Hunt The Wumpus

1982 Hunt the Wumpus Cartridge

By Hunter Belcher
April 30, 2020

Have you ever been playing a modern video game and just got tired of the endless quests and pointless fighting? If that’s the case then I would recommend getting back to the basics with Hunt the Wumpus. Hunt the Wumpus is an adventure game originally created by a man named Gregory Yob ¹ and written in the BASIC programming language. The version that can be found at the Media Archeology Lab was released in 1980 by Texas Instruments ² . This version was released on a Solid State Command Module ³ and was meant to be played on the TI99/4A. The goal of the game is to find and kill the Wumpus, while avoiding traps and without waking the Wumpus up. The game board is a random system of rooms, connected by hallways. The player starts out in a random room and must navigate through the rooms and use clues to deduce where the Wumpus is hiding and then shoot him with an arrow. If you miss the with your arrow, the Wumpus will wake up and you will have to restart with a new board.

            The original game was a text based game where you would type in commands and the console would print out information based on what moves you made. Texas Instruments version improved on this by adding a GUI (Graphical User Interface). Their version also introduced different difficulties and game modes to increase the playability. One of the new game modes was “blindfold” in this version once the player left a room it will disappear off the map so that they would either have to remember what rooms they’ve been to before. These changes along with its originality led to Hunt the Wumpus’s popularity throughout the 1980’s.