Scott Adams
| Scott Adams | |
|---|---|
 Scott Adams with Mythical Monster | |
| Born | July 10, 1952 |
| Occupation | Software Programmer |
| Website | http://www.msadams.com/index.htm |
Scott Adams was the co-founder of Adventure Internation Inc. and programmer of many software titles. He programmed, with his wife Alexis Adams, Adventure: Pirate's Adventure. Scott Adams also released the following Adventure series games that could be played with the same cartridge as Adventure: Pirate's Adventure with the additional purchase of a floppy disk or cassette tape:
- Adventureland
- Voodoo Castle
- The Count
- Strange Odyssey
- Mystery Fun House
- Pyramid of Doom
- Ghost Town
- Savage Island Part 1
- Savage Island Part 2
- Golden Voyage
Byte Magazine Article
The following appeared in the December 1980 issue of Byte Magazine (Volume 5, Number 12). It appears to be written by Scott Adams himself. The article begins on page 192 of that issue of the magazine. [1]
A Short History
Time flies. The copyright date on my game, Pirate's Adventure, reads 1978. It seems like yesterday, but it has been two and a half years since I started on my Adventures . . .
At the time I was working as a systems programmer for Stromberg Carlson when I was first introduced to the classic Adventure game written by Crowther and Woods to run on a DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation) PDP-10. After playing for only a few minutes I was hooked. It took almost ten days of early-morning and late-evening sessions before I achieved the coveted score of 350 and the title of Grand Master. I had done it--I was a bona fide adventurer! Yet it seemed unfair that such a fascinating game was restricted to such an expensive machine.
Back then, I had just gotten my Radio Shack TRS-80 Level II computer, and (having recently finished my backgammon program) I was looking for another good game to write. The concept of character strings intrigued me, and I wanted a game that used them. (Up to that point, I had programmed primarily in FORTRAN and assembly language, neither of which can handle strings easily.)
Adventure seemed to fit my needs exactly. But I didn't want to copy someone else's program, and I was afraid I wouldn't get much of an Adventure in a 16 K-byte BASIC computer-especially when the FORTRAN version I played took about 300 K bytes!
I mentioned the idea of getting some sort of Adventure into my small machine to friends; fortunately, I was not daunted by their laughter. After all, I could remember when it was supposedly impossible to get a BASIC interpreter to run on an 8080 microprocessor!
Interpreter? Did I say interpreter? Suddenly the idea fell into place! I had written many compilers and operating systems. Why not write an Adventure interpreter? This would allow me to write many Adventures and would also provide the compression I needed to fit them into a small machine. (Inside, I'm really a frustrated science-fiction writer; I have over 3000 science-fiction books in my collection but have never tried to write one myself.)
So, weeks later, my initial scribblings had evolved into a working interpreter with a skeleton Adventure to play on it. It took some six months of play-testing before my first Adventure, Adventureland, was finally released through The Software Exchange of Milford, New Hampshire, and Creative Computing Software. Thus the Scott Adams Adventure Series was born.
And, at that same moment, it almost died. For six months I had been so engrossed in programming Adventure that my wife Alexis (who at the time was pregnant with Maegen, our daughter) started hiding my floppy disks around the house to get my attention. Once she hid them in the oven-boy, did she get some attention that time! I then decided that one Adventure was enough.
Some time after that, Alexis unexpectedly announced that she wanted to write an Adventure, and it was this effort that led to the Scott Adams Adventure given in listings 1 and 2, Pirate's Adventure. With her basic ideas, we created an Adventure that was different from any that had ever been written before. Instead of simply searching for treasures in this Adventure, you now had an added ingredient-a "mission." (In this case, you had to figure out how to build a pirate's ship!) This set the stage for many of my later mission-oriented Adventures that replace a cumulative score with a do-or-die situation. These include my Mission Impossible, The Count, Voodoo Castle, and Mystery Fun House Adventures.
All my current Adventures, for the Apple II, the Radio Shack TRS-80, and the Exidy Sorcerer, are written in machine language and run much faster and cleaner than the original BASIC versions (of which there were only two and a half). I probably would never have written these programs in machine language if it had not been for the gentle nudges I received from a friend I've never met but greatly respect, Lance Micklus.
