Scott Adams: A Life In Text

Marvel gave Adams the freedom to decide which characters appeared in each game: “Hulk, I saw as an easy target, as his power set was limited. To be able to work with [the Fantastic Four] meant I had to have a well-planned adventure, and that would take some time.” For this reason, The Hulk became the first game in the series, with an easy difficulty level to help ease Marvel fans into the adventure gameplay. Spider-Man came next, followed by The Fantastic Four, which Adams cites as one of the favourite games of his career. It featured the Thing and the Human Torch as playable characters, with gameplay that required switching between them and taking different actions in different locations to succeed. Although both roles could be assumed by a single player, Adams considered it an opportunity for two players to collaborate, making The Fantastic Four an early example of story-based multiplayer gaming.

When asked why only two of the superheroes were playable in the adventure and not all four, he admits: “It was my decision. I had to limit how much I could get into a game.” A second Fantastic Four title likely would have come later in the Questprobe series. An X-Men game was next in line but was canceled when Adventure International went out of business in 1985.

Only two years earlier, Adams’ company had experienced its best sales year ever, with $3 million in revenues. But the videogame market was changing fast, with Apple and IBM computers and the Nintendo Entertainment System overshadowing other platforms. Adams describes issues with Texas Instruments and Commodore at the heart of Adventure International’s shutdown. After years of selling the TI-99/4A at a loss to compete with Commodore and others, Texas Instruments discontinued the computer, taking with it a major platform for Scott Adams’ text adventures. “The TI had great guts but the external system was pretty much junk,” he recalls. “That’s what sunk their sales. If they had put a real keyboard on it and left off the cartridge slot they would have sold a ton and not gone out of business.”Licensing issues also caused problems: “I had licensed Commodore to have the exclusive rights to the Marvel Questprobe series. They basically sat on it, and this was a big problem. They ended up having to buy out of their contract at ten cents on the dollar. It was a major loss of planned revenue.”

With his company bankrupt, Adams returned to his original calling: programming. He went to work for engineering firm Esterline AVISTA, where he remains today as a senior programmer. It would be 15 years before Scott Adams designed another game. In 2000 he released Return To Pirate’s Island 2 for Windows PCs, but admits it was more of a novelty project than a business endeavour: “I only did this because numerous fans kept requesting something. It was fun but hasn’t really sold any great number.” The game returns to its text-only roots with an enhanced parser that understands full sentences, and boasts sound effects and a built-in hint system. It sells for $19.95 from Adams’ website . “I have a shelved game that I keep thinking I will get back to, but haven’t in some time,” he adds.

If this seems like a sad end to the tale of the man who unleashed story-based gaming on the world, remember how Adams describes himself: a programmer who creates games when there are none to be played. Forty years after he taught his school’s computer to play tic-tac-toe, there are plenty of games out there, and Adams enjoys many of them. “Post [Adventure International], I enjoyed playing Myst and its series of games,” he says. Today, “I mostly enjoy MMOs such as EverQuest II, City Of Heroes, and currently I’m messing around in Age Of Conan. I also enjoy RPGs on the Xbox 360 such as Oblivion and Fable II.” It comes as no surprise that someone who was once drawn to Colossal Cave Adventure still looks for games that tell a good story. The worlds and the treasure hunts have grown, but at their core, these games are open-ended sandboxes that can be explored by answering that simple and timeless question: “WHAT SHALL I DO?” For this, we all have Scott Adams to thank.

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