Hunt the Wumpus

I don't remember the first time I was exposed to a computer. It was either when my dad brought home a 286 when I was four or five, or sometime earlier with my uncle's TI-99. If an original Atari 2600 counts then it was that. That thing is still somewhere in the attic....

The TI-99 was awe inducing. It didn't do much but boot into TI-BASIC and run programs off of cartridges. All the programs my uncle had were games. Some were in BASIC and some were on those cartridges. There was a racing game, some tanks game, Parsec, and Hunt the Wumpus.

http://www.stageselect.com/News/NewsViewer.aspx?newsid=593

Ah, the Wumpus. Bane of my existence whenever I went to my grandmother's house and was allowed to play.

I did some searching today and learned that Hunt the Wumpus started as a text based game. The version on the TI-99 had graphics. You just move from room to room trying to find clues about where the Wumpus had been while avoiding rooms that had pits or bats that would pick you up and put you in a random spot.

I'm at a crossroad right now. I've gotten as far as I really want to with my file reader program. I didn't get the experience allocating memory that I wanted, but that can wait until a rainy afternoon. It's a matter of feeling up to rewriting the program again. My latest quick and dirty project for work was a furious few hours of coding with a mixture of my own code and the work programmer's example code that ended with success and a knowledge of how to utilize libraries in the Windows SDK. I think what comes next should be a simple game, like Hunt the Wumpus. It could even be just text.