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wumpus


wumpus: /wuhm'p*s/ n. The central monster (and, in many
   versions, the name) of a famous family of very early computer games
   called "Hunt The Wumpus", dating back at least to 1972 (several
   years before ADVENT) on the Dartmouth Time-Sharing System.
   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 M"obius 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 both (Zork acknowledged this heritage by including a super-bat colony). Today, a port is distributed with SunOS and as freeware for the Mac. A C emulation of the original Basic game is in circulation as freeware on the net.