Install wumpus with Homebrew, MacPorts, zypper

Project links

• Homepage
• Repository
• Upstream docs
• Package manager page

Commands and aliases

• superhack
• wumpus

Project history

Hunt the Wumpus was created by Gregory Yob in 1973 after he became tired of grid-based hide-and-seek cave games. Its distinctive design arranged rooms as the vertices of a dodecahedron, added hazards such as pits and bats, and made the player infer nearby dangers through textual clues before moving or firing crooked arrows.

The game circulated through the People's Computer Company ecosystem and early hobbyist computing culture. Wikipedia's sourced history records mail-order distribution by Yob and PCC, a Creative Computing source-code publication in 1975, and republication in The Best of Creative Computing in 1976. The game then became one of the canonical BASIC listings that programmers ported, studied, and modified.

ESR's package preserves that lineage as a retrocomputing artifact rather than a reinvention. The manual says the original was written by Gregory Yob and that ESR cloned this version from the original BASIC sources; the project page frames the point of the package as nostalgia and exactness, including the original interface.

Adoption history

Wumpus has unusual adoption history because its importance predates package managers. By 1975, variants already existed in multiple languages, and a C version by Ken Thompson appeared in early Unix game culture. Later BSD and Linux systems kept related Wumpus implementations alive through terminal-game collections, while ESR's standalone package makes the historical game available as a small installable Unix program.

How it is used

The package is used like a traditional Unix terminal game: run `wumpus` and play the turn-based cave hunt in text. The companion `superhack` keeps the same structural idea with a different premise. Its modern use is mostly recreational, historical, and educational rather than competitive gaming.

Why package nerds care

For package nerds, wumpus is a tiny artifact of several histories at once: BASIC type-in games, early adventure-game design, Unix games, and retrocomputing preservation. Its value is not feature velocity but continuity: it keeps a famous 1970s game installable with a normal package command and a man page.

Timeline

• 1973: Gregory Yob creates Hunt the Wumpus and demonstrates it in the People's Computer Company milieu.
• 1975: Creative Computing publishes source for Hunt the Wumpus.
• 1976: The Best of Creative Computing republishes the game.
• 1974-1975: Early C and multi-language versions appear in Unix and hobbyist computing circles.
• 2026-04-04: ESR's project page lists wumpus 1.12 and continues to point to the GitLab repository.

Related projects

• The package is related to bsdgames-style terminal game collections, other Hunt the Wumpus variants, and early text adventure and puzzle games. The manual also documents `superhack`, a related game shipped with ESR's package.

Sources

• http://www.catb.org/~esr/wumpus/
• http://www.catb.org/~esr/wumpus/wumpus.html
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunt_the_Wumpus