It looks like Adventure was the first at something else too.
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Why am I not surprised that it was Microsoft?
“Microsoft, screwing up software since 1975”
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Not just that, but Microsoft preventing piracy of … something they themselves had stolen.
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So…completely on brand.
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Nonetheless, that’s the version I had access to as a kid. (One day in my father’s office wasn’t enough.) If Microsoft hadn’t done that version with an Apple 2 port, I wouldn’t have been able to play Adventure until I got to college.
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(Mind you, we had a pirated copy!)
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This reminds me of something I’ve been pondering for a while.
Given the existence of the BSD licensed vesion:
Do you think it would be legal to recreate a work-alike of Crowther’s original version in another language as a stripped down modification of the Crowther-Woods version there, provided the license/copyright statements are kept?
That’s something I’d actually like to do.
In the words of Graham Nelson:
[350-point Adventure] was generally considered at the time, and ever since, to be in the public domain, on what legal grounds it’s hard to see
Given how many ports and different versions already exist, I’m confident you wouldn’t get in legal trouble for porting Crowther’s original. At least one person already has, in I7.
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Yeah. I was more concerned about the goodwill of the original authors by adhering to the intent of the license they granted, than any real legal implications.
My luck - I’d be the first person to be sued for doing a port of Adventure 
Neither Crowther nor Woods has ever shown any interest in restricting Adventure. Woods’ version had some code obfuscation, but that was only to help sysadmins enforce limits on playing time during working hours, and since few of us are still playing on a time-shared mainframe, that’s not very relevant now. We’ve now had over forty years of remixes, expansions, and ports of the game. It almost certainly exists in more versions than any other work of IF. I think working with it should be quite safe.
(As for the original license, I don’t think it had any. It was expected at the time that software would be shared and passed around, but the formalities and conventions of the process hadn’t been developed yet.)
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I was referring to the BSD license of open-adventure, since the original authors seem to have given their approval to Eric S. Raymond for that project.
I see, I misunderstood you. That also seems perfectly safe, though. If the authors agreed to a permissive license, it’s safe to assume they’re okay with redistribution and copying.
If anyone compiles Rust stuff:
https://crates.io/crates/colossal
Edit: Updated to fix a couple bugs.
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