Colossal Cave 550

A programmer at BBN Technologies and devoted spelunker, Crowther wrote the first Colossal Cave Adventure to share his love of Mammoth Cave in Kentucky. Running on a PDP-10, the original game modeled real cave passages and is widely considered the founding work of the adventure game genre.

A Stanford graduate student who discovered Crowther’s game on ARPANET and, with his blessing, expanded it into the 350-point version known worldwide. Woods added treasures, puzzles, fantasy elements, the troll bridge, and the magic words XYZZY and PLUGH.

Extended Woods’ version to 550 points, adding the catacombs, ice caves, new treasures, and richer puzzles — creating the definitive full-length Colossal Cave experience.

Utilized Claude Code to wrap Platt’s C source in a Progressive Web App with a touch-friendly controls grid, dynamic item buttons, and atmospheric scene imagery that cross-fades as you explore. Playable offline via a service worker. Platt’s C is compiled to WebAssembly using Emscripten; the front end is vanilla HTML, CSS, and JavaScript — no frameworks.