Exhaustive lineage of Colossal Cave Adventure ports and adaptations spanning 1975-2020, covering dozens of platforms, languages, and authors.
Key Takeaways
The tree traces forks from Crowther’s 1975 PDP-10 FORTRAN original through Woods, Platt, Gillogly, Arnautov, and many others across 50+ years.
Ports span FORTRAN, C, APW C, AppleSoft BASIC, Inform, Rust, A-Code, AGT, TADS, Python, PHP, and batch files on platforms from PDP-11 to iOS.
Mike Arnautov’s A-Code branch (ARNA series) is one of the most active lineages, producing variants from 1984 to 2020 targeting modern browsers and cloud.
The tree surfaces obscure forks: Soviet CP/M ports, ZX Spectrum commercial releases, HP-95LX adaptations, and a Junos op-script port.
Many entries are source-only or lost; provenance is reconstructed from in-game credits, README files, and secondary sources like IF Archive citations.
