The Jargon File (version 4.4.7, 29 Dec 2003):

wumpus
 /wuhm'p@s/, n.

    The central monster (and, in many versions, the name) of a famous family of
    very early computer games called Hunt The Wumpus. The original was invented
    in 1970 (several years before ADVENT) by Gregory Yob. The wumpus lived
    somewhere in a cave with the topology of an dodecahedron's edge/vertex
    graph (later versions supported other topologies, including an icosahedron
    and M?bius strip). The player started somewhere at random in the cave with
    five ?crooked arrows?; these could be shot through up to three connected
    rooms, and would kill the wumpus on a hit (later versions introduced the
    wounded wumpus, which got very angry). Unfortunately for players, the
    movement necessary to map the maze was made hazardous not merely by the
    wumpus (which would eat you if you stepped on him) but also by bottomless
    pits and colonies of super bats that would pick you up and drop you at a
    random location (later versions added ?anaerobic termites? that ate arrows,
    bat migrations, and earthquakes that randomly changed pit locations).

    This game appears to have been the first to use a non-random
    graph-structured map (as opposed to a rectangular grid like the even older
    Star Trek games). In this respect, as in the dungeon-like setting and its
    terse, amusing messages, it prefigured ADVENT and Zork and was directly
    ancestral to the latter (Zork acknowledged this heritage by including a
    super-bat colony). A C emulation of the original Basic game is available at
    the Retrocomputing Museum, http://www.catb.org/retro/.


The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing (30 December 2018):

Hunt the Wumpus
Wumpus

    (Or "Wumpus") /wuhm'p*s/ A famous fantasy
   computer game, created by Gregory Yob in about 1973.

   Hunt the Wumpus appeared in Creative Computing, Vol 1, No 5,
   Sep - Oct 1975, where Yob says he had come up with the game
   two years previously, after seeing the grid-based games
   Hurkle, Snark and Mugwump at People's Computing Company
   (PCC).  He later delivered Wumpus to PCC who published it in
   their newsletter.

   ESR says he saw a version including termites running on the
   Dartmouth Time-Sharing System in 1972-3.

   Magnus Olsson, in his 1992-07-07 USENET article
   <9207071854.AA21847@thep.lu.se>, posted the BASIC source
   code of what he believed was pretty much the version that was
   published in 1973 in David Ahl's "101 Basic Computer Games",
   by Digital Equipment Corporation.

   The wumpus lived somewhere in a cave with the topology of an
   dodecahedron's edge/vertex graph (later versions supported
   other topologies, including an icosahedron and M"obius
   strip). The player started somewhere at random in the cave
   with five "crooked arrows"; these could be shot through up to
   three connected rooms, and would kill the wumpus on a hit
   (later versions introduced the wounded wumpus, which got very
   angry).  Unfortunately for players, the movement necessary to
   map the maze was made hazardous not merely by the wumpus
   (which would eat you if you stepped on him) but also by
   bottomless pits and colonies of super bats that would pick you
   up and drop you at a random location (later versions added
   "anaerobic termites" that ate arrows, bat migrations and
   earthquakes that randomly changed pit locations).

   This game appears to have been the first to use a non-random
   graph-structured map (as opposed to a rectangular grid like
   the even older Star Trek games).  In this respect, as in the
   dungeon-like setting and its terse, amusing messages, it
   prefigured ADVENT and Zork and was directly ancestral to
   both (Zork acknowledged this heritage by including a super-bat
   colony).

   There have been many ports including one distributed with
   SunOS, a freeware one for the Macintosh and a C
   emulation by ESR.

   [Does "101 Basic Computer Games" give any history?]

   (2004-10-04)