Oregon Trail was first a sort of text adventure when it was put together in 1971. You didn't navigate rooms, though, so it wasn't exactly the same thing.
I think Wikipedia is notorious for that in general, along with constant subtle bias (of whoever won the pissing contest in the discussion page) in just about every article.
In this case, Wikipedia's citation leads (via an intermediate hop) to an academic article that dates Adventure to 1975-76, and argues that a date of 1972, which some other sources had previously mentioned, is incorrect: http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/001/2/000009/000009...
This game is not only an early text adventure -- it is early interactive fan fiction. See Keith Laumer's Jame Retief stories: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jame_Retief
The CDT, Mr. Magnan -- the whole scenario is straight from Laumer's work. Fan fiction inspires all great things :)
It's a huge game with a very advanced parser, but it only runs on the HP e3000 and the source code has never been released. This is another one I'd like to eventually see the source code to, but I tried contacting one of the authors and got no reply.
I have a copy of this (Peter Langston's Wander C source code) from a 1980 distribution.
I don't think it was ever "lost", it just became gradually more obscure over time, as most things do.
Edit: Looking closer, I see that Langston's 1980 distribution also included Empire (PDP11 object files, not source! -- infamously), "Fast Food" (with C source), and "Star_Drek" -- object files again)
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[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 40.7 ms ] threadJust a reminder, the ESA would like to make this a crime.
Edit: the source was retrieved from the original author. I stand down.
The CDT, Mr. Magnan -- the whole scenario is straight from Laumer's work. Fan fiction inspires all great things :)
If you want to try your hand at another obscure, early text adventure, there's a version of Warp (early 1980s) hosted here:
http://empire.openmpe.com/empire/other_games.html
(You have to access it through telnet.)
It's a huge game with a very advanced parser, but it only runs on the HP e3000 and the source code has never been released. This is another one I'd like to eventually see the source code to, but I tried contacting one of the authors and got no reply.
I don't think it was ever "lost", it just became gradually more obscure over time, as most things do.
Edit: Looking closer, I see that Langston's 1980 distribution also included Empire (PDP11 object files, not source! -- infamously), "Fast Food" (with C source), and "Star_Drek" -- object files again)