Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Colossal Cave Adventure/archive1

The following is an archived discussion of a featured article nomination. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the article's talk page or in Wikipedia talk:Featured article candidates. No further edits should be made to this page.

The article was promoted by Gog the Mild via FACBot (talk) 18 February 2022 [1].

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Colossal Cave Adventure

Nominator(s): PresN 01:47, 2 February 2022 (UTC)

In 1975 a programmer, wanting to make something to connect with his daughters, combined his love of caving with the spoken descriptions of tabletop role-playing games, and the result was Colossal Cave Adventure, aka just Adventure. As the name and year hint at, this one-man project is one of the most influential games of all time: it invented and is the namesake for the adventure game genre (well, the name probably would have been that anyways), but also kicked off the interactive fiction genre and was a precursor to computer role-playing games, roguelikes, and MUDs (and through them MMORPGs). Except it only became all of that through a string of coincidences: that Crowther was a developer for the ARPANET so when he dumped his divorce-therapy game on his work computer programmers all over the country saw it; that one of those players wanted to expand it so he emailed Crowther at every email provider that existed to get the source code; that Woods put his code out with the game so that for the next five years as everyone and their dog made their own "Adventure" games they had the actual code to work from... And as a result, hundreds of millions of people have played what came from a halfway-forgotten text-based game originally played on a teleprinter.

I've been mucking around with early video games for a while, though it's been over a year since I last brought one through FAC, but this article I picked up only this year. It sailed through GAN, and I've been poring over it since, so hopefully it will sail through here as well. Thanks for reviewing! --PresN 01:47, 2 February 2022 (UTC)

• Image review–pass I see no licensing issues assuming that the game was published without a copyright notice. And even if it was, there's a case for {{PD-text}}. (t · c) buidhe 10:03, 2 February 2022 (UTC)

• Note: it was indeed published without a copyright notice, as well as before the Copyright Act of 1976 went into effect. --PresN 12:55, 2 February 2022 (UTC)

Support from Alexandra

I intend to review this - please ping me if I haven't done so by the end of the week.--Alexandra^IDV 08:55, 2 February 2022 (UTC)

• "The program acts as a narrator, describing to the player what each location in the cave has" - the wording "what each location in the cave has" comes across as unusual to me. Could we just write that it describes each location?
• "If it did not understand the player's commands," should be in present tense. There are a few more instances of this like "The player could die", "the game had no ending", "included an entire extra section", etc.
• Would recommend linking tabletop role-playing game
• ", he decided to create a text-based game" - the creation is what's important, rather than the decision to create. Would suggest rewording to something like "he began working on a..."
• "The game did not have an explicit title in it, simply stating "WELCOME TO ADVENTURE!!" as a part of the opening message and having a file name of ADVENT; it was referred to as both Adventure and Colossal Cave Adventure," - Where did CCA come from - was it just a descriptive name that players made up and used among themselves?
• What does "The game is generally the first known example of interactive fiction" mean? Is it supposed to be "among the first known examples", or does "generally" mean something else here?
• "that are standard in interactive fiction titles today" - would recommend changing to "that have since become standard in interactive fiction titles" to avoid dating the article
• "These included Zork (1977)—which began development within a month of the release of Woods' version—by the team of Dave Lebling, Marc Blank, Tim Anderson, Bruce Daniels, and Al Vezza of Infocom, Adventureland (1978) by Scott Adams of Adventure International, and Mystery House (1980) by Roberta and Ken Williams of Sierra Entertainment." - would recommend separating list items with semicolons for ease of reading since the items themselves also contain commas
• "The Carmen Sandiego series, an early educational game series" - describes CS as a series twice in one sentence
• "Massively multiplayer online role-playing game" is not a name and should not be capitalized
• ""xyzzy" is a magic word that teleports" - either capitalize to Xyzzy or rewrite so the sentence does not begin with a lowercase letter

Looks good otherwise, and I enjoyed reading it.--Alexandra^IDV 12:16, 7 February 2022 (UTC)

• Done
• Done
• Done (whoops, used to be an earlier wikilink to that)
• Done
• I have no idea! Pretty sure you're right but I can't find any sources on the drift in the name- it was clearly just referred to as Adventure generally at first, but "Colossal" was thrown around somewhere because by 1982 there was the commercial version Colossal Adventure; I'd guess that the shift happened in part because the 1980 Atari Adventure was more well-known and stole the name, but it's a mystery.
• Hmm, so what I'm trying to not say is that it was the "first", because Wander pre-dated it, but the thing is that very few people played Wander so it didn't inspire much; CCA "started" the genre(s) without actually being the first interactive fiction game. I think "generally" is making a mess here; rewrote to be "The game is the first well-known example of interactive fiction", which is much cleaner.
• Done
• Done
• Done
• Done
• Done, just capitalized since the original was case-insensitive so it doesn't matter.

