C=US builds on the whole of human experience, not only on what changed this week. Nothing is thrown away; it is translated for a newer audience, as Babylonian tablets became Knuth’s algorithms, a Kentucky cave became the first text adventure, and that adventure became this screen.

C=US Adventure is an homage to Colossal Cave Adventure (1976), the first text adventure. It was written by Will Crowther, a programmer and caver, from his survey maps of Kentucky's Mammoth Cave, and expanded by Don Woods in 1977.

Donald E. Knuth recast Woods's program as ADVENT, a literate program in CWEB, in 1998. Knuth also wrote “Ancient Babylonian Algorithms” (Communications of the ACM, July 1972), which studies how people approached computation nearly 4,000 years ago, from Old Babylonian clay tablets of about 1800–1600 B.C.