefigured ADVENT and
Zork and was directly ancestral to the latter (Zork
acknowledged this heritage by including a super-bat colony). A C emulation
of the original Basic game is available at the Retrocomputing Museum,
http://www.catb.org/retro/.
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Definitions of wumpus
