Talk:Hunt the Wumpus

My memory is

My memory is, if you shot and missed, the Wumpus would wake and move...only eating the player if he happened to move into the player's room. --142.177.171.164 18:08, 15 October 2003 (UTC)

I played this on a DEC KA-10; it was an early version, probably around 1976. In it, the hint that you had bats in an adjacent room was "I hear squeaking!". Did the original really have "Bats nearby"? 24.63.57.12 (talk) 14:42, 18 April 2016 (UTC)

I don't know about others, but I believe the Wumpus (as a creature) appears in more games. One example I know about is the IF-game 'Hunter, in darkness'. If there are more, perhaps a list could be made? --81.246.179.75 10:20, 26 August 2005 (UTC)

Hey, isn't that kind of a spoiler? It's not revealed to be the Wumpus until you finally meet it at the end. Eris Discord | Talk 22:49, 27 May 2007 (UTC)

Origin of name?

The term "fuzzy wumpus" long predates the game (my mother used it to refer to hairy people in the 1960s.) Some discussion of where the name comes from seems in order (but I haven't had much luck.)24.63.57.12 (talk) 14:46, 18 April 2016 (UTC)

PCC

Added note about origins of Peoples Computer Company, since there is no Wikipedia article yet. Maybe someone can dig up enough about the personalities and the organization's history to write the article. There's confusion about its correct name -- both "People's Computer Company" and "Peoples Computer Company" appear on the Web. --Quicksilver^{T @} 19:05, 28 November 2005 (UTC)

There is now an online collection of some of the early issues from the PCC Journal. You can find this reference here: http://hcle.wikispaces.com/Peoples_Computer_Company_working. I don't know enough of the history to write the article, but according to Vol 1, issue 1, the title is "People's Computer Company". Mgg4 (talk) 00:47, 27 January 2018 (UTC)

Spaghetti code

Yob's original code, reproduced in "The Best of Creative Computing" (1976), is a great example of spaghetti code. It contains numerous illegal GOTO jumps that just happened to allow the program to work, but makes direct conversion into a structured program, such as ANSI BASIC or C, impossible. Even though the code was cleaned up a bit when it was later ported to GWBASIC/BASICA, the spaghetti code structure remains in the versions that can be downloaded from archives today. --Quicksilver^{T @} 18:20, 29 November 2005 (UTC)

Well, I wrote a beautifully-structured spaghetti-free version in Pascal last year. So there. Doops | talk 19:11, 29 November 2005 (UTC)

The original code confounds automatic translators, and better high-level language compilers prohibit jumping into the middle of loop structures and subroutines. I recently wrote a version of Hunt the Wumpus in True BASIC 3 (©1993) that looks and feels like the original. In order to make it work, the code ended up looking very different from Yob's original BASIC code. --Quicksilver^{T @} 20:06, 30 November 2005 (UTC)

M:tG Creature Abilities?

Do the abilities of the Hunted Wumpus ("When Hunted Wumpus enters play, each other player may put a creature from their hand into play") or Thrashing Wumpus ("B: Thrashing Wumpus deals 1 damage to each creature and player") relate at all to the game, or were the names the only references to the game? Dariustriplet 02:06, 27 December 2005 (UTC)

TI 99 4a version?

My family used to have one of these behemoths that had hunt the wumpus on it, but there is no mention of it here, I have also seen a web based version of it but can't find it anymore. The different thing about it was that it was a graphical version lots of fun. http://www.videogamehouse.net/huntwumpus.html --138.67.41.39 08:46, 7 February 2006 (UTC)

Me too. But the description there now is definitely not how I remember it. What I had was a Basic program I probably got out of a magazine and text-only. AngusCA (talk) 16:39, 19 July 2018 (UTC)

M.U.L.E. Wampus

It's spelt Wampus in the MULE games, NOT Wumpus. Does this mean that maybe they're not connected? I thought the MULE name was in reference to the French comic Wampus? It's on Wikipedia here. - 08/02/06 (February 8th) --213.36.110.30 16:00, 7 February 2006 (UTC)

It's called the Mountain Wampus in the original 8-bit Atari and Commodore games. I think it must be inspired by Hunt the Wumpus as the instruction manual concerning it is headed "Wampus Hunting". Additionally, the graphics depict the Wampus emerging from a cave.Xot (talk) 14:58, 30 March 2008 (UTC)

The M.U.L.E. Mountain Wampus is indeed inspired by Hunt the Wumpus, as confirmed by Joe Ybarra (EA producer of M.U.L.E.) and Jim Rushing (M.U.L.E. co-author) in interviews which appear in issue #6 of The Gamer's Quarter. Xot (talk) 05:06, 25 June 2008 (UTC)

GM Bot duplication

The paragraph I removed and which was subsequently restored is largely duplicating an earlier line.

