Warren Robinett's 1980 Atari 2600 game Adventure generated $25 million for the company while he earned a $22,000 salary, no royalties, and no credit on the box. This episode traces how a UC Berkeley student who learned C from Ken Thompson played Colossal Cave Adventure at the Stanford AI lab and decided to translate a text game that used hundreds of kilobytes into a 4 kilobyte cartridge with 128 bytes of RAM, even after his supervisor George Simcock said it could not be done.

We break down the hardware tricks, from repurposing the Pong ball as the player avatar and stretching missile registers into walls, to the mirrored rooms and duck-like dragons the limits produced. Then we follow the Warner-era anonymity policy, Robinett's refusal to re-theme his game as a Superman tie-in, and the invisible gray dot that unlocked a hidden room bearing h ...