[ HelpMenu; if (menu_item == 0) { item_width = 8; item_name = "About Adventure"; if (deadflag == 2) return 4; else return 3; } if (menu_item == 1) { item_width = 6; item_name = "Instructions"; } if (menu_item == 2) { item_width = 4; item_name = "History"; } if (menu_item == 3) { item_width = 6; item_name = "Authenticity"; } if (menu_item == 4) { item_width = 7; item_name = "Did you know..."; } ]; [ HelpInfo; if (menu_item == 1) { print "I know of places, actions, and things. You can guide me using commands that are complete sentences. To move, try commands like ~enter,~ ~east,~ ~west,~ ~north,~ ~south,~ ~up,~ ~down,~ ~enter building,~ ~climb pole,~ etc.^^"; print "I know about a few special objects, like a black rod hidden in the cave. These objects can be manipulated using some of the action words that I know. Usually you will need to give a verb followed by an object (along with descriptive adjectives when desired), but sometimes I can infer the object from the verb alone. Some objects also imply verbs; in particular, ~inventory~ implies ~take inventory~, which causes me to give you a list of what you're carrying. The objects have side effects; for instance, the rod scares the bird.^^"; print "Many commands have abbreviations. For example, you can type ~i~ in place of ~inventory,~ ~x object~ instead of ~examine object,~ etc.^^"; print "Usually people having trouble moving just need to try a few more words. Usually people trying unsuccessfully to manipulate an object are attempting something beyond their (or my!) capabilities and should try a completely different tack.^^"; print "Note that cave passages turn a lot, and that leaving a room to the north does not guarantee entering the next from the south.^^"; print "If you want to end your adventure early, type ~quit~. To suspend your adventure such that you can continue later, type ~save,~ and to resume a saved game, type ~restore.~ To see how well you're doing, type ~score~. To get full credit for a treasure, you must have left it safely in the building, though you get partial credit just for locating it. You lose points for getting killed, or for quitting, though the former costs you more. There are also points based on how much (if any) of the cave you've managed to explore; in particular, there is a large bonus just for getting in (to distinguish the beginners from the rest of the pack), and there are other ways to determine whether you've been through some of the more harrowing sections.^^"; print "If you think you've found all the treasures, just keep exploring for a while. If nothing interesting happens, you haven't found them all yet. If something interesting *does* happen, it means you're getting a bonus and have an opportunity to garner many more points in the master's section.^^"; "Good luck!"; } if (menu_item == 2) { print "Perhaps the first adventurer was a mulatto slave named Stephen Bishop, born about 1820: `slight, graceful, and very handsome'; a `quick, daring, enthusiastic' guide to the Mammoth Cave in the Kentucky karst. The story of the Cave is a curious microcosm of American history. Its discovery is a matter of legend dating back to the 1790s; it is said that a hunter, John Houchin, pursued a wounded bear to a large pit near the Green River and stumbled upon the entrance. The entrance was thick with bats and by the War of 1812 was intensively mined for guano, dissolved into nitrate vats to make saltpetre for gunpowder. After the war prices fell; but the Cave became a minor side-show when a dessicated Indian mummy was found nearby, sitting upright in a stone coffin, surrounded by talismans. In 1815, Fawn Hoof, as she was nicknamed after one of the charms, was taken away by a circus, drawing crowds across America (a tour rather reminiscent of Don McLean's song `The Legend of Andrew McCrew'). She ended up in the Smithsonian but by the 1820s the Cave was being called one of the wonders of the world, largely due to her posthumous efforts.^^"; print "By the early nineteenth century European caves were big tourist attractions, but hardly anyone visited the Mammoth, `wonder of the world' or not. Nor was it then especially large (the name was a leftover from the miners, who boasted of their mammoth yields of guano). In 1838, Stephen Bishop's owner bought up the Cave. Stephen, as (being a slave) he was invariably called, was by any standards a remarkable man: self-educated in Latin and Greek, he became famous as the `chief ruler' of his underground realm. He explored and named much of the layout in his spare time, doubling the known map in a year. The distinctive flavour of the Cave's names -- half-homespun American, half-classical -- started with Stephen: the River Styx, the Snowball Room, Little Bat Avenue, the Giant Dome. Stephen found strange blind fish, snakes, silent crickets, the remains of cave bears (savage, playful creatures, five feet long and four high, which became extinct at the end of the last Ice Age), centuries-old Indian gypsum workings and ever more cave. His 1842 map, drafted entirely from memory, was still in use forty years later.