Gaming in the Dark: Colossal Cave Adventure, Kentucky Route Zero, and the Racial Imaginary of the Mammoth Cave System

Abstract

This article reads the seminal text-based computer videogame Colossal Cave Adventure (1976–77) as a key document to understand videogame and computing history’s fraught relationship with race. It situates its simulation of underground exploration in the context of the actual location that inspired it: Kentucky’s Mammoth Cave system, a destination that was immensely popular with tourists in the mid-nineteenth century, but also relied heavily on the labor of enslaved Black men. This article examines what it means for one of the foundational videogame texts to be modelled after a space historically marked by Black slave labor; it positions Adventure and the programming culture from which it emerged, and in which it was so enthusiastically received, as crucial sites to understand how the ideology of whiteness as an unraced, universal position came to be so enmeshed with videogame and computer culture. The ramifications of Adventure’s relation to race are explored through a reading of Cardboard Computer’s critically acclaimed videogame Kentucky Route Zero (2012–2020), which pays homage to Adventure by using the Mammoth Cave as a setting for its magical realist exploration of the entanglement of media history, labor, and dispossession in America, but ends up providing a whitewashed account of the labor that shaped the region.