--- layout: post title: Colossal Cave Adventure + Twitter date: 2019-01-06 tags: ["Geek"] --- A few months back as I was getting ready to go to XOXO I was reminded of the early days of computing and the advent of the classic text adventure. Even though i never really played them regularly as a kid, I remember hearing about Zork and enjoying the idea of the simple interface (although it is combined with the frustration the few times I did play them of figuring out what to type). However, this simplicity of interface, a typed command followed by a description of an environment or result of an action brought to mind the back and forth of a Twitter conversation. And that thought spawned this idea; a melding of the old and new. It seemed an easy enough proposition to hook up one of the older text adventure games to a Twitter bot that would allow one to send commands and receive the output. Mapping the conversation thread between a user and the bot as a single adventure with the bot maintaining persistence on the back end. The original [Colossal Cave Adventure](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossal_Cave_Adventure) has been dutifully reconstructed and the code is available as open source. With some slight modifications to work around some situations where multi-line answers were required and allow saving without penalty, I was able to get the code in a form that matched a back and forth Twitter exchange. A simple ruby application acted as the go between for the old C program and Twitter. Each conversation was saved off based on the username of the recipient and commands sent back and forth. And [Colossal Cave Bot](https://mobile.twitter.com/ColossalCaveBot) was born. It was a fun little exercise that a few people played around with and seemed to have fun with. The code on the ruby side is not pretty but I might at some point clean it up and share it. (To those who find this in the future, apologies if the bot is no longer running.)