Looking back at Microsoft’s first PC game, Microsoft Adventure

Microsoft has had its hand in all sorts of different products, even in its early days. We have already discussed how it sold hardware add-in cards for Apple PCs as early as 1980. However, even before then, Microsoft released a PC game that’s now mostly forgotten. It’s called Microsoft Adventure, and it’s the first game from the company that has brought us Microsoft Flight Simulator, Age of Empires, Halo, Gears of War, and many more game franchises that are more well-known today.

Microsoft Adventure was actually an adaptation of another game that was developed and released for free in the mid-1970s for those big mainframe computers found in university and research centers That game was called Colossal Cave Adventure (sometimes referred to simply as Adventure) and was first written and released by William Crowther in 1975. In an interview for the book, Genesis II: Creation and Recreation With Computers, Crowther states he was inspired to create the game from his own exploration of caves combined with playing the original Dungeons and Dragons tabletop RPG.

Colossal Cave Adventure is a text-only game, where the player character explores a cave system. He looks for treasure while also having to deal with attacking dwarves and trying not to fall to his death. He plays the game by typing one or two-word commands.

In 1977, another programmer, Don Woods, got access to the game’s source code and expanded the game with even more fantasy elements and a points system. Adventure is one of the first true adventure-based PC games, and many games released afterward, from Zork onwards, owe a debt to it.

Microsoft Adventure was an adaptation of Adventure from programmer Gordon Letwin, who made it via his own company Softwin Associates. TRS-80.org says that while other programmers tried to adapt the original Adventure for smaller personal computers, Letwin was the first to bring over the entire game to the PC. Unfortunately, when Microsoft Adventure was released in 1979 by Microsoft, it did not credit Crowther or Woods for their work.

While the game was first released for the TRS-80 Model 1 PC, it required 32K of memory, and a floppy drive, which a lot of PCs didn’t have. The game was also copy-protected, which is one of the first examples of a PC game getting that kind of protection. It also allowed players to save their progress up to two times per disc. It cost $29.95 to buy, which also made it pretty expensive for its day, and Microsoft also sold hint documents at $1 each to give some help to gamers who might be stuck.

Microsoft Adventure was also released for the Apple II in 1979. In 1981, the game got another edition, this time for the release of the first IBM PC. It was the first commercial game ever made for IBM’s debut personal computer system. There was also a game included for free in the IBM PC DOS operating system, a racing game called DONKEY.BAS, which was actually co-written by Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates (Perhaps we will write a feature on that game someday).

If you are interested, you can play the IBM version of the game on the PCjs.org website. While it’s unlikely that Microsoft will ever do a full graphical reboot of this game (especially since it’s an adaptation of two men’s previous work) it’s still fascinating to learn about both the early days of PC gaming and Microsoft’s first software efforts, even before its own work om MS-DOS or Windows

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