In 1978, Scott Adams released Adventureland, the first text-based adventure written for a personal computer. In this episode, we explore how Adams and his wife, Alexis, turned a TRS-80 hobby project into Adventure International, one of the earliest and most prolific independent game studios. Our conversation dives into the creation of the Scott Adams Adventure series, the evolution of text adventures, and how Adams’s two-word parser and imagination helped define interactive storytelling. We also look at Adventure International’s later forays into licensed games like Questprobe and Buckaroo Banzai, its rise and fall during the video game crash, and Adams’s legacy in game development. Join us as we type our way through the golden age of microcomputer adventures on today’s trip down Memory Card Lane.
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A Trip Down Memory Card Lane