Scott Adams | |
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 Adams in 2002 | |
| Born | July 10, 1952 |
| Website | www |
Scott Adams (born July 10, 1952) is an American entrepreneur, computer programmer, and video game designer. He co-founded, with then-wife Alexis, Adventure International in 1979. The company developed and published video games for home computers. The cornerstone products of Adventure International in its early years were the Adventure series of text adventures written by Adams.
Born in Miami, Florida, Adams had access to an advanced 16-bit computer at home, built by his brother Richard Adams, that gave him a jump on game programming in his leisure time. [1] Adams wrote a graphical action game similar to Spacewar! on this system in 1975.
Scott Adams was the first person known to create an adventure-style game for personal computers, [2] in 1978 on a 16 KB Radio Shack TRS-80 Model I, written in BASIC. Colossal Cave was written two years earlier by Will Crowther, but on a mainframe computer (the PDP-10). These early text adventures recognize two-word commands of the form VERB NOUN. The parser only scans the first three letters of each command, so SCREAM BEAR, SCRATCH BEAR, or SCREW BEAR are treated identically. [2] The games from his company, Adventure International, were subsequently released on most of the major home computers of the day, including TRS-80, Exidy Sorcerer, Apple II, Atari 8-bit computers, PET, VIC-20, and ZX Spectrum. Later adventure games added graphics, with the text entry window below an image illustrating the scene. [3]
Adams's work was influential in adventure gaming. In 1990 Computer Gaming World reported a statement by a "respected designer" that it was impossible to design new and more difficult adventure puzzles, because Adams had already created them all in his early games. [4]
Adams and his wife eventually started organizing their own conventions, and opened a chain of computer stores in Orlando. Alexis negotiated the rights to make a video game out of the Buckaroo Banzai sci-fi movie in 1983. [5]
Since the late 1980s, Scott Adams has worked as a senior programmer for AVISTA in Platteville, Wisconsin. [6]
In 2013, Scott Adams released the Bible-based The Inheritance, his first game in over ten years. As in most of his other games, the player is the protagonist of a novel-like story and helps events unfold in a text adventure set. However, this new game also includes sound. [7] In a 2018 interview Adams said he had not been happy with the game as it was released so had withdrawn it from the market whilst it was rewritten. [8]
In July 2016, Adams created a new company called Clopas to begin publishing games in a new genre he called "Conversational Adventure Games". [9] These games were similar to his early text adventure games, except that they now supported full natural language sentences. [10] The first game he put out under company was Escape The Gloomer , a game published in collaboration with Soma Games for their Lost Legends of Redwall series.
Adams met Irene "Alexis" Reuben in 1977 and they married not long after. While at first she only saw his computer obsession as something that prevented them from sharing more time together, already when pregnant with the couple's first child Alexis Adams saw the business potential of personal computer adventure games, and they started their company as co-founders. [5] Adams would describe how his wife "handles most of the business" as the corporate vice president and general manager of Adventure International, and that she "has been intimately involved in all aspects... from the very beginning". [11] [12] [13] [14]
The couple decided to build an image of mystery around their company and opted to put Scott's name alone on products. Still Alexis was credited as co-creator on some games' title screens, with one giving her sole billing: Voodoo Castle (1979). [5] In a 1980 interview, Scott credited his wife with using his tools to create 95% of that game by herself. [15] One character from that game, "Medium Maegen" named after the couple's daughter, may be the first woman with dialogue in a video game, appearing years before most other contenders. [5]
Scott and Alexis divorced not long after the video game crash of 1983. Alexis died in 2008, 51 years old. [5]
Adams later remarried. [16]
Infocom was an American software company based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that produced numerous works of interactive fiction. They also produced a business application, a relational database called Cornerstone.
The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension, often shortened to Buckaroo Banzai, is a 1984 American science fiction comedy film produced and directed by W. D. Richter and written by Earl Mac Rauch. It stars Peter Weller in the title role, with Ellen Barkin, John Lithgow, Jeff Goldblum, and Christopher Lloyd. The supporting cast includes Lewis Smith, Rosalind Cash, Clancy Brown, Pepe Serna, Robert Ito, Vincent Schiavelli, Dan Hedaya, Jonathan Banks, John Ashton, Carl Lumbly and Ronald Lacey.
