My father was always pushing us, to take honors classes and so on, and my mother was always making sure we had what we needed. Scott : They were definitely science-minded. You had quite a technical focus in the family. I had read about you and your brothers building hardware and software together. MNM : That would be the mid-70s, a 16-bit machine then was way ahead of its time. Before that, my brother built a homebrew 16-bit computer, my other brother built a “TV Typewriter” for it, and I wrote perhaps the world’s first 16-bit game for it. It came out about the same time as the MITS Altair but was far better. Before I had the TRS-80 (which we called an “appliance computer”, because you could buy it off-the-shelf) I had a kit computer called Sphere, a machine with a fascinating history, but not well known. Scott: I had been working on computers for a long time before that. Was TRS-80 the first machine you decided to write a similar game for? I know you had in the 1970s played the mainframe game Colossal Cave, and were inspired to build something similar for the microcomputer world. MNM : Scott, great to meet you finally, thanks for taking the time to chat with The Mad Ned Memo today! I am very interested in hearing about your current projects, but I thought we would maybe first spend a few minutes to talk about the early programming days. Get the weekly Mad Ned Memo delivered to your inbox, cost-free and ad-free! You can unsubscribe at any time. If you would like more nerdy stories, interviews, and discussions of computer software and hardware development over the past 40 years, consider subscribing. Here’s how that went down.īut first, a word from our sponsor (me). I sent him something again, expecting no reply, but was pleasantly surprised when he not only replied back, but graciously agreed to talk with me about the old days of game development, and what he’s been up to lately. A day later, I realized I had missed a golden chance to interview one of computing’s early game pioneers. Scott’s company, Adventure International, produced this and many other text adventure games through the 1980s, pioneering the genre of Interactive Fiction. After that reply I felt foolish - Because I immediately realized I had mistakenly emailed the creator of Adventureland, widely regarded as the first text adventure game ever sold for microcomputers. He sent me back something polite, saying he was not in charge of the TRS-80 site, he was Scott Adams, the “Adventure Guy”. After publishing it, I had sent a note to the TRS-80 fansite I used for the article to thank them for their work, and ended up accidentally sending mail to Scott Adams, whose address was linked to the site. It turns out not to be the only happy accident resulting from that article. Scott and Roxanne Adams (Photo courtesy Team Clopas LLC)Ī while back I published an interview with gaming pioneer Walter Bright, which happened due to an accidental meeting in the Hacker News discussion of a different article about TRS-80 game development I wrote.
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