Microsoft, which offers a huge service to game lovers with its GamePass service, is a company that has shown its interest in games even in the first years of its establishment. Founded in 1975, Microsoft also developed its first game in 4 years. While the company’s first game was Microsoft Adventure, it was the company’s first game to bring Microsoft Flight Simulator, Age of Empires, Halo, Gears of War and many more game series that are better known today.
Microsoft Adventure is actually an adaptation of another game developed and released for free in the mid-1970s for large mainframe computers in universities and research centers. This game was called Colossal Cave Adventure and was first written and released by William Crowther in 1975. In an interview for the book Genesis II: Creation and Recreation With Computers, Crowther stated that he was inspired by his own cave explorations, along with the original Dungeons and Dragons desktop RPG game, when creating the game.
Colossal Cave Adventure is a text-only game where the player character explores a cave system. While searching for treasure, he has to deal with the attacking dwarves and try not to die. The game was played by typing one or two word commands.
In 1977, another programmer, Don Woods, accessed the game’s source code and expanded the game with even more fantasy elements and a points system. While Adventure was one of the first true adventure-based PC games, many games released since Zork owe a lot to it.
Microsoft Adventure was an adaptation of Adventure by programmer Gordon Letwin through his own company, Softwin Associates. While other programmers are trying to adapt the original Adventure for smaller PCs, Letwin is the first to bring the entire game to the PC. Unfortunately, when Microsoft Adventure was released by Microsoft in 1979, neither Crowther nor Woods was thanked for their work.
While the game was originally released for the TRS-80 Model 1 PC, it required 32K of memory and a floppy drive not found on many PCs. The game was also copy-protected, which is one of the first instances where a PC game has this kind of protection. It also allowed players to save their progress up to 2 times per disc. It cost $29.95 to buy, which made it pretty expensive for the day, and Microsoft was also selling hint documents for $1 each to help out the stuck gamers a bit.
Microsoft Adventure was also released for the Apple II in 1979. It was also the first commercial game for IBM’s first personal computer system. On the other hand, there was a racing game called DONKEY.BAS included for free in the IBM PC DOS operating system, and this game was co-written by Microsoft’s co-founder Bill Gates.
If you’re interested, you can play the IBM version of the game on the PCjs.org website. While it’s unlikely that Microsoft will graphically re-evaluate and release this game, it’s still fascinating to learn about both the early days of PC gaming and Microsoft’s early gaming efforts before MS-DOS or Windows, isn’t it?
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