# Tarn Adams - Maker: Game programmer - Date: b. 1978 - Canonical: https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/tarn-adams/ > The Stanford-trained mathematician who quit academia to spend his life, with his brother Zach, on Dwarf Fortress, a procedurally generated fantasy that simulates everything from world history to a dwarf's grudges. **Why it matters:** Adams created Dwarf Fortress, one of the most ambitious simulations in games, whose generated histories, emergent stories and roguelike depth influenced Minecraft, RimWorld and the whole culture of procedural storytelling. ## Quick answers **Who is Tarn Adams?** The Stanford-trained mathematician who quit academia to spend his life, with his brother Zach, on Dwarf Fortress, a procedurally generated fantasy that simulates everything from world history to a dwarf's grudges. **When was Tarn Adams born?** Tarn Adams was born in 1978 in Silverdale, Washington. **What is Tarn Adams known for?** Tarn Adams is best known for Dwarf Fortress. **Why does Tarn Adams matter to fantasy and games?** Adams created Dwarf Fortress, one of the most ambitious simulations in games, whose generated histories, emergent stories and roguelike depth influenced Minecraft, RimWorld and the whole culture of procedural storytelling. ## Life Tarn Adams was born on April 17, 1978, in Silverdale, Washington. His father, Dan, taught Tarn and his older brother Zach the rudiments of programming when they were small, and a shared love of code kept the brothers close as the family moved often for their father's work. They grew up playing computer games, drawing the randomly generated creatures they met and keeping detailed logs of their journeys. Tarn called himself "a get-home-from-school, get-on-the-computer kind of kid." In fifth grade the brothers wrote their first animation game together, and in sixth grade their first fantasy game, *Dragslay*, in BASIC: a series of battles culminating in a fight with a [Dragon](https://www.lanternhall.org/bestiary/dragon/). Influenced by [Dungeons & Dragons](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/original-dungeons-and-dragons/), Tarn later rewrote it in C with minute detail about the populations of its generated world. Its code gave the family's later games their deity: a variable called `arm_ok`, tracking how many arms a unit had left, became "Armok," the god of blood. Tarn studied mathematics at the University of Washington and then earned a PhD at Stanford University in 2005 with a dissertation titled "Flat Chains in Banach Spaces," published in *The Journal of Geometric Analysis*. He has described his first year at Stanford as a period of heavy stress, torn between mathematics and game-making. In 2006 he began a postdoctoral position at Texas A&M University, a goal since his undergraduate days, but left during the first year to make games full-time. As he put it, a math paper could be a building block for mathematics, "but working on a problem and having a game when you're done? That's pretty damn cool." ## Work The brothers' first big project, inspired partly by [Ultima](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/ultima-i/), was *Slaves to Armok: God of Blood*, a 3D fantasy adventure with a random story generator and absurd physical detail, posted on their website in 2000. By 2004 it was struggling, and Tarn shifted his attention to a side project begun as a two-month diversion in October 2002, itself grown out of a small mining game called *Mutant Miner*. That project was [Dwarf Fortress](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/dwarf-fortress/). Under the name Bay 12 Games, with Tarn as "Toady One" and Zach as "ThreeToe," they released freeware games and relied on fan donations. The first alpha of Dwarf Fortress appeared on August 8, 2006. Before play begins, it generates a world with [Procedural generation](https://www.lanternhall.org/lexicon/procedural-generation/): continents, rivers, civilizations and centuries of recorded history, wars and legends. In the main mode the player directs a band of [dwarves](https://www.lanternhall.org/bestiary/dwarf/) carving a fortress into a mountain; each dwarf has a personality, preferences, relationships and memories, and the simulation extends to fluids, temperature, weather and the anatomy of every creature. There are no [Hit points](https://www.lanternhall.org/lexicon/hit-points/); wounds damage specific tissues and organs, and combat logs describe them in unsparing detail. Adams has said that hit points depress him, "like a game designer stopped doing their job." An Adventurer mode turns the same world into an open-ended [Roguelikes](https://www.lanternhall.org/atlas/roguelike/). Rendered in text characters and nearly impenetrable to newcomers, the game adopted the unofficial motto "Losing is fun!", a joke from its manual about the inevitability of a fortress's collapse. Donations grew enough to support the brothers, and the game gathered a devoted community that shared its emergent disasters as serialized stories. Tarn calls Dwarf Fortress his life's work; in 2011 he said version 1.0 was at least twenty years away. In 2019 the brothers announced a commercial edition with graphical tiles and a new soundtrack, published by Kitfox Games. Released on Steam and itch.io on December 6, 2022, it sold 160,000 copies in its first 24 hours and more than half a million by the end of 2022, and passed one million on Steam by April 2025. The free text version remains available. Adams has also written and edited on design, contributing a chapter on simulation principles to *Game AI Pro 2* (2015) and co-editing, with Tanya X. Short, *Procedural Generation in Game Design* (2017) and *Procedural Storytelling in Game Design* (2019). He moved to the United Kingdom in 2024. ## Legacy Dwarf Fortress has been called one of the most complex games ever made, but its influence is simpler to state: it showed that a world could generate its own stories. Minecraft, RimWorld and many colony-simulation games show its influence, and its generated histories anticipated a whole movement in procedural narrative. The Museum of Modern Art selected it for its video game collection in 2012. It is also a direct heir of the lineage this museum follows from [Rogue](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/rogue/) and [NetHack](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/nethack/): the roguelike's randomness, [Permadeath](https://www.lanternhall.org/lexicon/permadeath/) and unforgiving systems, scaled up into a fantasy world that dwarves, [goblins](https://www.lanternhall.org/bestiary/goblin/) and [kobolds](https://www.lanternhall.org/bestiary/kobold/) actually live in. For visitors to the [Screens, Sandboxes & the Open Game](https://www.lanternhall.org/chronicle/screens-and-sandboxes/) chapter, Tarn Adams is the purest example of the [Sandbox](https://www.lanternhall.org/lexicon/sandbox/) ideal: two brothers, one game, and a lifetime spent making a world big enough to surprise its makers. ## Facts - Born April 17, 1978, in Silverdale, Washington, he learned to code from his father as a child. - "Armok," the god of his early game Slaves to Armok, came from a variable named arm_ok that counted a unit's remaining arms. - He earned a mathematics PhD at Stanford in 2005 with a dissertation titled "Flat Chains in Banach Spaces." - The first alpha of [Dwarf Fortress](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/dwarf-fortress/) was released as freeware on August 8, 2006, supported only by donations. - Dwarf Fortress was selected in 2012 for the Museum of Modern Art's collection of video games. - The 2022 Steam edition sold 160,000 copies in its first 24 hours and passed one million Steam sales by April 2025. ## Sources and further reading - [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarn_Adams) - [Wikipedia: Dwarf Fortress](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dwarf_Fortress) - [Bay 12 Games](https://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/) --- From The Lantern Hall (https://www.lanternhall.org/), a museum of fantasy literature and roleplaying games.