2 definitions found
From Jargon File (4.2.3, 23 NOV 2000) [jargon]:
wumpus /wuhm'p*s/ n. The central monster (and, in many
versions, the name) of a famous family of very early computer games
called "Hunt The Wumpus'. The original was invented in 1970 (several
years before {ADVENT}) by Gregory Yob. The wumpus lived somewhere in
a cave with the topology of an dodecahedron's edge/vertex graph (later
versions supported other topologies including an icosahedron and Mo"bius
strip). The player started somewhere at random in the cave with five
`crooked arrows'; these could be shot through up to three connected rooms
and would kill the wumpus on a hit (later versions introduced the wounded
wumpus, which got very angry). Unfortunately for players, the movement
necessary to map the maze was made hazardous not merely by the wumpus
(which would eat you if you stepped on him) but also by bottomless pits
and colonies of super bats that would pick you up and drop you at a random
location (later versions added `anaerobic termites' that ate arrows,
bat migrations, and earthquakes that randomly changed pit locations).
This game appears to have been the first to use a non-random
graph-structured map (as opposed to a rectangular grid like the even
older Star Trek games). In this respect, as in the dungeon-like setting
and its terse, amusing messages, it prefigured {ADVENT} and {Zork} and
was directly ancestral to the latter (Zork acknowledged this heritage by
including a super-bat colony). A C emulation of the original Basic game
is available at the Retrocomputing Museum, `http://www.ccil.org/retro'.
From The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing (13 Mar 01) [foldoc]:
Wumpus
{Hunt the Wumpus}
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