"wander" was created in 1973 by peter langston. it was initially created by langston in hp basic at evergreen state college, likely on an hp2000 minicomputer like his 1972 "empire". langston rewrote the game in c in 1974 while at harvard university and released it to other users of the mainframe system. he maintained the game through the rest of the decade, with a release in 1980 as part of his psl games collection package of games for unix. the game was thought lost since, as the mainframe computers it ran on were discontinued and no backup copies were known, but in 2015 an interactive fiction enthusiast named "ant", upon seeing the game on a list of lost mainframe games, contacted langston, who found a copy of the 1980 version in a friend's email archives. the 1980 source code has since been uploaded to github, with adjustments made by langston and others to make it run on non-unix systems.