Hunt the Wumpus
No graphics, no map, one arrow, and something asleep two rooms away.
The original
Yob wrote it as a reaction against the grid-based hide-and-seek games of the time, and set it instead in a cave of twenty rooms connected as a dodecahedron. You move between rooms, you are told only what you can sense from where you stand, and eventually you have to fire an arrow at a room you have never seen.
How it played
Each room reported its neighbours' contents without saying which neighbour. "I smell a Wumpus" meant it was in one of the rooms adjoining this one. Draughts meant a bottomless pit next door; the sound of wings meant bats that would pick you up and drop you somewhere random. You built a map in your head, or on paper, out of nothing but these hints.
You had a handful of crooked arrows that could be steered through several rooms in sequence, so a shot was a guess at the cave's shape as much as at the Wumpus's position. Miss, and you woke it, and it moved.
What it left behind
It is the founding example of a game played entirely on inference. Nothing is shown; everything is deduced from partial, ambiguous readings — and the commitment, the arrow, has to be made before you are certain. Every game since where you triangulate an unseen thing from indirect signals is working in the shape Yob cut.
Made by
Gregory Yob
First appeared
1973
On
BASIC, on whatever you had
Genre
Deduction
Taken after by
The build on this site that owes it.