Paragraph I removed:

The first IRC bot, GM, played a game of Hunt the Wumpus with users who 
communicated with it over IRC. GM was written by Greg Lindahl.

In an earlier paragraph:

The first IRC bot, named "GM" (for "game master") was a multiplayer Hunt the Wumpus game, ...

These two need merging, but having already had my changes reverted I'll leave it to someone who's been working on the article to fix it in a suitable manner. --HappyDog 02:29, 20 June 2006 (UTC)

IRC no longer exists in the article, oh well, fun to find every reference to me in Wikipedia deleted over time. Greg (talk) 04:01, 5 July 2020 (UTC)

@Greg Lindahl: If you have a reliable source that indicates that it was the first IRC bot and that it played Hunt the Wumpus, it can be re-added; otherwise it's just a digital urban legend. --PresN 16:46, 5 July 2020 (UTC)

Wait, I'm supposed to go google myself and tell you about it? That's not how Wikipedia works. Greg (talk) 02:28, 8 July 2020 (UTC)

"You tell strangers to go add something to an article and then sit back and watch" isn't how Wikipedia works either. I just assumed that, as it's your accomplishment, you knew of a source talking about it. If you don't, maybe I'll find one sometime- I found a book talking about it (that wasn't just referencing Wikipedia), but it didn't say it was the first, just one of the first. --PresN 18:41, 8 July 2020 (UTC)

Commercial game involving Mummies?

Anyone remember a commercial game for the (I believe) C-64 that had game play very much like the Wumpus, but was instead mummis.? It had graphics too.

Just curious.

Multiplayer Hunt the Wumpus

I've played a version of Hunt the Wumpus where there can be multiple players at once. You can even shoot each other instead of the Wumpus. What fun

TSR version

I used to have a handheld version of this game branded by TSR as a "Dungeons and Dragons" game, but same basic concept - go through the dungeon looking for the dragon, bats can carry you around, find the arrow, then find and kill the dragon. It was a little magenta colored game, with a screen like the cheap McDonalds toys. It had a 4-way joystick and a shoot button. According to my wife, it is most likely up in the attic with everything else from my childhood. Have to hunt for it as I can't find it via google. Sabalon 19:59, 11 April 2007 (UTC)

FINALLY - found it - http://www.handheldmuseum.com/Mattel/D&D.htm Sabalon (talk) 16:20, 12 November 2010 (UTC)

lol - wikipedia had me covered - Dungeons & Dragons Computer Fantasy Game Sabalon (talk) 16:25, 12 November 2010 (UTC)

Shouldn't this entry have a sidebar?

Shouldn't there be one of those sidebar things that list what genre of game it is, who developed it, when it was released, ect...? --Logomachist 02:07, 23 May 2007 (UTC)

D&D: Intelivision

I've never seen this game, but based on the description in this article it sounds like it has much in common with the Intelivision console game Dungeons & Dragons (shooting arrows from room to room, bats, not being able to kill the dragon if you do not shoot it from an adjacent room, waking the dragon, etc.). Does anyone know if there was any actual link, or are there no true similarities. BobertWABC (talk) 19:23, 1 February 2010 (UTC)

Wumpus books by Elleston Trevor

Elleston Trevor wrote a series of children's books entitled Wumpus, More about Wumpus, and Where's Wumpus published in 1945, 1947, and 1948 respectively. The Wumpus page, however, redirects here. Should there be a disambiguation page? Drichardson (talk) 00:45, 8 April 2011 (UTC)

I've added a mention in the redirect template, linking to Trevor. Unless the series (or character) is noteworthy enough to have a page of its own, I think that's the right solution. Joule36e5 (talk) 00:10, 18 February 2015 (UTC)

Focus on the classical version

The "Gameplay" section was describing a specific video remake (the one for the TI-99/4A, I think). It seems to me that this article should be primarily about the original text-based game, so I rewrote and clarified it. After I finished, I wondered if it might have been better to just delete the section entirely, as there's a lot of overlap with what immediately follows it. If someone chooses to revert or delete, I won't object.

