Tarn was born in
Silverdale, in the
U.S. state of
Washington, in 1978. His father, Dan, worked at a
waste water treatment plant and used to work in
data management. He taught his sons the rudiments of coding at an early age and this shared interest allowed the brothers Tarn and Zach to remain close to each other despite their family's constant shifting due to their father's work. The brothers grew up playing computer games, 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 play them themselves, and they soon began introducing complicated and unpredictable behavior to achieve more
replayability. In sixth grade, they developed their first
fantasy game, called
Dragslay and written in
BASIC. It consisted of single battles leading to a final encounter 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. 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. After
Dragslay, Tarn and Zach started working on another adventure game, focusing on
procedural world generation. For this, they drew inspiration from the
role-playing video game hit
Ultima. After working on the project for four years and rendering it in
3D graphics, they released it under the title
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 addition of a random story generator was inspired by both of them being avid story writers. During his first year at Stanford, he said he was under heavy pressure, that the professional environment and competitiveness affected him negatively. He also cited a dilemma he was facing between studying mathematics and developing video games. This stressful situation drove him for a time into
depression and he admitted to having had a brief stint with
narcotics.
Shift to game development The Adams brothers started a company called Bay 12 Games, where they developed and released
freeware games, attracting a small following. Tarn assumed the
alias "Toady One" and Zach "ThreeToe". Tarn's background in mathematics helped in the development of
algorithms with
three dimensional spatial considerations. With his skill in programming and Zach's background in ancient history and storytelling, together the brothers designed and developed various projects. They worked on other small projects during graduation which were released on their website. Tarn put up a
PayPal button after a request from a fan; similarly, a subscriber system was added later. In the next five months, they made around $300, which brought in only enough to cover their site's $20 hosting cost. They made side projects like
Corin and
Kobold Quest in a few days and
Squiggles was made in three hours. Other titles were
Liberal Crime Squad and
WWI Medic. In 2006, Tarn started his post doctorate in
Texas A&M, which was his goal since his undergraduate days. He decided to leave during the first year due to increasing stress and is said to have broken down in the department head's office. After being offered to stay another year and a $50,000
stipend, he agreed and eventually left to devote his full attention to developing
Dwarf Fortress and other games, which was until then only a hobby. He said, "At the end of a math problem, you have a paper and maybe you publish it, and the paper can be a building block for the edifice of mathematics, but to me that's not so important. But working on a problem and having a game when you're done? That's pretty damn cool." ==
Dwarf Fortress ==