around and write
a program that was a re-creation in fantasy of my caving,
and also would be a game for the kids … My idea was that it would be a computer
game that would not be intimidating to non-computer people, and that
was one of the reasons why I made it so that the player directs the
game with natural language input, instead of more standardized commands.

(Quoted in Dale Peterson, Genesis II: Creation
and Recreation with Computers, 1983.) It's hard not to feel a certain
sadness that the first adventure game is shaped by these two lost souls,
Bishop and Crowther, each like Orpheus unable to draw his wife out of
the underworld.

Crowther's program (c. 1975), then, was a simulation
of the Bedquilt Cave area, owing its turn-based conversational style
to a medieval-fantasy adaptation of tabletop wargaming:E. Gary Gygax
and Dave Arneson's Dungeons and Dragons (1973–4). Nor
was the program without precedent, either in computing – ‘Hunt
the Wumpus’ (Gregory Yob, 1972) was a textual maze game, while
‘SHRDLU’ (Terry Winograd, 1972) had a recognisably
adventure-like parser – or in literature, where OuLiPo and other
ludic literary genres, especially in France, had tried almost every
permutation to make physical books more open-ended: Raymond Queneau's
Cent mille milliards de poèmes (1962) cut its pages into
strips so that the lines of ten sonnets could be mingled to form
1014 different outcomes.1 But the OuLiPo writers,
and earlier futurists, had thought more in terms of clockwork than
the computer: the literature machine's unashamed mindlessness a
provocation to the reader, in whom associations will be triggered.
Italo Calvino (in his 1969 lecture Cybernetics and Ghosts):

It will be the shock that occurs