^^"; print "As a tourist attraction (and, since Stephen's owner was a philanthropist, briefly a sanatorium for tuberculosis, owing to a hopeless medical theory) the Cave became big business: for decades nearby caves were hotly seized and legal title endlessly challenged. The neighbouring chain, across Houchins Valley in the Flint Ridge, opened the Great Onyx Cave in 1912. By the 1920s, the Kentucky Cave Wars were in full swing. Rival owners diverted tourists with fake policemen, employed stooges to heckle each other's guided tours, burned down ticket huts, put out libellous and forged advertisements. Cave exploration became so dangerous and secretive that finally in 1941 the U.S. Government stepped in, made much of the area a National Park and effectively banned caving. The gold rush of tourists was, in any case, waning.^^"; print "Convinced that the Mammoth and Flint Ridge caves were all linked in a huge chain, explorers tried secret entrances for years, eventually winning official backing. Throughout the 1960s all connections from Flint Ridge -- difficult and water-filled tunnels -- ended frustratingly in chokes of boulders. A `reed-thin' physicist, Patricia Crowther, made the breakthrough in 1972 when she got through the Tight Spot and found a muddy passage: it was a hidden way into the Mammoth Cave.^^"; print "Under the terms of his owner's will, Stephen Bishop was freed in 1856, at which time the cave boasted 226 avenues, 47 domes, 23 pits and 8 waterfalls. He died a year later, before he could buy his wife and son. In the 1970s, Crowther's muddy passage was found on his map.^^"; print "The Mammoth Cave is huge, its full extent still a matter of speculation (estimates vary from 300 to 500 miles). Although this game has often been called ~Colossal Cave~, it is actually a simulation of the Bedquilt Cave region. Here is Will Crowther's story of how it came about:^^"; print "~I had been involved in a non-computer role-playing game called Dungeons and Dragons at the time, and also I had been actively exploring in caves -- Mammoth Cave in Kentucky in particular. Suddenly, I got involved in a divorce, and that left me a bit pulled apart in various ways. In particular I was missing my kids. Also the caving had stopped, because that had become awkward, so I decided I would fool around and write a program that was a re-creation in fantasy of my caving, and also would be a game for the kids, and perhaps some aspects of the Dungeons and Dragons that I had been playing.^^"; print "~My idea was that it would be a computer game that would not be intimidating to non-computer people, and that was one of the reasons why I made it so that the player directs the game with natural language input, instead of more standardized commands. My kids thought it was a lot of fun.~ [Quoted in ~Genesis II: Creation and Recreation with Computers~, Dale Peterson (1983).]^^"; print "Crowther's original FORTRAN program had five or so treasures, but no formal scoring. The challenge was really to explore, though there was opposition from for instance the snake. Like the real Bedquilt region, Crowther's simulation has a map on about four levels of depth and is rich in geological detail. A good example is the orange column which descends to the Orange River Rock room (where the bird lives): the real column is of orange travertine, a beautiful mineral found in wet limestone.^^"; print "The game's language is loaded with references to caving, to `domes' and `crawls'. A `slab room', for instance, is a very old cave whose roof has begun to break away into sharp flakes which litter the floor in a crazy heap. The program's use of the word `room' for all manner of caves and places seems slightly sloppy in everyday English, but is widespread in American caving and goes back as far as Stephen Bishop: so the Adventure-games usage of the word `room' to mean `place' may even be bequeathed from him.^^"; print "The game took its decisive step toward puzzle-solving when Don Woods, a student at Stanford, debugged and expanded it. He tripled the number of treasures and added the non-geological zones: everything from the Troll Bridge onward, together with most of the antechambers on the Bedquilt level. All of the many imitations and extensions of the original Adventure are essentially based on Woods's 350-point edition. (Many bloated, corrupted or enhanced -- it depends how you see it -- versions of the game are in Internet circulation, and the most useful way to identify them is by the maximum attainable score. Many versions exist scoring up to around the 400s and 500s, and one up to 1000. Woods himself continues to release new versions of his game; most of the other extenders haven't his talent.)