For anyone who’s been fiddling around with computers since the days before VGA, “Hunt the Wumpus” probably brings back fond memories. Developed in 1973, this text game has you move around a system of caves searching for the foul-smelling Wumpus, a vile creature which you must dispatch with your trusty bow and arrow. Some consider it to be one of the very first survival horror games ever developed, a predecessor to the Resident Evil franchise as well as the video game version of Hannah Montana: The Movie.
If the concept of “Hunt the Wumpus” sounds interesting to you, but you just can’t get over the whole text adventure thing, you may be in luck. [Benjamin Faure] has developed a semi-graphical version of the classic horror title which might better appeal to your 21st century tastes. Running on an Arduino Mega 2560 with graphics displayed on a 8 x 8 LED matrix, it’s not exactly DOOM; but at least you won’t have to type everything out.
For his handheld version of “Hunt the Wumpus”, [Benjamin] 3D printed a nice enclosure and adorned it with labels and instructions that look like tiny scrolls, a neat touch for a game that’s so old contemporary players would have called Zork a “next gen” game. While playing you can see where you’ve been and where you are currently thanks to illuminated dots on the MAX7219 display, and there are LEDs to warn you of your proximity to bottomless pits and the Wumpus itself. There’s even a piezo speaker that will chirp when a bat is nearby, which is important as they have a tendency to ruin your day by carrying you away to a random location in the cave.
Most of the game looks like an advanced version of Snake, but [Benjamin] did go through the trouble of adding some rudimentary animations and sound effects that play during specific parts of the game. When you shoot your arrow or get carried away by a bat, you’ll see a “cutscene” of sorts on the LED display. It’s a fairly simple effect, but helps break up the otherwise fairly spartan graphics and might just be enough to keep a youngins’ attention.
If you subtract a dimension, this project is reminiscent of the 1D dungeon crawler we covered last year. But if even one dimension is too many, you could always run the text version of “Hunt the Wumpus“ on your trusty Arduino.
There is Hunt the Wumpus for TI-99/4 computer that uses graphic rather than text. There was a in-progress version for Atari 2600 but I don’t know if author ever finished it.
Speedruns were fun on that, with a snappy microswitch joystick that barely needed to be moved.
Heh, FF7 victory tone when the wumpus dies XD
The graphical map does make the game a whole lot easier.
Wasn’t the Wumpus also in M.U.L.E.?
Ah, Wikipedia says it was a “mountain wampus” in that game…
First and only game I know of that plays on a dodecahedral maze.
Very cool project! I’m planning on adapting it for a color (WS2812) 8×8 matrix that I’m working on and been looking for Arduino demos that would show off that matrix.
There is a typo in your code defining wumpus3[], missing a B for one of the bytes. Also got warnings for your char definitions, had to specify unsigned chars.
Love this!!!
Good catch, I’ll try to update these when work gives me a breather, which could be a while.
The classic text adventure Hunt the Wumpus game arranged the rooms as the vertices of a dodecahedron. I had it on a CP/M system years ago and mapped the connections on paper.
Thanks for the article about my project! I was pretty stoked to learn that someone wrote about something I did. Though credit where credit is due, I learned that my implementation of Hunt the Wumpus was NOT the first one for Arduino. Here’s an Adafruit article of the original text version recreated for Arduino.
Whoops, I accidentally posted my response to the article on your comment.
And I can’t move a “child” comment up to “parent” level without completely hosing WP’s comment database. Sorry about that.
Thanks for the article about my project! I was pretty stoked to learn that someone wrote about something I did. Though credit where credit is due, I learned that my implementation of Hunt the Wumpus was NOT the first one for Arduino. Here’s an Adafruit article of the original text version recreated for Arduino.