To hear Gregory Yob tell it, Hunt the Wumpus was as much inspired by his hatred of the Cartesian grid employed by Hurkle and similar games as it was by anything else. Yob wanted to make a monster-seeking game based on the dodecahedron, his “favorite Platonic solid.” I must say my own interest in geometry is limited enough that it’s hard for me to share Yob’s passion; certainly I lack a “favorite Platonic solid” to compare with Yob’s. I’m more interested in the other innovations Yob deployed on the way to implementing his dodecahedron.
Hunt the Wumpus is the origin point of all those twisty little passages that would be filling so many computer screens and graph-paper pads just a few years after its creation. Its world consists of a grid of twenty rooms, each of which is connected to exactly three other rooms. Some of these rooms have contents, which are randomly placed before each play: bottomless pits that result in instant death, “super bats” that carry the player to another (random) room, and of course the wumpus himself. If the player walks in on him, he has a 75% chance of merely wandering off to another room, but a 25% chance of eating her up right there. The wumpus can be killed only remotely, by firing an arrow from elsewhere into the room that contains him. The game in fact understands just two verbs: “move” and “shoot.” Gameplay, at least if you’re a cautious (not to say callow) sort like me, consists of moving carefully around the storyworld constructing a map of its rooms, connections, and hazards, and finally moving into position to take the kill shot against the poor wumpus. On the terminal, it looks like this:
HUNT THE WUMPUS YOU ARE IN ROOM 20 TUNNELS LEAD TO 13 16 19 SHOOT OR MOVE (S-M)?M WHERE TO?13 I FEEL A DRAFT YOU ARE IN ROOM 13 TUNNELS LEAD TO 12 14 20 SHOOT OR MOVE (S-M)?M WHERE TO?20 YOU ARE IN ROOM 20 TUNNELS LEAD TO 13 16 19 SHOOT OR MOVE (S-M)?
Okay, so it’s not too much to look at. When you play it for the first time, you might end up asking if that’s really all there is. Still, if you give it a decent chance you’ll find a well-constructed little game that can still be engaging, at least for the first few plays as you sort out how it works and how to beat it. From a design perspective, its biggest flaw is perhaps that you can often begin with a configuration like this:
I FEEL A DRAFT YOU ARE IN ROOM 4 TUNNELS LEAD TO 3 5 14
The draft tells you that you are adjacent to a pit; one of those three tunnels, in other words, leads to death. Because you have not yet had a chance to gather any additional information, you are left to rely on blind chance. You must just pick one and hope for the best — hardly a fair situation.
But I’m not so interested in “pure” game design as I am in the history of ludic narrative. From that perspective, Hunt the Wumpus is hugely important in two ways.
First, it represents a radical change in perspective from games like Hurkle. While the player viewed those games from on-high, Wumpus places her in its storyworld. You are there, creeping from room to room in the darkness. Wumpus offers the merest stub of a narrative, but that stub combined with the switch from a third-person to a first-person perspective gives it a very different feel from Hurkle and its companions. Those games feel like abstractions; Wumpus is a much more immersive experience. It wasn’t quite the first game to put its player inside a storyworld — The Oregon Trail, at least, preceded Wumpus by about a year and was possessed of a much more full-bodied narrative in addition — but it’s nevertheless a significant departure from the norm of its time.
Second, and even more importantly, Wumpus is a prototype version of the system of geography that is still with IF today: a set of discrete, self-contained rooms linked together by connectors the player can use to pass from one to another. Compass directions are not yet here, but the rest of the scheme is. Wumpus is all about mapping. The early IF games that would follow were continuing its tradition in being full of those twisty little passages that so frustrate modern players who try to go back to them today. This brings up a point that I’ve only recently started to grasp: the earliest IF was about geography and mapping more so than story or even puzzles. (I want to talk about the original Adventure just a bit after I finish up with Wumpus. I’ll have more to say about this idea then.)
Like The Oregon Trail, all signs point to Hunt the Wumpus having been originally written in HP Time-Shared BASIC. I was able to locate it on tapes preserved by Bob Brown and Michael Gemeny of the HP-2000 Yahoo! Group. Its BASIC code was first published in a mid-1973 issue of the People’s Computer Company magazine, and later appeared in the October, 1975, issue of Creative Computing. The program that appeared there is almost identical to that which we found on the tape, with the only notable difference being some REM and PRINT statements found in the printed version that attribute it to Yob and plug Wumpus 2 and Wumpus 3, two sequels he had written by that time.
Unlike The Oregon Trail, which remained quite firmly under the thumb of MECC and was apparently spread only to educational institutions, Wumpus quickly spawned heaps of ports and adaptations on almost every viable computing platform of its era (and of every era since). By the time it appeared in Creative Computing Yob could write that, “I have reports of Wumpus written in RPG, a listing of one in FORTRAN, a rumor of a system command of ‘to Wumpus‘ on a large corporation’s R&D computer system and have even seen an illustrated version for the Hazeltine CRT terminal!!” It was interesting enough as a game to cross the cultural boundaries that normally kept the cheerful BASIC hippies of PCC and Creative Computing separated from the world of the hardcore institutional hacker. At least by the 1975 release of Unix Version 6 (and quite possibly earlier), Wumpus had been ported to Unix C; a comment in the source cheerfully declares it “stolen from PCC Vol. 2 No. 1.”
