Scott Adams (game developer)

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Scott Adams (born July 10, 1952 in Miami , Florida ) is an American programmer and computer game pioneer who, with his company Adventure International, was the first to bring commercial text adventures to the market for the then new home computers from 1978 and thus helped them To bring the genre of games (and computer games in general) from a student hobby to a marketable product.

Adams graduated from high school in 1972 and accepted a position at the Florida Institute of Technology (FIT), where he quickly rose to become a senior programmer. Three years later he switched to RCA, where he analyzed space objects on Ascension . After completing a computer science degree at FIT and a few more years at RCA, he moved to a small systems house in Melbourne in Florida to be closer to his home . There he met his future wife Alexis, with whom he moved to Lake Mary within Florida to take a position at the telecommunications equipment supplier Stromberg-Carlson. He was introduced to the computer game Adventure through work colleagues . Fascinated by the possibilities the game offered, he began working on similar games in his spare time on a Tandy TRS-80 Model 1 . Scott and Alexis formed Adventure International, and Scott left Stromberg-Carlson to focus on creating and marketing adventure games. He initially sold the adventures he had created himself by advertising them in computer magazines and copying and shipping them himself. The business was profitable; In 1983 the company had 40 employees and had moved to Longwood .

His games were characterized by a reduction to the essentials with an almost telegram-like language and only then fit into the small memory of early home computers. However, they often had a complex plot with well-thought-out puzzles and tasks. The parser could only understand about 120 words; The 1977 developed Zork the company Infocom understood already nearly 700 words. Nick Montfort, professor of digital media at MIT , pointed out in a work on interactive fiction that Adam's reputation was not based on high-quality games, but rather that they were full of spelling mistakes , of questionable grammar and written in a kind of pidgin English. However, the games were available everywhere and served the home computer market that was only emerging at the time. Scott Adams' games were only available in English; Translations were attempted several times (for example on behalf of Tandy Radio Shack ), but failed due to the simplified grammar of the games, which was unsuitable for other languages. In some cases, the results were not completely playable because the ambiguities caused by the translation had not been taken into account in the program. The underlying memory-saving program system was published in the form of an adventure generator program and the first game, Adventureland in the BASIC version, after a few years in a specialized magazine (later in book form) and subsequently the basis for many other adventure games; By this time, however, many fans had already reverse-engineered the games on their own and developed their own program systems based on their findings. With memory becoming less and less important, Scott Adams' games lost their importance after just a few years. For example, the mainframe- based Fortran program Adventure , from which his game Adventureland emerged, was meanwhile even playable on home computers .

Since the 1980s, Adams worked as a programmer for a software company in Platteville . In 2013 he published a text adventure called The Inheritance , which technically linked to his old works and dealt with religion. In 2017 he founded the development studio Team Clopas, which published the text adventure Escape the Gloomer in 2018 and has since been working on an adventure game called Adventureland XL .

Works

  • Adventureland (1978)
  • Pirate Adventure (1978-1979)
  • Secret Mission (1979)
  • Voodoo Castle
  • The Count (1979)
  • Strange Odyssey (1979)
  • Mystery Fun House (1979)
  • Pyramid of Doom (1979)
  • Ghost Town (1981)
  • Savage Island, Part I (1982)
  • Savage Island, Part II (1982)
  • Golden Voyage (1982)
  • Sorcerer of Claymorgue Castle (1982)
  • Return to Pirate's Isle (1983)
  • Quest sample :
    • Quest Sample # 1: The Hulk (1984)
    • Quest Sample # 2: Spider-Man (1984)
    • Quest sample # 3: The Fantastic Four (1984)
  • The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai (1984)
  • Return to Pirate's Island 2 (2000)
  • The Inheritance (2013)
  • Escape the Gloomer (2018)

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Ron Mitchell: Scott Adams: Adventuring with the Atari . In: Antic . 2, No. 4, July 1983, p. 12.
  2. ↑ Point & Click Adventures . In: Retro Gamer . 2015, No. 3, June 2015, p. 35.
  3. ↑ Infocom-IF.org: Zork I Specs. Retrieved December 7, 2018 .
  4. ↑ Nick Montfort: Twisty Little Passages - An Approach to Interactive Fiction . The MIT Press, Cambridge 2003, ISBN 0-262-13436-5 , pp. 125 .
  5. ^ AdventureGamers.com: The Inheritance Review. Retrieved August 8, 2016 .
personal data
SURNAME Adams, Scott
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American programmer and computer game developer
DATE OF BIRTH July 10, 1952
PLACE OF BIRTH Miami (USA)