Hunt the Wumpus is a text-based adventure game developed by Gregory Yob in 1973. In the game, the player moves through a series of connected caves, arranged as the vertices of a dodecahedron, as they hunt a monster named the Wumpus. The turn-based game has the player trying to avoid fatal bottomless pits and "super bats" that will move them around the cave system; the goal is to fire one of their "crooked arrows" through the caves to kill the Wumpus. Yob created the game in early 1973 due to his annoyance at the multiple hide-and-seek games set in caves in a grid pattern, and multiple variations of the game were sold via mail order by Yob and the People's Computer Company. The source code to the game was published in Creative Computing in 1975 and republished in The Best of Creative Computing the following year.

An adventure game is a video game genre in which the player assumes the role of a protagonist in an interactive story, driven by exploration and/or puzzle-solving. The genre's focus on story allows it to draw heavily from other narrative-based media, such as literature and film, encompassing a wide variety of genres. Most adventure games are designed for a single player, since the emphasis on story and character makes multiplayer design difficult. Colossal Cave Adventure is identified by Rick Adams as the first such adventure game, first released in 1976, while other notable adventure game series include Zork, King's Quest, Monkey Island, Syberia, and Myst.