Scott Adams: A Life In Text

Designed by programmer and spelunking enthusiast Will Crowther, Colossal Cave Adventure is the granddaddy of adventure games. Using a text parser that accepts two-word commands, the player must travel through a series of caves based on the Mammoth caves in Kentucky, solve puzzles, and acquire treasures. “It felt more like an open-ended sandbox than a game at times,” Adams recalls of his early experience playing Colossal Cave Adventure on the Stromberg-Carlson mainframe. “It was just a great deal of fun to play and solve.”

By this time computers were slowly infiltrating the home, and Adams had purchased a Tandy TRS-80 for his personal use. While a few games were available for the platform, none provided a storytelling experience like Colossal Cave’s, and Adams saw an opportunity to introduce interactive fiction to the average Joe. He developed an engine that would run a text parser game using only 16K of memory as opposed to the 300K needed by Colossal Cave, and created his first commercial game for the TRS-80: Adventureland. Released in 1978 by Adams’ newly formed company, Adventure International, this was the first adventure game playable on a home computer.

Like Colossal Cave, Adventureland was primarily a treasure hunt. The player’s objective was to recover valuable items scattered across a world of hodgepodge fantasy elements that included a sleeping dragon, the devil, and legendary logger Paul Bunyan. Adams set the scene through simple descriptions: “I’m in a forest. Visible items are: Trees.” The parser asked “WHAT SHALL I DO?” and the player directed it by typing two-word commands – a verb followed by a noun – such as ‘CLIMB TREE’, ‘THROW AXE’ or ‘EAT MUD’. If you entered a combination the game wasn’t expecting, the parser quipped: “Huh? I don’t think so!”

Home computers’ limited system memory meant that Adams had to significantly restrict the text parser’s vocabulary, often to the player’s frustration. Although Adventureland had a vocabulary of about 120 words, the parser only recognised the first three letters of each word. “This caused some problems with words that had three letters the same but were totally different,” Adams recalls. “There was this bear on a ledge that people needed to get past. I wanted them to shout at the bear and put in synonyms for shout, scream, yell. I got an interesting letter from a player who was so frustrated with the bear he typed in ‘SCREW BEAR’ [and the] game replied ‘Bear is so startled that he fell off the ledge!’”

Adventureland was first marketed through advertisements in computing magazines such as Byte, with Adams duplicating the cassettes himself and fulfilling orders through the mail. As word of Adventureland spread, Adventure International increased production and started selling into Radio Shack and other retail stores. Adams began churning out a number of successful adventures, releasing new titles such as Pirate Adventure, The Count, Mystery Fun House and Ghost Town about twice a year. Distribution expanded across the US’s major home computer models, with Adventure International’s games available for the Atari 8-bit series, Commodore PET, Texas Instruments TI-99/4A and Apple II by the early Eighties.

Adams’ interactive fiction is told in the first-person, with each game set in a new and iconic environment. The player character is almost always unidentified and anonymous, and the lack of a defined back story invites players to jump in and assume the protagonist’s role, a convention that persisted in later adventure games like Cyan’s Myst series. When asked who he imagined these anonymous characters to be, and how they got into the situations they were in – standing on a deserted road leading into a haunted ghost town, for example – Adams replies: “I never had a back story in mind. I let people supply their own ideas.”

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