Colossal Adventure

Colossal Adventure takes its cue from the very earliest mainframe text adventures. Our hero must rescue the elves and find fifteen pieces of treasure. There are many dark areas, so lights and batteries are at a premium. Be careful of vicious dwarves, who can be killed using axes. You can carry up to four objects at a time; the useful ones include a newspaper, keys and sandwiches. The vocabulary includes saying spell names, DROPping items to stay within the carrying limit (and for other specific reasons), CATCHing a bird, and standard directions plus IN and OUT.

COLOSSAL ADVENTURE, only available as part of the JEWELS OF DARKNESS compilation on the Amiga, enhances the original text-only incarnations released for 8-bit platforms by adding graphics, more extensive text descriptions, an extended parser that understands many more commands and other user-friendly features (e.g. multitasking, a quit back to WB option).

COLOSSAL ADVENTURE is the first installment in Level 9'sMiddle-Earth Trilogy, which also contained ADVENTURE QUEST and DUNGEON ADVENTURE. The Middle-Earth Trilogy was later published in enhanced form as a compilation and renamed to JEWELS OF DARKNESS, albeit with references to Tolkien changed or removed, reportedly, for legal reasons.

COLOSSAL ADVENTURE was Level 9's adaptation of the first computer text-based adventure game ADVENTURE (aka ADVENT, COLOSSAL CAVE, COLOSSAL CAVE ADVENTURE), written by Will Crowther in 1975/76 and enhanced by Don Woods in 1977. Originally released for the DEC PDP-10 mainframe computer and containing almost 300k of Fortran code, the game was strongly influenced by J.R.R. Tolkien. COLOSSAL ADVENTURE draws even more inspiration from Tolkien's writings and features an enlarged master game with an additional 70 locations, and a more detailed outside world than the original.