@Alexandra IDV: Done all; replied below your comments. Thanks for reviewing! --PresN 15:33, 7 February 2022 (UTC)

@PresN: Beautiful, I now support this nomination!--Alexandra^IDV 17:35, 7 February 2022 (UTC)

Comments from Mike Christie

Support. This was a pleasure to read. I played this in 1981 on a CDC mainframe, and remember it very well; I never did get the very last point needed to get the maximum score, but I spent a lot of time trying. I’ve read through and made some copy edits; please revert anything I you disagree with. Other than the copy edits I could find nothing to complain about. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 11:49, 2 February 2022 (UTC)

Support from Shooterwalker

This article is very close to featured article quality. I have a few suggestions to really nail down a few small issues:

• The first paragraph is very long, and it's good to keep the opening as accessible as possible. For readability, I think the lead could be broken into three paragraphs instead of two. There is a clear change in tone / scope at "The original game, written in 1975 and 1976, was based on Crowther's maps..."
• I know this game isn't strictly the first adventure game, but it may as well be. Based on most of my reading, this game considered the eponym for why we call them adventure games. The article is fairly clear on this, but I think you could make this more explicit, especially in the lead. Establishing the genre is arguably one of the game's most important legacies. (Frankly, I think you could even say this very early, in the first paragraph of the lead.)
• The "legacy" section is a little long and might be more readable with subsections. I'm stumped about the best way to organize that.
• There are a few sentences that could be broken into smaller sentences, as they are so long as to interfere with readability.

• "The program acts as a narrator, describing to the player what each location in the cave has and the results of certain actions, or if it did not understand the player's commands, asking for the player to retype their actions"
• "The original 1976 version of the game contains five treasures which can be collected, and while based on a real cave system contains a few fantasy elements such as a crystal bridge, magic words, and axe-wielding dwarves."
• "Woods found the game on a PDP-10 at the Stanford Medical School, and wanted to expand upon the game and contacted Crowther to gain access to the source code by emailing "crowther" at every domain that existed on the ARPANET."
• "Games such as Zork (1977)—which began development within a month of the release of Woods' version—by the team of Dave Lebling, Marc Blank, Tim Anderson, Bruce Daniels, and Al Vezza of Infocom, Adventureland (1978) by Scott Adams of Adventure International, and Mystery House (1980) by Roberta and Ken Williams of Sierra Entertainment were all directly influenced by Colossal Cave Adventure, and these companies would go on to become key innovators for the early adventure game genre." -> (this one in particular tries to combine too many thoughts into a single sentence. Its influence on other games is also important enough that you can really take your time with each influence.)
• ... and many sentences that use a semi-colon. I recommend using a full stop where there are two separate ideas. Or using "and" where the ideas are connected.

Thanks for improving the quality of this very important article. Shooterwalker (talk) 19:35, 2 February 2022 (UTC)

@Shooterwalker: Addressed all of these points; I think it's more readable now and the important contributions more prominent. I have a habit of making long sentences, and have chopped up a couple more that you didn't mention. I won't apologize for the semicolons, though I did reduce the number of them as they were a little out of hand. Thanks for reviewing! --PresN 03:00, 3 February 2022 (UTC)

Support based on the excellent revisions. It's much more readable now. I might still nitpick the sentence about all the games it influenced, but it's partially because I'd be interested for the article to slow down and explain the influence on those games individually. (Particularly Mystery House and its influence on the whole line of Sierra adventure games.) That's more of an after thought, and nothing to stop this from being an FA. Great work and thanks for elevating this subject. Shooterwalker (talk) 04:11, 3 February 2022 (UTC)

Support from ChrisTheDude

• In the gameplay section you refer to the "point system", but the caption uses "points system". Both are probably valid but it would probably be best to be consistent
• "Crowther and his ex-wife Patricia" - was she already his ex-wife at the time? If not, I would suggest "then-wife"
• "In 1975, after he and Patricia divorced" - ah, OK, ignore the above :-)
• Teleprinter is linked twice in the Crowther's original version section
• That's all I got. Great read! -- ChrisTheDude (talk) 21:30, 3 February 2022 (UTC)

• @ChrisTheDude: Done, except for the ex-wife bit; I don't know how to phrase it better. They were divorced when he started the game (so "ex-wife"), but I also discuss the caving which happened before they divorced (so "then-wife"). Open to any suggestions. Thanks for reviewing! --PresN 01:32, 4 February 2022 (UTC)

• Now I understand the situation I think it reads fine as it is - support -- ChrisTheDude (talk) 08:35, 4 February 2022 (UTC)

Support from Jaguar

Happy to add my support since others have made fine-tuning suggestions before me. The prose is excellent and the article's comprehensibility does it further justice. It was an enjoyable read. ♦ jaguar 14:55, 7 February 2022 (UTC)

Source/img review - pass

Passes for source and image. All sources are reliable and consistently and well formatted. Images have appropriate purpose, caption, alts and licences. GeraldWL 17:48, 7 February 2022 (UTC)

• Closing note: This candidate has been promoted, but there may be a delay in bot processing of the close. Please see WP:FAC/ar, and leave the {{featured article candidates}} template in place on the talk page until the bot goes through. Gog the Mild (talk) 15:54, 18 February 2022 (UTC)

The above discussion is preserved as an archive. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this page.