Hunt the Wumpus terrifies TI 99/4a users in November 1980


You ever smell a Texas Instruments TI-99/4A when it’s been running too long? That hot-plastic, cheap-capacitor stink that sneaks out of the vents like robots dying behind the walls. During the Christmas season of 1980, that odor hung over half the dens in America, because something had just woken up inside those beige coffins. Something hungry. Something that had been sleeping since the caves of mainframes past.

They called it Hunt the Wumpus.

A different kind of darkness was stirring. A primal one. A necessary one. The Wumpus was loose, and it wanted a piece of your soul, or at least a few hours of your time.

Texas Instruments, bless their cold, calculating hearts, decided to bring the horror home. The original game, a text-based thing made of words and imagination, had been kicking around on big, clunky university computers since '73. It was pure dread, conjured in the mind. But this, this new beast on the TI-99/4A computer, it had pictures. It had color. It had sound. And in the late autumn chill of '80, it arrived, a little black cartridge, promising adventure indoors where there was only the chill of the void outside.

You slid that cartridge into the slot, and the world outside the window just...faded. The screen glowed with that sickly cathode-ray light, and you weren't in your den anymore, surrounded by family photos and the smell of your mom's cooking. No, you were in the black belly of a dodecahedron-shaped cavern system, a place of twenty rooms, all connected by twisting, shadowed tunnels. A labyrinth built by something that had a mean streak and a sense of geometry.

And the Wumpus was in there. Somewhere.

You couldn't see the Wumpus. That was the genius, the real spine-chilling fear. Just as you would explore an unknown cave system with a torch or flashlight in real life, each cave room in the game only became visible on the screen as you ventured into it. Your digital avatar had a sense of smell, represented graphically. When you were near the cave room the Wumpus was currently using as his lair, you would get a clue that you were close.

Other dangers awaited you in this labyrinth of caves. Bats. Not just bats, but Super Bats. Nasty little buggers that grabbed you and dropped you in a random room, maybe right into a pit, maybe right into the jaws of the Wumpus itself. And slime pits so deep that, once you fell in, not even Elon Musk's mini sub could save you.

If you managed to deduce which cave room the Wumpus was in without getting eaten by him first, you had a chance to fire your crooked arrow into the darkness and pray that it found its fiendish target. If you were wrong, well, you might end up dying, with the tip of your own arrow buried in your back.

When you stumbled - or were dropped - into the lair of the Wumpus, you would come face to face with his terrifying visage, and his massive jaws and teeth would slowly close on you. And Jonah thought he had problems!

"Oops...the Wumpus got you," the computer drolly informed you. With three skill levels, and four game modes, that long cold winter was a little shorter, and a little warmer.

It was a game of dread, of navigation by fear and deduction. You became the hunter, but you were also the hunted, and the line between the two was thinner than a cobweb in a drafty old house. It was primitive, sure. Black labels on black cartridges, selling for a modest $24.95. But for those of us who sat in the glowing light of the monitor, the wind rattling the windows outside, that little cartridge contained an entire universe of creeping, crawling, beautiful dread. It taught us that sometimes, the scariest monsters aren't the ones you can see; they're the ones you can only smell, waiting in the dark just one room away.

And when you boot up the game after all these years, and that funereal fanfare sounds, and the caves load up again, he’ll be one room closer than you think.

Location: Texas, USA

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