Every day, thousands of new people learn how to use the internet, mostly youngsters, who have no idea what’s out there for them to explore. Link sites like Neatorama tend to focus on what’s new, so vast archives of interesting things lay dormant and unused. Some of these are certainly worth another look, even if they haven’t been updated in years, like the game Colossal Cave Adventure.
There’s a ton of MMORPGs out there today, and all of them owe their existence to the early days of the MUD and the MUSH. One of the first was Colossal Cave Adventure, painstakingly coded and released in the mid-1970s and all based around the Mammoth Cave system in Kentucky. Creators Will Crowther and Don Woods took a real-life setting and added fantasy elements, and the gaming world never really looked back.
Not only is the page for the game still there, but you can play it in full, too. It’s now hosted by AMC, in all its black-and-neon-green glory. As one of the forerunners of the modern MMORPG, it’s still incredibly entertaining, and there’s something infinitely rewarding about going back to a text adventure set-up, where players rely more on their imaginations and memories than quest markers and detailed maps.
There are ten other abandoned but available websites and games you might want to look through, listed at Urban Ghosts.