William Crowther (programmer)

William Crowther
Will Crowther in fall of 2012 in the Shawangunk Mountains
Born	1936 (age 80–81) United States
Other names	Willie
Occupation	Computer programmer, caver
Spouse(s)	Patricia Crowther (until 1976), Nancy S. Crowther (married 1980-present)

William ("Willie" or "Will") Crowther (born 1936) is a computer programmer and caver. He is best known as the co-creator of Colossal Cave Adventure, a seminal computer game that influenced the first decade of game design and created a new game genre, text adventures.

During the early 1970s Crowther worked at defense contractor and internet pioneer Bolt Beranek and Newman (BBN), where he was part of the original small ARPAnet development team. His implementation of a distributed distance vector routing system for the ARPAnet was an important step in the evolution of the Internet.

Crowther met and married Pat Crowther while at MIT.

Following his divorce from his wife, Crowther used his spare time to develop a simple text-based adventure game in Fortran on BBN's PDP-10. He created it as a diversion his daughters Sandy and Laura could enjoy when they came to visit.

Crowther wrote:

"I had been involved in a non-computer role-playing game called Dungeons and Dragons at the time, and also I had been actively exploring in caves - Mammoth Cave in Kentucky in particular. Suddenly, I got involved in a divorce, and that left me a bit pulled apart in various ways. In particular I was missing my kids. Also the caving had stopped, because that had become awkward, so I decided I would fool around and write a program that was a re-creation in fantasy of my caving, and also would be a game for the kids, and perhaps some aspects of the Dungeons and Dragons that I had been playing. My idea was that it would be a computer game that would not be intimidating to non-computer people, and that was one of the reasons why I made it so that the player directs the game with natural language input, instead of more standardized commands. My kids thought it was a lot of fun."