tarn

Stephen Henson reminded me of the article written about Tarn Adams, the creator of Dwarf Fortress.

Also from another interview, Tarn spoke about how he sees Dwarf Fortress as his life's work.

It's the vision of Tarn and Zach Adams manifested without the filter of commercial interests.

It's rare for someone to devote themselves to a lifelong project, and Tarn has been going strong for a decade now.

They have a captive audience right now which donates on average more than $4,000/mo for the work of Tarn and Zach.

There'd be a much bigger one if he could get a proper GUI together, but Tarn Adams seems perfectly content with his modest income.

Once upon a time, Tarn Adams did an AMA on Reddit.

IMO, Tarn Adams[1] is much more interesting to listen to.

After reading this story I'm struck by a bit of a parallel between Notch and Tarn Adams, the guy who writes Dwarf Fotress.

I can easily see Tarn and his brother be completely overwhelmed by open source activity, paralyzed to make any kind of internally directed progress on it.

While I am absolutely an advocate of OSS and I do wish Tarn would go for it, the basic thing is that they dont want to and they love what they do, so deal with it, it's their game.

Not a reddit reader, but I do follow Tarn Adams & Dwarf Fortress pretty closely (serious amount of respect for someone who can build a single game over a really really long time and call it his life's work, and live only on donations.) This quote from his recent AMA really stood out to me -- "I'm sure my code is considered garbage by people that know what they are doing." And he has a very strong math background.

Tarn Adams, the developer of Dwarf Fortress ( bay12games.com/dwarves/ ), is working on the game fulltime.

Tarn gladly accepts donations and will send you a crayon drawing inspired by the game.

Tarn Adams, the creator of dwarf fortress, is the canonical game programmer example.