Initial release date April 1973 Mode Single-player video game | Genre Strategy game | |
Developer(s) Bud Valenti (and students)
Bob Albrecht Distributor(s) People's Computer Company People also search for Hurkle, Hunt the Wumpus, Star Trek Platforms Commodore PET, Commodore 64 Publishers Creative Computing Software, Commodore Educational Software | ||
Mugwump is an early video game where the user is tasked with finding four "Mugwumps" that are randomly hidden on a 10x10 grid. It is a text-based game written in BASIC.
Contents
Development
Mugwump was written by students of Bud Valenti from Project SOLO in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and then modified by Bob Albrecht of the People's Computer Company. A sample run first appeared in the People's Computer Company Journal Vol. 1 No.3 in February 1973 and source code was published in Vol. 1 No. 4 in April 1973. Source code was again published in Vol. 3 No. 1 in September 1974. Mugwump was later included in the book BASIC Computer Games.
Gameplay
The user enters a pair of single-digit co-ordinates in the range from 0 to 9 which are the x,y coordinates to scan. If a mugwump is at that location then the user is alerted. Otherwise the user is told the distance from the scanned coordinates to each of the mugwumps that are yet to be found. The game ends after ten turns or when all of the mugwumps have been found.
Legacy
Frustration with grid based games like Mugwump led Gregory Yob to produce Hunt the Wumpus.