Scott Adams: A Life In Text

“Every time I added a new game, I tweaked the engine and added new features,” Adams says. With each release, the text parser got smarter and its vocabulary increased. The games ramped up in difficulty as well, and hint books became a profitable side business. “Later I came up with the SAGA [Scott Adams Graphic Adventure] engine that used graphics, but was still two words. Then I went to SAGA+ and it allowed full sentence inputs.”

Why add graphics when the text-only format was selling well? “It sort of was a step backwards,” admits Adams. “Usually the pictures were never as good as [people] imagined themselves. But people wanted them and they sold, so I added them.” Several of the original text adventures were re-released with graphics, and Return To Pirate’s Island, a sequel to one of Adams’ first games, was released exclusively for the Texas Instruments system as a text/graphics hybrid. “Getting a full graphic adventure into a TI-99/4A game cartridge was an amazing feat,” he points out. “One that I don’t think was ever repeated.” Unfortunately, it was a feat few players experienced; Return To Pirate’s Island shipped just as Texas Instruments was abandoning production of the TI-99/4A, and only a limited number of the cartridges were ever released.

In a few short years, Adventure International had grown from a one-man shop to a thriving company with about a dozen employees, including Adams’ then-wife Alexis, who was a general manager. The company branched out from Adams’ text adventures to publish business and utility software, as well as other types of games – some notable examples are Russ Wetmore’s Preppie and Preppie II, and the Galactic Saga trilogy created by Doug Carlston, who went on to form Brøderbund. The UK-based Adventure Soft, which later rose to fame in adventure gaming circles with the Simon The Sorcerer series, set up shop in Birmingham to port Adventure International’s games to British hardware, and also created its own games using Adams’ engine.

In 1984, Adventure International celebrated its continued success by securing two high-profile licensing deals: The Adventures Of Buckaroo Banzai Across The 8th Dimension, based on the 20th Century Fox movie of the same name, and the Questprobe series, in partnership with Marvel Comics. “We were contacted by Joe Calamari, the vice president of Marvel at the time,” Adams explains. “He wanted to see the characters on computers and thought [Adventure International was] the best route to do it.” The Questprobe series was planned for 12 instalments, each featuring a different Marvel favourite as the protagonist.

Until this point Adams had been calling the shots for Adventure International’s games, but for the Questprobe titles he had to stay within Marvel’s guidelines. “I read the Marvel Universe comics – it was before they were about to publish them [for] the first time – and had a subscription to every single comic Marvel made, and I submersed myself in them.” Adams recalls working with Marvel as a fairly straightforward process: “I had full freedom, as long as I didn’t have characters doing something unexplained. Like killing off Spider-Man permanently, for example.”

The games were accompanied by a series of Questprobe comics written by Adams and inked and drawn by Marvel artists. “It was an incredible experience to meet the Marvel folks and work with them,” he says. “One of the highlights of my career. I still remember when Stan Lee autographed one of the comics I had written for the series.” The Questprobe comics had different storylines to the games, and Adams remembers them serving as tie-ins, with each comic containing a section where the superhero “was thrown or pushed or otherwise tricked through a portal the Chief Examiner created. The reader was told if they wanted to find out what happened in there, they would need to buy the game.”

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