Or perhaps it should be a table of features and versions that contain those features. (I'm a little disappointed that there's no mention of my favorite version, which included dynamite to change the topology; I don't have a reference to justify adding it.) Joule36e5 (talk) 03:48, 18 February 2015 (UTC)

Original year of release

The information about when Hunt the Wumpus was made seems inaccurate. According this page on The Best of Creative Computing (scroll all the way to the bottom), the original Wumpus by Gregory Yob was published in 1975:

http://www.atariarchives.org/bcc2/showpage.php?page=244

Looking for Wumpus 1, I found this page where Gregory Yob says he was inspired by games like Hurkle and Mugwump which he saw two years prior:

http://www.atariarchives.org/morebasicgames/showpage.php?page=178

Well, this link confirms these games are, at least, from 1973:

http://www.ccapitalia.net/descarga/docs/1975-101-basic-computer-games.pdf

Also, there's a video on YouTube that covers this (read description):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5gvn0dchX2A

So it seems that Hunt the Wumpus is a more recent title (maybe the TI99 version?) for Wumpus 1, which was originally published in 1975.

If you have more reliable sources, please discuss them here. Thank you.

Raven-14 (talk) 16:10, 6 November 2017 (UTC)

According to the archive located at http://hcle.wikispaces.com/Peoples_Computer_Company_working, the Wumpus game was mentioned in vol 2, issue 1, published in September 1973. There is no mention of the author of the game, and the game source was not published at that time; however Gregory Yob is mentioned on page 5, including his address and phone number in Palo Alto. The mention of Wumpus occurs on page 20 of that issue. Readers could purchase a paper tape of the game listing for $4. Mgg4 (talk) 01:06, 27 January 2018 (UTC)

---

I can't provide any documentation, but I played Wumpus in 1968, possibly 1967. I was a student at Brooklyn Tech in NYC. The Chemistry Department had a timeshare account and teletype hookup to a computer at Brooklyn Polytech. We also had access to a golf game and horse racing game. This was pre-ASCII. It was Baudot and garbles happened. It was definitely Wumpus. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Geofffox (talk • contribs) 06:30, 28 March 2021 (UTC)

• Sounds like you had access to the Huntington Computer Project timesharing system, which is quite cool. Despite what your memory tells you though, it’s impossible that you played Wumpus in 1968. Yob was clear that he created the game in the 1970s, and there is no documentary evidence of the game anywhere before 1973. I am sure you played some interesting games on Huntington, but this was not one of them. Certainly could have been something similar though. Indrian (talk) 06:47, 28 March 2021 (UTC)

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GA Review

This review is transcluded from Talk:Hunt the Wumpus/GA1. The edit link for this section can be used to add comments to the review.

Reviewer: CelestialWeevil (talk · contribs) 18:49, 14 January 2019 (UTC)

I saw this title and thought it was the cutest thing, and then I saw it was a text-based thing and I got even more excited. I'll do this ASAP. CelestialWeevil ^(talk) 18:49, 14 January 2019 (UTC)

Infobox and lead

• As per Template:Infobox_video_game#Syntax_guide, I think "Adventure game" in genres should be shortened to "Adventure"

• ...the player moves through a series of connected caves, arranged in a dodecahedron, hunting a monster named the Wumpus. – There is some ambiguity in this language. I think it is clearer as "...the player moves through a series of connected caves, arranged in a dodecahedron, as they hunt a monster named the Wumpus"

• The turn-based game has the player trying to avoid fatal bottomless pits and "super bats" that will move them around the cave system, in order to fire... – I think "that will move them around the cave system" damages readibility; "in order to fire" is too far removed from "the player". But if you feel this is a necessary detail, you could divide it with a semicolon after "cave system" and change "in order to fire" to "the goal is to fire"

• Please wikilink source code

• ...1975, and republished... – This is an unnecessary comma since the second part isn't an independent clause. This also applies in the very next sentence (the first sentence of the second lead paragraph)

• Done all of the above section. --PresN 06:04, 18 January 2019 (UTC)

Gameplay

• ...and in each turn begins with... – remove "in"

• Maybe it would be useful to explain what "crooked arrows" are, or why they're crooked. I see that it is explained later in the development section, but this makes reading it a little confusing.

• If the Wumpus moves to the player's location, then they lose – I would remove "then" here; it's unnecessary and has been said several times already

• I'm a little troubled by just two citations, one per each paragraph. But this might just because I have a tendency to overcite things. Because you're a more experienced editor than me, I'll leave it up to your judgment.

• Done all of the above section. We can get away with 1 cite per paragraph here because not only is the entire paragraph cited to that 1 source (making it technically correct to just put 1 at the end of the paragraph), but unlike the sources we use on articles on modern games, the citation is to a complete description of the game alongside the (sort of) human-readable source code. --PresN 06:04, 18 January 2019 (UTC)

Development

• where the player moved through points connected through some other type of topology – There are some inconsistent tenses throughout. Here, I think 'moved' should be 'moves' as per WP:PLOTPRESENT.

• Is it "superbats" or "super bats"? This article has both.

