Wumpus

2 definitions found

From Jargon File (4.3.1, 29 Jun 2001) [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.tuxedo.org/retro'.
  
  

From The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing (27 SEP 03) [foldoc]:

  Wumpus
       
          {Hunt the Wumpus}