Adventure International

So Scott Adams was a system programmer in Orlando, and he made a game for the TRS-80 called Adventureland, which was a text adventure game largely inspired by Colossal Cave Adventure.

His game was successful enough for Scott to create his own video game publishing company called Adventure International.

Yeah, and really similarly, Doug Carlston, he was a practicing lawyer at the time, and he wrote a game called Galactic Empire on his TRS-80, and then his brother Gary started selling it to computer shops.

And so the brothers eventually would found Broderbund, who were known for publishing games like Choplifter, Lode Runner, and funnily enough, Prince of Persia as well.

While Peter Langston did realize at first that his wonder could be used for different interactive stories, it was Scott Adams who created an adventure editor for his internal use already in the late 70s.

This allowed Scott, his wife Alexis, and their company Adventure International to release multiple games a year.

Instead of programming each from scratch, they set up the logic in the editor, and it built a universal data file that could be packaged with a platform-specific interpreter to make a ready-to-sell game for any computer.

It was a little inconvenient when Scott decided to release Pirate Adventure as a type-in TRS-80 game in the Byte Magazine in December 1980.

We'll put adventures aside for 1982, as that's when game editors get a little more action-oriented.

I've mentioned one of them already.

Bill Budge's pinball construction set, released by his own company near the end of the year.

This Apple II program had a few pre-made pinball tables to play right away, you could adjust the strength of gravity and bounce and ball speed to make them spicier, but the main draw was a what-you-see-is-what-you-get editor.