Tarn Adams

Tarn Adams (born April 17, 1978) is an American computer game programmer, best known for his work on Dwarf Fortress. He has been working on the game since 2002 together with his older brother Zach.

He learned programming in his childhood, and took up designing computer games as a hobby.

Tarn was born in Silverdale, in the U.S. state of Washington, in 1978.

His father, Dan, worked at a waste water treatment plant and used to work in data management.

He taught his sons the rudiments of coding at an early age and this shared interest allowed the brothers Tarn and Zach to remain close to each other despite their family's constant shifting due to their father's work.

The brothers grew up playing computer games, drawing their own renditions of the randomly generated creatures they encountered, and logging their journeys in detail.

In fifth grade, Tarn wrote his first animation game with Zach.

Explaining his reluctance to socialize, he said, "I was a get-home-from-school, get-on-the-computer kind of kid."

Tarn stated that the main reason they started writing games was to play them themselves, and soon began introducing complicated and unpredictable behavior to achieve more replayability.

In high school Tarn and Zach created a spacecraft game that simulated sections of a rocket blowing off and released their first publicly available game on America Online.

In sixth grade, they developed their first fantasy game, called Dragslay and written in BASIC.

It consisted of single battles leading to a final encounter with a dragon.

A few years later, Tarn rewrote it in the C programming language, and it featured minute details and kept track of populations of units in the generated world.

After Dragslay, Tarn and Zach started working on another adventure game, focusing on procedural world generation.

For this, they drew inspiration from the role-playing video game hit Ultima.

After working on the project for four years and rendering it in 3D graphics, they released it under the title Slaves to Armok: God of Blood.

"Armok" was the name of the game's deity from the variable "arm_ok", which was used in Dragslay to indicate how many arms were left on a particular unit.

The addition of a random story generator was inspired by both of them being avid story writers.

Tarn said, "you could zoom in on your character, and it'd tell you how curly his leg hairs were, and the melting and flash points of various materials, It was insane."

The brothers posted it on their website in 2000, but by 2004 the project started to face increasing problems.

Tarn announced in 2004 on his forums that he was going to shift his main project from Armok to a side project called Dwarf Fortress.

Tarn earned a degree in mathematics at the University of Washington.

He began his doctoral studies at Stanford University, completing them in 2005 with a dissertation titled "Flat Chains in Banach Spaces", which was published in The Journal of Geometric Analysis.

During his first year at Stanford, he said he was under heavy pressure, that the professional environment and competitiveness affected him negatively.

He also cited a dilemma he was facing between studying mathematics and developing video games.

This stressful situation drove him for a time into depression and he admitted to having had a brief stint with narcotics.

The Adams brothers started a company called Bay 12 Games, where they developed and released freeware games, attracting a small following.

Tarn assumed the alias "Toady One" and Zach "ThreeToe".

Tarn's background in mathematics helped in the development of algorithms with three dimensional spatial considerations.

With his skill in programming and Zach's background in ancient history and storytelling, together the brothers designed and developed various projects.

They worked on other small projects during graduation which were released on their website.

Tarn put up a PayPal button after a request from a fan; similarly, a subscriber system was added later.

In the next five months, they made around $300, which brought in only enough to cover their site's $20 hosting cost.

They made side projects like Corin and Kobold Quest in a few days and Squiggles was made in three hours.

Other titles were Liberal Crime Squad and WWI Medic.

In 2006, he quit during his first year of a mathematics post doctorate at Texas A&M University to focus on game development.

In 2006, Tarn started his post doctorate in Texas A&M, which was his goal since his undergraduate days.

He decided to leave during the first year due to increasing stress and is said to have broken down in the department head's office.

After being offered to stay another year and a $50,000 stipend, he agreed and eventually left to devote his full attention to developing Dwarf Fortress and other games, which was until then only a hobby.

He said, "At the end of a math problem, you have a paper and maybe you publish it, and the paper can be a building block for the edifice of mathematics, but to me that's not so important. But working on a problem and having a game when you're done? That's pretty damn cool."