The foundational code for the adventure game genre was not written in a corporate lab. It was written in the 1970s by a divorced dad trying to connect with his two young daughters. This episode explores Will Crowther, an ARPANET engineer at Bolt Beranek and Newman by day and a hardcore caver with the Cave Research Foundation the rest of the time, who with his wife Patricia turned muddy survey notebooks into some of the first computer-drawn cave maps of Mammoth Cave through a chain of teleprinters, a PDP-1, punched paper tape, and a drum plotter. After the couple divorced in 1975, Crowther stopped caving and, sitting alone with spare time, wrote a Fortran game on a PDP-10 based on the Bedquilt and Colossal Cavern sections, mixed with elements from his Dungeons and Dragons campaigns.

The hosts explain the natural language parser that let a ch ...