Thanks to Bob Brown, you can experience the original version of this relic in its original environment if you’d like, as well as its immediate predecessors Hurkle, Snark, and Mugwump. Here’s what you need to do. (Yes, this is largely the same drill used to access The Oregon Trail on the same system.)
1. Telnet to mickey.publicvm.com. (Telnet, mind you. None of that newfangled SSH!)
2. Slowly alternate CTL-J and CTL-M until you see a “PLEASE LOG IN” message.
3. Enter “HEL-T001,HP2000,1″. Without the quotes, of course — and note that those are zeroes. Oh, and the system isn’t case-sensitive, but for the authentic experience you might want to have your caps lock on.
4. Enter “GET-WUMPUS” for Hunt the Wumpus; “GET-HURKLE” for HURKLE; “GET-SNARK” for Snark; or “GET-MUGWMP” for Mugwump.
5. “LIST” the program if you like, or just “RUN” it.
Have fun!
Victor Gijsbers
May 16, 2011 at 12:03 pm
Ha, got it on the first try. :) I suppose one of the great advantages of the compass directions convention of IF was that it discouraged people from making dodecahedron-based geographies!
J.P. McDevitt
December 4, 2012 at 9:45 pm
First try as well! We’ve made history.
Jason Dyer
May 16, 2011 at 1:45 pm
Any luck on finding Wumpus 3 anywhere?
Jimmy Maher
May 16, 2011 at 3:01 pm
It’s not on the backup tape set that Wumpus 1 was on. To tell the truth, I haven’t looked beyond that.
Jason Dyer
February 1, 2019 at 3:26 pm
8 years belated, but I found Wumpus 3. There was a special “Games” issue of PCC released in 1974 that had it. (It was not in any of the regular issues.)
https://bluerenga.files.wordpress.com/2019/02/wpic1.png
https://bluerenga.files.wordpress.com/2019/02/wpic2.png
rob hardy
November 26, 2014 at 1:07 pm
is this wumpus 3 ?
http://www.freevintagegames.com/SMSarcade/newarcade/c64/W/9/W/WUMPUS3.T64.php
Jimmy Maher
November 26, 2014 at 2:15 pm
That’s a Commodore version of Wumpus 3, but what Jason was referring to was the original version written in HP BASIC.
Daniel
January 10, 2015 at 10:49 pm
According to Gregory Yob, in Creative Computing Jan/Feb 1976, Wumpus 3 was not written by him, but sent to him by a guy called Howard. He added: “My personal opinion is that the changes and reshufflings happen too often for comfort.”
Apparently, David Ahl still has a copy of the program, but won’t release it because he isn’t sure if this Howard meant for it to be in the public domain.
The HP2000 simulator moved to mickey.publicvm.com
Jimmy Maher
January 11, 2015 at 9:43 am
Thanks. I changed the simulator’s URL in the Oregon Trail article, but forgot about this one.
Eric Lundquist
November 29, 2016 at 6:59 pm
I’m not sure how relevant this is, but dodecahedrons are 12-sided with 5 adjacent sides per face, icosahedrons are 20-sided with 3 adjacent sides per face.
Random832
February 17, 2017 at 2:38 pm
A dodecahedron has 20 vertices with three edges leading from each vertex, though (making it the dual of the icosahedron).
Victor Steerup
June 4, 2017 at 12:54 am
The Chicago T.I. User’s Group did a tribute to Hunt the Wumpus and its variations on June 3, 2017 at the monthly meeting held in the Evanston Public Library. The streaming video record is available at http://www.ustream.tv/channel/chicagotiusersgroup%27s-show at least for a while.
Ian Crossfield
October 1, 2021 at 2:01 am
Just a note that the link to the UNIX C source code for Wumpus is now broken, and even the Internet Archive’s Wayback machine doesn’t have an accessible copy. However, this seems to show what’s referred to in the article above:
https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=SysIII/usr/src/games/wump.c
Jimmy Maher
October 1, 2021 at 12:59 pm
Link changed. Thanks!
Giuseppe Lettieri
March 2, 2026 at 5:19 pm
Does anyone know exactly where Wumpus appeared in PCC? The reference by Thompson (I guess) in the Unix source code seems incorrect if PCC Vol. 2 No. 1 is the version available here: https://archive.org/details/197309PccV2N1/page/n11/mode/2up. Wumpus is only mentioned on page 20, where it is said to appear in ‘Future issues’. Interestingly, the same page shows a sort of genealogy of the “CAVES” games, and Vol. 2 No. 1 actually contains the CAVES3 source code. These are simple exploration-only games, but do they predate Wumpus?
Busca
March 2, 2026 at 8:12 pm
Looks like it was in the very next issue, see here in PCC Vol. 2 No. 2 on the lower part of page 22 and then the following page.
