Adventure International

History

 
Adventure International was founded in 1978 by Scott Adams shortly after he created his first text based adventure computer game for the TRS-80 personal computer. That first game was Adventureland. After Adventureland, the schedule at which games were released by Adams and Adventure International was fairly quick. The first games released by the company following the premier effort were also mostly created by Adams and were also text based adventure games. Those first games included Pirate Adventure, Secret Mission and The Count.
 
The company went on to release games that Adams worked on with others too, and those created solely by other creators. After many of these games, the company gained what would then be a very early agreement to create computer games based on Marvel Comics characters. These games were released under the Questprobe moniker and included games featuring Spiderman, The Incredible Hulk and the Fantastic Four. The company also released a very hard to find and rare game based on the movie The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the Eighth Dimension.
 
The company even went on to develop and use own proprietary software, specifically created for the creation of adventure games. The Marvel comics games were written and created in this language,a computer language that Adams and the company designed themselves specifically to create adventure games. The language was called SAGA for Scott Adams Graphic Adventures. Adams described the language like this to CRASH magazine, "It’s a full sentence and graphics interpreter designed to run on machines as small as 48K or as large as 400 megabytes. SAGA is an open ended language which is designed to take advantage of new machines as they come out — we are ready for the next two or three generations of machines."   The language included robust text compression and a command interpreter that ran on a BBC Micro microcomputer and a graphics tool running on an Apricot F1 computer, a British made personal computer in the 1980's.
 
Adventure International had begun to incorporate graphics into its games with the SAGA engine, but the games were still text based adventure games for the most part. In the early eighties more graphic based games on video game consoles and computers were beginning to grow in prominence. This probably contributed to the company's losing market share.  
 
Adventure International also had a store front in Longwood, Florida in the eighties.
    
Adventure International closed its doors in 1985. Copyright and ownership of Adventure International intellectual property and games was transfered to the company's bank and eventually reverted to Scott Adams himself.
 

Post Adventure International

After the shuttering of Adventure International Adams became a computer programmer for the company Avista, Inc. In 2000 he returned to the computer and video game world with Return to Pirate's Island 2. 
 
Adams went on to release most of the classic Adventure International text based adventure games as shareware on the internet.
 
Scott Adams was last rumored to be working on an adventure game based on the Old Testament, titled "The Inheiritance."