^^"; print "Although the game has veered away from pure simulation, a good deal of it remains realistic. Cavers do turn back when their carbide lamps flicker; there are indeed mysterious markings and initials on the cave walls, some left by the miners, some by Bishop, some by 1920s explorers. Of course there isn't an active volcano in central Kentucky, nor are there dragons and dwarves. But even these embellishments are, in a sense, derived from tradition: like most of the early role-playing games, `Adventure' owes much to J. R. R. Tolkien's `The Hobbit', and the passage through the mountains and Moria of `The Lord of the Rings' (arguably its most dramatic and atmospheric passage). Tolkien himself, the most successful myth-maker of the twentieth century, worked from the example of Icelandic, Finnish and Welsh sagas.^^"; print "By 1977 tapes of `Adventure' were being circulated widely, by the Digital user group DECUS, amongst others: taking over lunchtimes and weekends wherever it went... but that's another story. (Tracy Kidder's fascinating book `The Soul of a New Machine', a journalist's-eye-view of a mainframe computer development group, catches it well.)^^"; "This is a copy at third or fourth hand: from Will Crowther's original to Donald Woods's 350-point edition to Donald Ekman's PC port to David M. Baggett's excellent TADS version (1993), to this.^^"; } if (menu_item == 3) { print "This port is fairly close to the original. The puzzles, items and places of Woods's original 350-point version are exactly those here.^^"; print "I have added a few helpful messages, such as ~This is a dead end.~, here and there: and restored some ~initial position~ messages from objects, such as the (rather lame) ^^ There is tasty food here.^^ from source files which are certainly early but of doubtful provenance. They seem to sit well with the rest of the text.^^"; print "The scoring system is the original, except that you no longer lose 4 points for quitting (since you don't get the score if you quit an Inform game, this makes no difference) and, controversially, I award 5 points for currently carrying a treasure, as some early 1980s ports did. The rank names are tidied up a little. The only significant rule change is that one cannot use magic words until their destinations have been visited.^^"; print "The dwarves are simpler in their movements, but on the other hand I have added a very few messages to make them interact better with the rest of the game. The probabilities are as in the original game.^^"; print "In the original one could type the name of a room to visit it: for the sake of keeping the code small, I have omitted this feature, but with some regrets. [RF: this feature incorporated into Release 9.]^^"; print "The text itself is almost everywhere preserved intact, but I've corrected some spelling and grammatical mistakes (and altered a couple of utterly misleading and gnomic remarks). The instructions have been slightly altered (for obvious reasons) but are basically as written.^^"; "A good source for details is David Baggett's source code, which is circulated on the Internet."; } print "Did you know that...^^"; print "The five dwarves have a 96% chance of following you, except into light, down pits or when admiring themselves: and the nasty little knives are 9.5% accurate.^^"; print "Dragons burn up dwarves (perhaps because dwarves eat only coal).^^"; print "The bear (who likes the volcano) is too heavy for the bridge... and you can go back to the scene after being resurrected.^^"; print "You can slip past the snake into the secret E/W canyon, 35% of the time at any rate. And walking about in the dark is not all that gruesome: it carries only a 25% risk of falling down a pit.^^"; print "The vase does not like being immersed.^^"; print "Shadowy figures can wave to each other.^^"; print "Watering the hinges of the door rusts them up again.^^"; print "When the cave closes, the grate is locked and the keys are thrown away, creatures run off and the crystal bridge vanishes...^^"; print "...and a completely useless hint is written on the giant oyster's shell in the end game. (To make this hint slightly fairer, I've altered one word and placed suggestions elsewhere in the game.)^^"; "The last lousy point can be won by... but no. That would be telling."; ]; [ HelpSub; if (deadflag ~= 2) DoMenu( "There is information provided on the following:^ ^ Instructions for playing ^ A historical preface ^ How authentic is this edition?^", HelpMenu, HelpInfo); else DoMenu( "There is information provided on the following:^ ^ Instructions for playing ^ A historical preface ^ How authentic is this edition? ^ Did you know...^", HelpMenu, HelpInfo); ]; [ Amusing; HelpSub(); ]; Verb 'help' * -> Help;