Wander was created by Peter Langston in 1974 (possibly 1973), thus predating Crowther & Woods' Colossal Cave Adventure by at least two years. Gamewise the two systems seem very alike, with cardinal directions, distinct locations and text parsing being used.
[- Peter Langston source]As I remember I came up with the idea for Wander and wrote an early version in HP Basic while I was still teaching at the Evergreen State College in Olympia, WA (that system limited names to six letters, so: WANDER, EMPIRE, CONVOY, SDRECK, GALAXY, etc.). Then I rewrote Wander in C on Harvard’s Unix V5 system shortly after our band moved to Boston in 1974. I got around to putting a copyright notice on it in 1978.
Games created with Wander were referred to as "worlds". After being lost for a number of years, the system was re-discovered in 2015. Anthony Hope, who was part of this process, has more information on his blog.
Apart from the games listed below, Langston also used the system to write Tut, a tutorial in binary arithmetic, in 1978.
Title | Publisher | Year | Language | Documents |
---|---|---|---|---|
Advent | Peter Langston | 1981 | English | |
Aldebaran III | Nat Howard, Peter Langston | 1977 | English | |
Library | Nat Howard | 1978 | English |