wumpus

wumpus /wuhm'p*s/ n.  The central monster (and, in many
   versions, the name) of a famous family of very early computer games
   called "Hunt The Wumpus", dating back at least to 1972 (several
   years before {ADVENT}) on the Dartmouth Time-Sharing System.
   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 M"obius 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).
   Today, a port is distributed with SunOS and as freeware for the
   Mac.  A C emulation of the original Basic game is in circulation as
   freeware on the net.