But he is best known for Dwarf Fortress, the fantasy colony sim co-created by Tarn and his brother Zach. From its debut in 2006, Dwarf Fortress has grown into one of the most ambitious and loved games on the PC, celebrating its 20th anniversary this year. ADams now split his time "half and half" between supporting the existing game and working on new additions to it."I've been doing these cool workshops, procedurally generated magic workshops," he says."If you want a nice little plant and some skulls on another table and a big crystal with electricity around it, I got you."Adams took a break from tinkering with workshops to show me around the digital battlements of his PC.

We talked about his current obsession with terraformation games, his childhood experiments in Basic, and how gaming's greatest factory sim helped him work through a tragic loss. What game are you currently playing? Tarn Adams is a lifelong programmer and one half of the duo that gave us Dwarf Fortress, which he created with his brother Zach.

A true labour of love, Dwarf Fortress started life in 2002, launched in 2006, featured Ascii graphics, and eventually got an overhaul in 2022, when it launched on Steam. It currently sits in the third spot in PC Gamer's Top 100. I've been playing The Planet Crafter.

I had played it before, back when it was in early access and got up to a certain level of content. And then, of course, it just stops. I didn't have frogs or something and it was really bothering me.

But I had to stop because there was no more. It's aterraforming game. You're thrown on a planem and you have to terra Form IT!

You can die [from a lack of] oxygen or thirst or [starvation]. But you're not going to get attacked by giant bugs or anything. And you have to make your habitat enough to survive.

And then from there, you unlock the little technologies to get the planet hotter, build the air pressure, get the oxygen, and then eventually get water and plants and everything. And then you can start building bases and go deeper into the planet and stuff. That's pretty much it.

It's fun. It's chill. You don't have to worry about higher difficulty settings where they just send infinite streams of difficult enemy units at you.

Your only limiting factor is your tools and your technology. Screengrab from Tarn Adams/Bay 12 Games

What was the first game you ever played? I have a hard time remembering my earliest ones, but I know I played Myst when it came out. I did not have a computer when we moved to Oregon, so we basically lived out in the woods for a few years in our trailer while my dad finished up his PhD.

Then we finally got a computer after we moved onto the campus, and I guess Myst was out by then too. So that might have been one of the earlier games I played. Can you tell me about thefirst game you made?

The very first game I made was actually a platformer. But the very first thing I tried to make was a text adventure in QBasic. My mum had gotten this book of Basic programming concepts, and I learnt about variables and if statements and loops.

So I wrote this text adventure where you were in a house, and you could move around, and there were puzzles. That was my first real attempt at making a game. And then I realised I couldn't draw pictures in Basic, so I switched to assembly.

I forget what the very first Assembly programme was, but I quickly forgot about text adventures and was justassembling interrupt handlers and stuff. What was your operating system when you built that first Assembly programme? Oh, that was definitely MS-DOS.

And compile it in Turbo Assembler, of course. And then I think we upgraded to Windows 95 or something, and then I went to coding in C or whatever. Those were the early days of the internet too, so you could download source code for shareware games, and you could see how people implemented collision detection or whatever.

I spent a lot of time reverse engineering various programs and Operating Systems. Can you tell me about the first multiplayer game you played? I am trying to think of the first multiplayer game I played online.

There weremultiplayer games before the Internet, like the original DOOM, but those required a local LAN setup. The first multiplayer game I played online has vanished into the mists of time, unfortunately. But I do remember playing Counter-Strike 1.6, I think, even before it was popular.

And then later on, we had a clan tag, Clan P HD, and we played competitively in South Africa against other clans. That was fun. Also, Star Craft was huge in South Africa at the time.

Our internet cafe frequents would stay up till four or five in the morning watching GSL tournaments. Did you and Zach play Dwarf Fortress together?(Laughs) Yes, we did. In fact, the screenshots in the Wikipedia page are from our old