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.
