adventure

You are a block. You grab a yellow arrow and point it into duck-looking dragons. You grab an "H" without the middle bar and you can walk through walls. You open gates of castles with keys and get lost in mazes in order to locate a flashing cup. When you bring back the flashing cup into the yellow castle, everything blinks and it makes firework-like noises. There is also a hidden dot that will allow you to pass over the sidelines and read the names of the developers.
Ahh, my favorite Atari game.

The original, I would say primordial, action-adventure video game. Adventure is a direct ancestor of Nintendo’s immensely popular The Legend of Zelda. Written by Warren Robinett for the Atari 2600 and published by Atari, this was the game that pioneered the concept of an overhead-view world made up of interconnecting screens, where the edge of one screen led directly into the opposite edge of the next. It also predicted Zelda in that the player had to find and use a variety of items in clever ways in order to win. Robinett has been quoted as saying that Adventure for the 2600 was an attempt to reproduce the experience offered by mainframe text games, such as Colossal Cave and Dungeon (which later became the Zork series) in a graphical fashion. The game's third variation, in which the required objects are scattered randomly around the map, has rudimentary Roguelike elements.

Adventure also contained the very first hidden secret, or "Easter Egg," ever included in a video game, hiding Robinett's name in a special room somewhere in the maze. He included the egg to get around the policy Atari had at the time of not publicly crediting its programmers. Robinett has said that the graphic of his name takes up 5% of the ROM space in the Adventure cartridge. The entire ROM for Adventure itself is only four kilobytes in size, which is less than half the size of an empty Microsoft Word 2000 document.

A well-made recreation (not emulation) of Adventure with a few new features, called Indenture and written in assembly by Craig Pell for systems which can run MS-DOS programs, can be found at: http://www.retro-remakes.com/Adventure!/adventure.php

Ad*ven"ture (?; 135), n. [OE. aventure, aunter, anter, F. aventure, fr. LL. adventura, fr. L. advenire, adventum, to arrive, which in the Romance languages took the sense of "to happen, befall." See Advene.]

1.

That which happens without design; chance; hazard; hap; hence, chance of danger or loss.

Nay, a far less good to man it will be found, if she must, at all adventures, be fastened upon him individually. Milton.

2.

Risk; danger; peril.

[Obs.]

He was in great adventure of his life. Berners.

3.

The encountering of risks; hazardous and striking enterprise; a bold undertaking, in which hazards are to be encountered, and the issue is staked upon unforeseen events; a daring feat.

He loved excitement and adventure. Macaulay.

4.

A remarkable occurrence; a striking event; a stirring incident; as, the adventures of one's life.

Bacon.

5.

A mercantile or speculative enterprise of hazard; a venture; a shipment by a merchant on his own account.

A bill of adventure Com., a writing setting forth that the goods shipped are at the owner's risk.

Syn. -- Undertaking; enterprise; venture; event.

 

© Webster 1913.

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Ad*ven"ture, v. t. [imp. & p. p. Adventured (#); p. pr. & vb. n. Adventuring (#).] [OE. aventuren, auntren, F. aventurer, fr. aventure. See Adventure, n.]

1.

To risk, or hazard; jeopard; to venture.

He would not adventure himself into the theater. Acts xix. 31.

2.

To venture upon; to run the risk of; to dare.

Yet they adventured to go back. Bunyan,

Discriminations might be adventured. J. Taylor.

 

© Webster 1913.

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Ad*ven"ture, v. i.

To try the chance; to take the risk.

I would adventure for such merchandise. Shak.

 

© Webster 1913.