Roberta and Ken Williams on redesigning one of the oldest games

Want to learn more about the future of the video game industry? Join gaming executives to discuss emerging parts of the industry in October at GamesBeat Summit Next. Sign up today.

For video game developers, Roberta Williams is a legend. She founded Sierra On-Line alongside her husband Ken and led the development of now classic titles like the King's Quest series, Phantasmagoria and the Laura Bow franchise. Now she and Ken are back in active game development and working on their latest project: a complete remake of Colossal Cave Adventure in VR.

Colossal Cave Adventure is the original text-based adventure game, the root from which all of these titles have grown since its launch in 1976. Although it is a important part of the game's story, it is difficult to translate it. sort of gameplay into something with a large audience. The Williams, however, came up with the idea of ​​remaking the game as a VR exploration title.

It goes without saying that translating the game to different media is a monumental task. GamesBeat spoke with the Williams about how they plan to bring this legendary title to modern gamers. Here is an edited transcript of our interview:

GamesBeat: What can you tell me about the Colossal Cave remake?

Event

Next GamesBeat Summit 2022

Join gaming leaders live October 25-26 in San Francisco to examine the next big opportunities within the gaming industry.

register here

Roberta Williams: Adventure (sometimes called Colossal Cave) is an old game. In fact, it's arguably the first real video game. It was the original text adventure game. It was a single-player adventure story through a fantasy cave. You don't really know what your goal is when you start playing it. But you find out it's to gather treasure, a certain amount of treasure, and bring it back to a safe place and walk through that cave without dying, and just solve other mysteries and puzzles with it. It has some nice descriptions of the cave you're in, which is loosely based on the Mammoth Caves in Kentucky.

Anyway, this game was written in the early 70s by two gentlemen named Will Crowther and Don Woods. Will Crowther was a caver, he and his wife. They had explored this cave and decided to use it as the subject and backdrop for what Will Crowther was experimenting with the AI. He decided to experiment with the idea that if a person wanted to talk to a game, he would talk back to them. You could control the game, or the story I would say. It was in the early 70s. At first, this game was only played at MIT. Then it was pulled out of MIT as people graduated and left. They took it with them to the various companies and other universities in which they worked, all over the country. It kind of spread like that.

I started playing Adventure in the early 1980s when my husband Ken was a programmer. I had been loosely into computers myself for a few years as an IBM 360 computer operator. I had just had a baby. I was home and needed something to do. He worked at Children's Hospital Los Angeles as a programmer. He saw that a game called Adventure was on their big corporate mainframe. He downloaded it and took it home. I played it on our Apple II. I liked it. I totally bought into this game. I had never seen anything like it, where you could literally play out a story. You go through the story and you talk to her, and she sort of responds to you.