January 2, 2026
Type LOOK: nostalgia appears
Adventure 751 (1980)
Lost CompuServe quest finally playable — nostalgia tsunami hits comments
TLDR: A rare 1980 variant of Colossal Cave, Adventure 751, was finally found and made playable, thrilling retro fans. Comments burst with nostalgia, documentary links, and plans to sink weeks into it, turning the thread into a cozy history tour and proving old-school text adventures still cast spells.
A long-lost slice of early online gaming just respawned: Adventure 751, a rare take on the text-only classic Colossal Cave, has been found and is now playable thanks to Arthur O’Dwyer’s decade-long hunt and a clutch assist by regular commenter LanHawk. Cue the nostalgia avalanche. The thread went full cozy-mode fast, with fans declaring they could lose months inside this rediscovered rabbit hole. One commenter basically packed snacks and waved goodbye to productivity: “What a nice site… I could spend months there.”
Link-drops turned the comments into a museum tour. Folks pointed to Jason Scott’s documentary GET LAMP and the YouTube version, turning a simple “it’s playable!” into a late-night binge. Meanwhile, newcomers got a crash course in the era: CompuServe was an early internet service where big “time-sharing” computers let many people dial in at once, and Arizona’s lab tinkered with “analog” machines—think flowing signals like music on vinyl—before blending them with digital parts.
The vibe? Joyfully chaotic. Jokes riffed on the old poster’s dragon—“type LOOK before you get roasted”—and on how text adventures are the original mindfulness apps: no graphics, just imagination. No flame wars, just warm fuzzies, deep cuts, and a collective “we’re going in.” The comments didn’t just celebrate a game; they celebrated the feeling of finding a hidden room in the internet’s attic.
Key Points
- •Adventure 751, a variant of Crowther/Woods Adventure, was hosted on CompuServe and disappeared when its games service shut down in the 1990s.
- •Arthur O’Dwyer, who launched a web page in 2012 to find Adventure 751, announced it has been located and is playable.
- •The University of Arizona established an Analog Computer Laboratory in 1958 that evolved into an Analog/Hybrid Computer Laboratory with designs like ASTRAC I, APE 1, and ASTRAC II.
- •Students Alexander B. Trevor, John Goltz, and Jeff Wilkins pursued a time-sharing company idea; hardware procurement shifted from a PDP-15 to a KA-10 (PDP-10) via DEC.
- •CompuServe emerged as a Golden United Life Insurance spin-off; Jeff Wilkins became president at 27, launched LIDIS, and the company expanded by 1973–1974.