Woods's version expanded the game in size and increased the number of fantasy elements present in it, such as a dragon and magic spells.

Both versions, typically played over teleprinters connected to mainframe computers, were spread around the nascent ARPANET, the precursor to the Internet, which Crowther was involved in developing.

Colossal Cave Adventure was one of the first teletype games and was massively popular in the computer community of the late 1970s, with numerous ports and modified versions being created based on Woods's source code.

[1] The program's replies are typically in a humorous, conversational tone, much as a Dungeon Master would use in leading players in a tabletop role-playing game.

Although it is based on a real cave system, it contains a few fantasy elements such as a crystal bridge, magic words, and axe-wielding dwarves.

The ultimate goal is to earn the maximum number of points—350, in the 1977 version—which involves finding all the treasures in the game and safely leaving the cave.

Driven by what he later described as an increase in spare time combined with missing his two daughters, he began working on a text-based game in Fortran on BBN's PDP-10 mainframe, interfacing through a teletype printer, that they could play.

[6] This approach was also developed to allow the game to be played on a teletype printer, rather than rely on user interface elements used in programs designed for monitors.

During his vacation, others found the game and it was distributed widely across the network to computers at other companies and universities, which surprised Crowther on his return.

[1] He also introduced a scoring system within the game and added ten more treasures to collect in addition to the five in Crowther's original version.

[9] According to cavers who have played the game, much of Crowther's original version matches the Bedquilt section of Mammoth Cave with some passages removed for gameplay purposes, though Woods's additions do not as he had never been there.

[1] Woods began working on the game in March 1977; by May his version was complete enough to release, and was soon attracting attention around the United States.

[1] Crowther did not distribute the source code to his version to anyone else, and it was later believed to be lost until it was rediscovered on an archive of Woods's student account at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in 2005.

Gillogly, with agreement from Crowther and Woods, spent several weeks porting the code to the C programming language to run on the more generic Unix architecture.

[19][20] The Software Toolworks released The Original Adventure for IBM PCs in 1981; endorsed by Crowther and Woods in exchange for a nominal payment, it was the only version for which they received any money.

[23] Designed by Ken and Roberta Williams, co-founders of Sierra Entertainment, the game was started as a hobby project by the pair during the COVID-19 pandemic, before being expanded into a full commercial product by a team of thirty.

Historian Alexander Smith described it as "ubiquitous" on computer networks by the end of 1977, alongside Star Trek and Lunar Lander, and Walter Bright, creator of Empire (1977), recalled that Adventure "caused a sensation".

[10][29] Columnist Jerry Pournelle said that "two weeks' work would be lost" whenever it arrived at a computer installation as employees played it.

These included Zork (1977)—which began development within a month of the release of Woods's version—first by the team of Dave Lebling, Marc Blank, Tim Anderson, and Bruce Daniels at MIT and later by Infocom; Adventureland (1978) by Scott Adams of Adventure International; and Mystery House (1980) by Roberta and Ken Williams of On-Line Systems.

[1] As an in-joke tribute to Adventure, many later games and computer programs include a hidden "xyzzy" command, the results of which range from the straightforward to the humorous.

[44] The game is also a key plot point in an episode of the 2014 TV series Halt and Catch Fire, a period drama taking place in the early days of the personal computing revolution.

[45] As a tie-in, a fully playable version of the game augmented with player hints and artwork revealed when certain locations are visited was made available on the show's official website.