The central monster (and, in many versions, the name) of a famous
family of very early computer games called Hunt The Wumpus. The
original was invented in 1970 (several years before {ADVENT}) by
Gregory Yob. The wumpus lived somewhere in a cave with the topology
of an dodecahedron's edge/vertex graph (later versions supported
other topologies, including an icosahedron and Möbius strip). The
player started somewhere at random in the cave with five `crooked
arrows'; these could be shot through up to three connected rooms, and
would kill the wumpus on a hit (later versions introduced the wounded
wumpus, which got very angry). Unfortunately for players, the
movement necessary to map the maze was made hazardous not merely by
the wumpus (which would eat you if you stepped on him) but also by
bottomless pits and colonies of super bats that would pick you up and
drop you at a random location (later versions added `anaerobic
termites' that ate arrows, bat migrations, and earthquakes that
randomly changed pit locations).
This game appears to have been the first to use a non-random
graph-structured map (as opposed to a rectangular grid like the even
older Star Trek games). In this respect, as in the dungeon-like
setting and its terse, amusing messages, it prefigured {ADVENT} and
{Zork} and was directly ancestral to the latter (Zork acknowledged
this heritage by including a super-bat colony). A C emulation of the
original Basic game is available at the Retrocomputing Museum,
http://www.catb.org/retro/.
[glossary]