page_title: Tarn Adams
section_title: Early life and education
hierarchical_section_title: Tarn Adams / Early life and education
caption_attribution_description: English: Dwarf Fortress game designer Zach Adams at PAX 2013
context_page_description: Tarn Adams is an American computer game programmer, best known for his work on Dwarf Fortress. He has been working on the game since 2002 with his older brother Zach. He learned programming in his childhood, and has been designing computer games as a hobby. He quit his first year of a mathematics post doctorate at Texas A&M to focus on game development in 2006.
context_section_description: Tarn was born in Silverdale, Washington, US,  in 1978. His father, Dan, worked at a waste water treatment plant and used to manage data. He credited his father for teaching him to code and his closeness to his brother, Zach, to their family's constant shifting due to their father's work. Tarn and Zach grew up playing computer games and, with notebooks in hand, 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 be able to play them themselves, and complicated and unpredictable behavior guaranteed 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 started their first fantasy game called dragslay written in BASIC. It consisted of single battles leading to a final one 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 world generation. The role-playing video game Ultima inspired them regarding world development. For four years, after working on the adventure title and rendering it in 3D graphics, they completed 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 random story generator was originated by both of them writing stories. 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 applied for his doctorate at Stanford University, completing it 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 pressure, that the professional environment and competitiveness affected him negatively. He cited the conflict between studying mathematics and developing video games as the reason. This stressful situation left him depressed and he admitted to having a brief encounter with drugs.
caption: Adams' older brother, Zach, in 2013
exif: {"Image Make": "FUJIFILM", "Image Model": "FinePix X100", "Image XResolution": "240", "Image YResolution": "240", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "Adobe Photoshop Camera Raw 7.0 (Windows)", "Image DateTime": "2013:09:18 09:20:01", "Image ExifOffset": "212", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "72", "Thumbnail YResolution": "72", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "804", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "4764", "EXIF ExposureTime": "1/60", "EXIF FNumber": "2", "EXIF ExposureProgram": "Program Normal", "EXIF ISOSpeedRatings": "3200", "EXIF SensitivityType": "Standard Output Sensitivity", "EXIF ExifVersion": "0230", "EXIF DateTimeOriginal": "2013:09:02 16:42:37", "EXIF DateTimeDigitized": "2013:09:02 16:42:37", "EXIF ShutterSpeedValue": "5906891/1000000", "EXIF ApertureValue": "2", "EXIF BrightnessValue": "-87/50", "EXIF ExposureBiasValue": "0", "EXIF MaxApertureValue": "2", "EXIF MeteringMode": "Pattern", "EXIF LightSource": "Unknown", "EXIF Flash": "Flash did not fire, compulsory flash mode", "EXIF FocalLength": "23", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "598", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "757", "EXIF FocalPlaneXResolution": "924", "EXIF FocalPlaneYResolution": "924", "EXIF FocalPlaneResolutionUnit": "3", "EXIF SensingMethod": "One-chip color area", "EXIF FileSource": "Digital Camera", "EXIF SceneType": "Directly Photographed", "EXIF CustomRendered": "Normal", "EXIF ExposureMode": "Auto Exposure", "EXIF WhiteBalance": "Auto", "EXIF SceneCaptureType": "Standard", "EXIF Sharpness": "Normal", "EXIF SubjectDistanceRange": "0"}