This is the source code for Jason Abbott's "cthulhu" text/curses game, as hosted on UCSCB in the 1990s.
Jason describes the game thus:
"I wrote a game with cthulhu in the title. You fought minor beasties around the world and then travelled to various other realms to try to knock off the elder gods."
"It wasn't so much a text adventure game as what we'd now (in the 2020s) call a rogue-like game. You acquire powers, and try to take out stronger and stronger foes."
"As I recall, the last thing I added to that game was a way to abstract out all the monsters, so that if it needed to we could not call things "Cthulhu" and "Azathoth" so as not to get in trouble with Chaosium... but it's might have been long enough that most of the names are now public domain. (important note; I'm not a copyright lawyer)"
"If you want to put any of the collective commons copylefts on it, feel free. I give it to the world, so whichever one of the public share copyrights you're most happy with would be good enough for me. Again, I have no idea if a game can use many of those names (I understand all the names are free for literature, but Chaosium might own the rights to the game versions of the names). Feel free to mention that I was the original other, and I'll be happy. There will be a lot of work to port it anywhere."
Per Jason's guidance, these sources are published under a CC BY-SA 4.0 license.
I haven't modified any of the source files, only added a few text files (this README, the license, and a note documenting my communication with Jason).
My plan is to not make changes to this repo, and instead focus development on my port of Jason's code to modern Linux: https://github.com/ttkciar/cthulhu-linux