William Crowther (programmer)

William Crowther (born 1936) is an American computer programmer, caver, and rock climber. He is the co-creator of Colossal Cave Adventure from 1975 onward, a seminal computer game that influenced the first decade of video game design and inspired the text adventure game genre.

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 early step in the evolution of the Internet.

Crowther met and married Pat Crowther while studying at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he received a B.S. in physics in 1958.

Following his divorce from his wife, Crowther used his spare time to develop a 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.

In Colossal Cave, or more simply called Adventure, the player moves around an imaginary cave system by entering simple, two-word commands and reading text describing the result. Crowther used his extensive knowledge of cave exploration as a basis for the gameplay, and there are many similarities between the locations in the game and those in Mammoth Cave, particularly its Bedquilt section. In 1975, Crowther released the game on the early ARPAnet system, of which BBN was a prime contractor.

In the spring of 1976, he was contacted by Stanford researcher Don Woods, seeking his permission to enhance the game. Crowther agreed, and Woods developed several enhanced versions on a PDP-10 housed in the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL) where he worked. Over the following decade the game gained in popularity, being ported to many operating systems, including personal-computer platform CP/M.