Scott Adams (game Designer)

Scott Adams (game Designer)

Scott Adams (born July 10, 1952) is the co-founder, with ex-wife Alexis, of Adventure International, an early publisher of games for home computers.

Born in Miami, Florida and currently living in Platteville, Wisconsin, Adams was the first person known to create an adventure-style game for personal computers, in 1978 on a 16KB Radio Shack TRS-80 Model I, written in the BASIC programming language. Colossal Cave was a year earlier, but on a mainframe, the PDP-10. These early text adventure games use a minimal parser, recognizing 2-word commands of the form VERB NOUN. The parser only scanned the first three letters of each command, so inputting SCREAM BEAR, SCRATCH BEAR or SCREW BEAR would be treated identically. Scott had access to an advanced 16-bit computer at home, built by his brother Richard Adams, that gave him a jump on game programming in his leisure time.

The Adventure International games were subsequently released on most of the major home PC platforms of the day, including TRS-80, Apple II series, Atari 8-bit series and Commodore PET. Versions of the games were also made for later platforms such as Vic-20 and some also had versions produced with rudimentary graphics.