Learn about Microsoft's first game

According to Neowin , Microsoft has been "dipping its hands" into many different fields since its early days. The company is known to have sold hardware add-in cards for Apple PCs as early as 1980. Not only that, before that time, Microsoft even took its first steps in the video game industry.

Microsoft's first game

Accordingly, the software giant once released a PC game called Microsoft Adventure , which was the first game to lay the foundation for later names such as Microsoft Flight Simulator, Age of Empires, Halo, Gears of War and many other games. So what is special about Microsoft Adventure ?

Microsoft Adventure is actually a port of a game that was developed and released for free in the mid-1970s for mainframe computers in universities and research centers. That game was called Colossal Cave Adventure (or simply Adventure ) and was first written and released by William Crowther in 1975.

In an interview for the book Genesis II: Creation and Recreation With Computers , Crowther said that his creation of the game was inspired by his cave explorations and playing the computer role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons .

Colossal Cave Adventure is a text-only game where players take their character and explore a cave system in search of treasure while dealing with dwarven attacks, and most importantly, keeping themselves from dying. The game is controlled by typing simple commands.

Colossal Cave Adventure Game Interface

In 1977, another programmer named Don Woods accessed the game's source code and expanded it with more fantasy elements and added a scoring system. Adventure was one of the first true PC adventure games, and many games released since then owe it a debt of gratitude.

And the big Adventure port was Microsoft Adventure , developed by programmer Gordon Letwin. TRS-80.org says that while other programmers tried to adapt the original Adventure game for small-scale personal computers, Letwin was the first to bring the entire game to a mainframe PC. Unfortunately, when Microsoft Adventure was released in 1979, Microsoft did not credit Crowther or Woods for the game.

Although the game was originally released for the TRS-80 Model 1 PC, Microsoft Adventure required 32K of memory and a floppy drive, which many PCs at the time did not have. The game was also copy protected and allowed players to save their progress up to two times per disc. It cost $29.95, which was quite expensive at the time.

Microsoft Adventure was also released for the Apple II in 1979. In 1981, the game received another version, this time for the release of IBM's first PC. It was the first commercial game ever created for IBM's first personal computer system.

Microsoft Adventure game cartridge for IBM PC

If you're interested, you can play the IBM version of Microsoft Adventure on PCjs.org, a great way to learn about the early days of PC gaming and Microsoft's early forays into software development, even before the advent of MS-DOS or Windows.

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