Adventure
Adventure is a common "interactive fiction" text-based game which leads you through an imaginary world collecting treasures.
Adventure is an incarnation of ADVENT, the prototypical computer adventure game, first designed by Will Crowther on the PDP-10 in the mid-1970s as an attempt at computer-refereed fantasy gaming, and expanded into a puzzle-oriented game by Don Woods at Stanford in 1976. (Woods had been one of the authors of INTERCAL.) Now better known as Adventure or Colossal Cave Adventure, but the TOPS-10 operating system permitted only six-letter filenames in uppercase. See also Zork.
Other games influnced by ADVENT/Adventure are nethack and moria.
Sample transcript
You are standing at the end of a road before a small brick building.
Around you is a forest. A small stream flows out of the building and
down a gully.
go inside
You are inside a building, a well house for a large spring.
There are some keys on the ground here.
There is a shiny brass lamp nearby.
There is food here.
There is a bottle of water here.
...
More Background
This game defined the terse, dryly humorous style since expected in text adventure games, and popularized several tag lines that have become fixtures of hacker-speak: “A huge green fierce snake bars the way!” “I see no X here” (for some noun X). “You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.” “You are in a little maze of twisty passages, all different.” The ‘magic words’ xyzzy and plugh also derive from this game.
Crowther, by the way, participated in the exploration of the Mammoth & Flint Ridge cave system; it actually has a Colossal Cave and a Bedquilt as in the game, and the Y2 that also turns up is cavers' jargon for a map reference to a secondary entrance.
ADVENT sources are available for FTP at ftp://ftp.wustl.edu/doc/misc/if-archive/games/source/advent.tar.Z . You can also play it as a Java applet. There is a good page of resources at the Colossal Cave Adventure Page.
This article is based, in whole or in part, on entry or entries in the Jargon File.