• ...making it in his opinion a hit game – I think "making it, in his opinion, a hit" is smoother

• In the second paragraph, Creative Computing is refered to as "its" (...in its October 1975 issue...) and the PCC as "their" (...in their book...). Because they're both collectives, I think either singular or plural should be adhered to. And since Yob is American, I would go with singular.

• Please wikilink the first instance of source code

• My attention is again drawn to the sparseness of citations in the first paragrpah. Three paragraphs in a row from one source is a little unnerving.

• This section done; did not convert to present tense as this is not a plot section but presented from the perspective of the developer prior to any players playing, so it's all "would move", etc. (though 'moved' was wrong either way). I knew the cites are odd, but again, it's a multi-page source where the sole developer of the game walks through his development process/timeline, the entire game is described, and the source code of the game is given. If you really hate it I can pull in some of the other cites that themselves reference that cite[1] here, but it would be cosmetic. --PresN 03:52, 20 January 2019 (UTC)

Legacy

• ...newsletter issue as they discussed... – This sentence has several more plural collectives

• Please wikilink torus

• Hunt the Wumpus has been cited as an early example of a survival horror game; the book Vampires and Zombies claims that Hunt the Wumpus was an early example of the genre, while the paper "Restless dreams in Silent Hill" states that "from a historical perspective the genre's roots lie in Hunt the Wumpus" – Three instances of the complete title in one sentence. I would remove the second instance and replace it with "it"

• ...as the player hunts rather than is hunted by the Wumpus and nothing in the game... – Comma before "and", please, as they're independent clauses.

• This section done; I think I've gotten so used to using 'they/their' as a singular gender-neutral pronoun that it's bled over into non-person'd collectives, where it's clearly wrong. --PresN 03:52, 20 January 2019 (UTC)

References

• Reference 16's tile is in sentence case, where most of the others are in title case. As per Help:Citation Style 1#Titles and chapters, please use either title or sentence case consistently.

• Please turn "ALL-TIME" to "All-Time" in reference 18 as per MOS:ALLCAPS

• Please uncapitalize "the" in reference 21

• This section done. On one hand, ref16's title is actually sentence case, and that's standard for that journal/area (re: your cite help link). On the other hand, it's really annoying to read, so I changed it anyway. Did not uncapitalize 'the'; the actual title of the novella is "The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow", so "The" should be capitalized as it's referencing the title of the work, not used as an article. --PresN 03:56, 20 January 2019 (UTC)

External links

• Looks good

End comments

• @PresN: Neat article! It's mostly good, but I'm going to put this on hold until some of the things above are address. Great job! CelestialWeevil ^(talk) 15:01, 15 January 2019 (UTC)

• @CelestialWeevil: Completed or responded to all points; sorry for the delay. Thanks for reviewing! --PresN 03:58, 20 January 2019 (UTC)

• @PresN: Great job as per usual, and I always like to learn new things myself on these reviews. It passes! CelestialWeevil ^(talk) 04:28, 20 January 2019 (UTC)

Windows 3.x

There exists a Windows 3.x version of the game called "Wumpus for Windows" by Monte Ferguson. Can be found at https://archive.org/details/HunttheWumpus_1020 . Deltasim (talk) 18:37, 12 February 2019 (UTC)

Reference in Star Trek 2 novelization.

The article for Vonda N. McIntyre states "In the Star Trek II novelization, one of the characters discusses a computer game he has written, named "Boojum Hunt." In Barbary, a character refers to a computer game named "Snarks and Boojums." but does not include a citation.

The game Hunt the Wumpus predates the book, so I think this a reference to the game. I am not sure if it belongs in this article and perhaps in the page for the original poem. Ranvaig (talk) 07:25, 24 February 2019 (UTC)

"Snarks and Boojums" is from Alice in Wonderland. A group of people are hunting Snarks, and their captain warns them to watch out if the Snark is actually a Boojum, because it will hunt them instead. I'm not seeing how this is a reference to Hunt the Wumpus. --PresN 15:31, 24 February 2019 (UTC)

Source

• https://web.archive.org/web/20051228134442/http://crucialclassics_10.1up.com/

Is this really survival horror?

Do we have a source for the claim of this game being an early example of survival horror? As far as I can tell, this is an adventure game, and I don’t see any evidence of “horror” elements in the gameplay. 31.121.114.146 (talk) 21:16, 28 April 2022 (UTC)

If you read past the lead to the third paragraph of "Legacy", then you can see what sources are discussing the game in the context of survival horror. --PresN 21:09, 29 April 2022 (UTC)

Move discussion in progress

There is a move discussion in progress on Talk:Vaumpus world which affects this page. Please participate on that page and not in this talk page section. Thank you. —RMCD bot 12:04, 13 November 2023 (UTC)