Even within this fairly restrictive medium, Adventureland was a clever and engrossing game that made players use their imagination to come up with some rather oddball solutions to the various puzzles. Adams’ adventure titles could easily be compared to the popular room escape type games found all over online gaming sites today. The player is presented with a seemingly random set of inventory items and must come up with often rather
unusual ways of using them to complete the game.
Adams published 17 adventure games between 1978 and 1984, including such titles as Secret Mission, Pyramid of Doom, and Savage Island. These titles were available on several of the platforms of the time, including TI99/4a, AppleII, Commodore Vic 20, Amiga, etc. His last published game from this 
period was the graphic adventure Return to Pirates Isle, a text adventure with graphics instead of text descriptions. While there was no true ‘point and click’ interactivity with the images, this game can easily be said to be the precursor of the now common room escape games on free gaming sites.
I first played Adventureland on my TI 99/4a, which required a cartridge that ran the game interface and loaded individual adventures from either a tape or disk drive. I had a blast playing these quirky things. If you’re curious and want to take a stab at an original Scott Adams Adventure, I’ll 
post links to sites where you can either play a Flash version online or download an emulator and ROM, all free and legal of course.
As it turns out, Mr. Adams lives only a few hours away from me in Wisconsin, USA. I took the liberty of shooting him an email with a few questions and he got back to me within a few days with these responses:
What inspired you to write your first text adventure game?
I played Colossal Caves on a DEC Mainframe. I wanted to do a game on my TRS-80 Model 1 that would use strings in Basic and this seemed like a good concept.What were the biggest challenges/obstacles you had to face while creating games in the late 70s and early 80s?
Memory size and lack of any secondary storage. It wasn't until the time of the Commodore 64 that disk drives started to be affordable. The other problem was lack of standardization. A game would have to be rewritten over and over for all the different computer systems then available.What games do you play these days?
Everquest 2 on the PC and on the Xbox 360 I am still playing Oblivion and King Kong. I try lots of games and recently enjoyed Titan's Quest for a few weeks, but EQ2 is the only game to hold my interest for long term. Oblivion is a distant second to that with about 60 hours played so far.What would you consider the greatest achievement (so far) of your gaming career?
Probably being the first company to specialize in gaming for the home computers.What projects are you working on these days?
I am working a little bit on a new adventure game based on the old testament but haven't done much on it recently.What developments would you like to see in gaming in the next 10 years?
Tough question. Certainly the appeal of the Xbox 360 is due to the ease of use for gamers. No drivers, no video cards or O/S to worry about. It would be nice if Vista will help the PC industry head in the same direction.Many of your original text adventures are available online via free game websites. How do you feel about this?
They have asked me for permission first and I have told them to go ahead. It is wonderful there are still folks interested in replaying my classics.What, in your opinion, is the best game on the market today?
Oh tough one! If we are talking single player then it would be Oblivion, if MOG then EQ2. Between the two, I would have to say EQ2 would rank number one. I have tried virtually all the current MOGs including WoW and I still think EQ2 is heads and shoulders above them all.
Scott Adams adventures are available to play online via flash or in a downloadable format at:
Scott Adam’s yahoo mail list group on computer gaming
Yahoo Group specifically on Scott Adam’s games
Scott Adam’s Yahoo Group
