Warren Robinett
Joseph Warren Robinett Jr. (born December 25, 1951) is a designer of interactive computer graphics software, notable as the developer of the Atari 2600's "Adventure" — the first graphical adventure video game — and as a founder of The Learning Company, where he designed "Rocky's Boots" and "Robot Odyssey". More recently he has worked on virtual reality projects. Robinett graduated in 1974 with a B.A. from Rice University, with a major in "Computer Applications to Language and Art". After graduating from Rice University, he was a Fortran programmer for Western Geophysical in Houston, Texas. He received an M.S.  from University of California, Berkeley in 1976, and went to work at Atari, Inc. in November 1977. Atari, Inc.. His first effort at Atari was "Slot Racers" for the Atari 2600. While he was working on it, he had discovered and played Crowther and Woods' "Colossal Cave Adventure" at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and decided that a graphical video game version "would be really cool". However, with 128 bytes of RAM and 4096 bytes of ROM, Atari's "Adventure" was a much simpler program, and with only a joystick for input, the set of "commands" was necessarily brief. "Adventure  was a hit upon its 1979 release, and eventually sold a million copies. Atari designers at the time were not given credit for their games, because Atari feared having to bargain with well-known designers. In response to this, Robinett placed a hidden object in the game that would allow the player to reach a hidden screen which displayed the words Created by Warren Robinett," hence creating one of the earliest known Easter eggs in a video game, and the first to which the name "Easter egg" was applied. Robinett then wrote the "BASIC Programming" cartridge, finishing both "BASIC Programming  and Adventure" in June 1979, and quit Atari. The Learning Company and later. He founded The Learning Company in 1980, and worked on several educational games there, including "Rocky's Boots" and "Robot Odyssey" for the Apple II. The Learning Company was acquired by Softkey in 1995 for US$606 million. He has since worked on virtual reality projects for NASA and the University of North Carolina. In 2016, Robinett announced "The Annotated Adventure", a book describing the design and implementation of "Adventure" for the Atari 2600. As of August 2019, the book has not been published yet. However, he  stated in 2018 that the initial book is being made in two differentiated ones: "The Annotated Adventure" will focus on the technical aspect of the game, whereas "Making the Dragon" will focus on the political story. The manuscripts for the books are both completed but still are under revision. Robinett's "Adventure" Easter egg is a plot element in the 2011 novel and 2018 film "Ready Player One".