Steven Eric Meretzky is an American video game developer. He is best known for creating Infocom games in the early 1980s, including collaborating with author Douglas Adams on the interactive fiction version of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, one of the first games to be certified "platinum" by the Software Publishers Association. Later, he created the Spellcasting trilogy, the flagship adventure series of Legend Entertainment. He has been involved in almost every aspect of game development, from design to production to quality assurance and box design.
Questprobe is a trilogy of graphical adventure video games featuring Marvel Comics characters. The three games are Questprobe featuring The Hulk, Questprobe featuring Spider-Man and Questprobe featuring Human Torch and Thing.
Temple of Apshai is a dungeon crawl role-playing video game developed and published by Automated Simulations in 1979. Originating on the TRS-80 and Commodore PET, it was followed by several updated versions for other computers between 1980 and 1986.
Questprobe: Featuring Spider-Man is the second video game in the Questprobe series.
Adventureland is a text adventure video game for microcomputers, released by Scott Adams in 1978. The game has no plot but simply involves searching for thirteen lost artifacts in a fantasy setting. Its success led Adams to form Adventure International, which went on to publish thirteen similar games in the Adventure series, each in different settings.
Voodoo Castle is a text adventure and is the fourth in the series of adventure games designed by Scott Adams. The game was written by his wife Alexis Adams. The game was published by Adventure International in 1979. It was available for the VIC-20, the Commodore 64, Apple II, and other contemporary computers.
Pirate Adventure is a text adventure video game written by Scott Adams. It was published by Adam's company, Adventure International, in 1979.
Brian Howarth is a British video game designer and computer programmer. He wrote many interactive fiction computer games in the early 1980s in a series called Mysterious Adventures. He was born in Blackpool in 1953.
The Count is a text adventure written by Scott Adams and published by Adventure International in 1979. The player character has been sent to defeat the vampire Count Dracula by the local Transylvanian villagers, and must obtain and use items from around the vampire's castle in order to defeat him.
Pyramid of Doom is a text adventure game written by Alvin Files and published by Adventure International in 1979. It is the eighth in the Scott Adams' Adventure series. Files independently reverse engineered Adams' Adventure engine, wrote a new game, and submitted it to Adams, who then tweaked it for release as part of the series.
Questprobe featuring The Hulk is a 1984 graphic adventure video game developed and published by Adventure International in collaboration with Marvel Comics. It is the first entry in Questprobe, an intended series of graphic adventure games that only released three installments before the developer's bankruptcy. The game's narrative follows the Marvel superhero Hulk and his human alter-ego Bruce Banner, who must explore the mysterious lair of the Chief Examiner. The graphics and story outline were created by Marvel artists and writers. Critical reception was generally positive, with much of the praise going to the visuals. Reactions to the gameplay were mixed, especially upon the game's budget re-release, by which time it was considered dated.
Adventure International was an American video game publishing company that existed from 1979 until 1986. It was started by Scott and Alexis Adams. Their games were notable for being the first implementation of the adventure genre to run on a microcomputer system. The adventure game concept originally came from Colossal Cave Adventure which ran strictly on large mainframe systems at the time.
Russ Wetmore is an American programmer and video game designer best known for writing commercial games and applications for Atari 8-bit computers in the early to mid 1980s. His Frogger-inspired Preppie! was published by Adventure International and praised by reviewers for the music and visuals. He also wrote the maze-game sequel, Preppie! II. Wetmore stopped writing games after the video game crash of 1983 and developed the integrated HomePak productivity suite for Batteries Included. He has remained in software development in director and architecture roles.
Scott Adams Scoops is a compilation of video games designed by Scott Adams and published by U.S. Gold for a variety of home computers: Pirate Adventure, Strange Odyssey, Voodoo Castle, and Buckaroo Banzai.
Questprobe featuring Human Torch and the Thing is the third and final video game in the Questprobe series.
Empire of the Over-Mind is an interactive fiction game written by Gary Bedrosian and published by Avalon Hill for the Apple II, Atari 8-bit computers, and TRS-80 in 1981. A version with an enhanced display for IBM PC compatibles by Bedrosian was published in 1986.
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