Hunt the Wumpus

Hunt the Wumpus
TI-99/4A boxart showing the visualization of the Wumpus and the graphics-based labyrinth
Developer(s)	Gregory Yob
Designer(s)	Gregory Yob
Platform(s)	BASIC, TI-99/4A
Release	Original BASIC Version 1972 TI-99/4A Version 1980
Genre(s)	Adventure game
Mode(s)	Single-player

Hunt the Wumpus is an early computer game, based on a simple hide and seek format featuring a mysterious monster (the Wumpus) that lurks deep inside a network of rooms. It was originally developed as a text-based game written in BASIC. Due to the source code availability the game has since been ported to various programming languages and platforms including graphical versions.

Hunt the Wumpus was originally written by Gregory Yob in BASIC while attending the Dartmouth campus of the University of Massachusetts in 1972 or 1973. Out of frustration with all the grid-based hunting games he had seen, such as Snark, Mugwump, and Hurkle, Yob decided to create a map-based game.Hunt the Wumpus was first published in the People's Computer Company journal Vol. 2 No. 1 in mid-1973, and again in Creative Computing in its October 1975 issue. This article was later reprinted in the book The Best of Creative Computing, Volume 1. Yob later developed Wumpus 2 and Wumpus 3, which offered more hazards and other cave layouts.

By the release of Version 6 Unix (1975), the game had been ported to Unix C. An implementation of Hunt the Wumpus was typically included with MBASIC, Microsoft's BASIC interpreter for CP/M and one of the company's first products. Hunt the Wumpus was adapted as an early game for the Commodore PET entitled Twonky, which was distributed in the late 1970s with Cursor Magazine. A version of the game can still be found as part of the bsdgames package on modern BSD and Linux operating systems, where it is known as "wump."