The Further Text Adventures of Scott Adams

I was really honored for a chance to talk with one of computer gaming's true pioneers, Scott Adams. His text adventure games launched an entire game genre and influenced and inspired a lot of other programmers and game developers.

If you read the interview and come away thinking, "why didn't he ask him about X?", today's your lucky day, because Scott has graciously agreed to stop by here and answer a few questions. He's new to HN, so be sure and give him a warm welcome!

Thanks for sharing your story Scott. Back when you wrote your early games, what were your toolchain and development process?

Really good question!

I was working on a TRS-80 Level II machine (this was a model 1 before there wer models). It was my first home appliance computer, before that I had homebrews. It came with Microsoft Basic.

I had only used tiny basic up until then and wanted to play with strings. It sounded neat to be able to manipulate language with them.

I wrote a game language, a compiler for the language, and an interpreter for the language to play the game, all in BASIC.

I also wrote Adventureland (my first game) at the same time. Adding features to the tools and the game as I was inspired.

Much later I converted the BASIC interpreter into Z80 assembler to be able to give me more memory. The entire game with interpreter had to fit in 16K bytes!

Which is a good point.

Back when the internet was starting to bloom I got a nice email from Scott Adams of Dilbert.

Seems he had gotten a number of fan mails meant for me and was trying to find who to send it to. I also had a number of fan mails meant for him! We exchanged the mails and had a nice chat about it!

Scott, are there any “modern” games that you feel capture the same spirit of exploration and discovery that your games embraced?