Original artwork, not a still
Narrator
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
— Colossal Cave Adventure • 1976
Behind the line
What it means
Our interpretation.
It describes a problem with no landmarks, and the humour is that the game says so in the voice of a patient narrator. Programmers and gamers reached for it for tangled code, endless menus and sprawling bureaucracy. It also marks where the whole genre begins: a cave, a parser and a joke about being lost.
Context reviewed
In context
Spoilers for Colossal Cave AdventureShow the scene
The sentence comes from Colossal Cave Adventure, the first text adventure, written by William Crowther in 1976 and extended by Don Woods in 1977. The game contains a maze of ten rooms whose descriptions are word for word the same, so the player has to drop items to tell them apart and map the layout. The phrase became a catchphrase of hacker culture, where "passages" is swapped for other words to fit whatever situation looks equally confusing.
Sources (1)
- Wikipedia: Colossal Cave AdventureGameplay and LegacyReference checked
Context reviewed