Giuseppe Lettieri
March 3, 2026 at 6:25 am
Thanks! There are no BASIC sources, though. I had the impression that, by ‘stolen’, he meant that he had simply converted the code from BASIC to C. However, maybe he just stole the idea.
Busca
March 5, 2026 at 7:18 am
This led me down a little rabbit hole. My understanding from a bit of research:
– In spite of what is written here and elsewhere, there was indeed no listing of the BASIC code of Hunt the Wumpus in the 1973 People’s Computer Company Newsletter. As mentioned in comments above, Vol 2 No 1 (Sept 1973), on page 20, just announced a presentation of the game in a future issue and gave the tape price. Vol 2 No 2 (November 1973), on page 23, then contained what Jason Dyer (for Caves) called a “sample transcript” of the game being played.
– This is confirmed in that later issue itself where on the preceding page 22 linked above a list of games including Wumpus and Super Wumpus is introduced by saying: “If you are a PCC subscriber, you can get free listings of all our games – send a stamped, self-addressed envelope for each listing. For the tapes themselves, these prices apply”.
Furthermore, in , Vol. 3, No. 3 (January 1975), page 20, a reader writes: “Also you make reference to back issues for info on various games, but some programs like “Hunt the Wumpus“ and “Star Trader” are not mentioned. Will these listings appear in the back issues that I just requested?” To which the handscribbled answer is: “Wumpus, page 24”.
– And indeed, in that same issue Vol. 3, No. 3 (January 1975), page 24, is what I understand the first time the program’s BASIC code is listed in the Newsletter, preceding the one in Creative Computing v01n05 (September/October 1975).
– The earliest ‘public’ listing in a printed publication, however, seems to be on page 21 of the 1974 listing compilation PCC Games (the same one Jason Dyer found Wumpus 3 in, see his 2019 comment with links further up) which, according to the description on the Internet Archive, was published early in that year.
– This chronology aligns with those reflected e.g. in The PCC Games List Project and the github site Programs from the People’s Computer Company (containing code listings, too) built on it.
The quotes I’ve seen by Yob also only mention him writing “Later, PCC published Wumpus in its newsletter[, and Creative Computing published it in their Sep/Oct 1975 issue].” without specifying that “Later”.
– I haven’t done a detailed compare of the listings (not a programmer), but two small differences I noticed between the 1975 PCC Newsletter one and the other two mentioned and linked above:
-> The scan of the PCC Games one found on the Internet Archive has an additional handwritten line:
“67 PRINT “WUMP4: HIDE-N-SEEK” ”
Not sure if that was a last minute addition (PCC newsletters apparently had a lot of handwritten stuff included) or put there by the person who owned the original that was scanned.
-> While the 1975 PCC Newsletter had a separate mention on the page of the listing stating “original concept: Gregory Yob”, the later Creative Computing one includes the author in the code:
“0015 REM: BY GREGORY YOB”
– Finally, it’s maybe worth mentioning that the 1975 book What to Do After you Hit Return (subtitle: ‘P.C.C.’s First Book of Computer Games’) includes Wumpus ‘sandwiched’ between two Caves games and the authors make references to each other’s games in the transitions. Yob also complemented his description / sample run with hand-drawn maps and an extra page on the dodecahedron form of his cave. Not sure to what extent that might or not give hints about the genealogy between the games Jason Dyer was wondering about on his blog. The book contains descriptions of games, but only listings of some of them, the latter if which which do not include Wumpus or the Caves games.
Giuseppe Lettieri
March 10, 2026 at 3:51 pm
Very interesting — thanks! I think it can be argued that Thompson didn’t consult the sources, but instead recreated the game based on the description in Vol. 2, No. 2. The most important clue is that the rooms in Unix Wumpus aren’t arranged in a dodecahedron. Instead, the program generates a random maze of 20 rooms, each with three tunnels, every time it is run. The sources available in the other issues that you have found (and, in some cases, even the comments and the introduction) would have revealed the topology of the caves, but the mere description in Vol. 2, No. 2 does not.
However, there is a counterargument to this. In both the original and Unix versions of the game, the Wumpus moves or does not move according to a 25/75 split when she (he?) wakes up. This ratio is spelled out in the introduction to the other versions (Vol. 3, No. 3, and the PCC compilation), but not in Vol. 2, No. 2. Nevertheless, it is possible to arrive at this ratio quite naturally by simply listing the possibilities (one of the three tunnels or the current room).
Busca
March 5, 2026 at 7:26 am
@Giuseppe Lettieri: Regarding the Caves games and their chronology and development in the context of other games, I’d recommend checking out Jason Dyer’s series of posts “Before Adventure” on his blog.
Adam Huemer
January 26, 2025 at 9:12 am
Your comment is awaiting moderation.
A minor typo:
“it’s biggest flaw is perhaps that you can often begin with a configuration like this:”
Must be: “its biggest flaw (…)”
Jimmy Maher
January 27, 2025 at 12:26 pm
Thanks!