After porting the Colossal Cave adventure game (http://www.dilwyn.me.uk/games/adventures/ccave.zip ) Graeme Gregory has now ported an earlier adventure game system called Wander.

Screen dump from opening screen of Wander

Wander is a tool for writing non-deterministic fantasy “stories”. The product is a story whose unfolding is affected by decisions made by the “reader”.

The author is Peter Langston (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Langston ), who when asked if this is really from 1974 says: “As I remember I came up with the idea for Wander and wrote an early version in HP Basic while I was still teaching at the Evergreen State College in Olympia, WA. Then I rewrote Wander in C on Harvard’s Unix V5 system shortly after our band moved to Boston in 1974. I got around to putting a copyright notice on it in 1978.”

Here you can find some more information on Wander: https://ahopeful.wordpress.com/2015/04/22/wander-1974-a-lost-mainframe-game-is-found/

Sources for Wander available here: https://github.com/SinclairQL/wander/tree/qdos-gcc

Please note that, at the time of writing, the program had an issue with the Signal Extension, which caused it to fail. The program should only be run without the Signal Extension being present.