I don’t know whether to be turned off by the new Colossal Cave or charmed by it. Here’s a game that originally came out in 1976, and was played entirely in text – printed on paper, in some cases – and it’s been remade in 3D. The caves you once explored in your imagination are now rendered around you.
Colossal CaveDeveloper: Cygnus EntertainmentPublisher: Cygnus EntertainmentPlatform: Played on PCAvailability: Releases later today – 19th Jan – on PC (Steam). Also apparently coming to Meta Quest 2, Xbox, PlayStation and Switch but I can’t see any sign of it on those storefronts there yet
Except, the text guidance is still here too, only it’s now narrated. So as you walk around the new 3D world, an eye icon and narrator also give you the old cues you no longer really need. “You are in a large cave,” for instance.
But there’s also something about the way it works. Colossal Cave behaves like a stop-start kind of adventure game, a point-and-click. There’s an inventory and you use things on other things. You can’t even open a door until you switch to the hand icon and ‘use’ it, and the same is true of ladders. There’s no jumping, no crouching, and the game locks you in place when you encounter someone while they run through a short animation of some kind.
It’s like seeing the kind of 3D world we know so well these days but being held back from exploring it with the fluidity we’re used to. It’s as though Colossal Cave, for all it wants to be new, can’t shake off the past.
But there’s a good reason for this! There’s a whole backstory to the game you have to know about. It revolves around Ken and Roberta Williams, who created Sierra On-Line back in the 80s and were the OG video game mega-company before the familiar names of today came along. Ken ran the business, Roberta made the games. And it all began for them with Colossal Cave – Roberta played it and never looked back.