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The charm of it is that he’s making exactly the game he wants to make.” He suggested ways of broadening the game’s appeal, but “that stuff didn’t matter to Tarn. “I told him there’s nothing out there quite like it,” Garfield recalled. Richard Garfield, who created the hit card game Magic: The Gathering, once attended a Dwarf Fortress fan meet in Seattle to introduce himself to Tarn. Programmers behind The Sims 3 reportedly played Dwarf Fortress when they were making their game, and several homages to Dwarf Fortress appear in the blockbuster fantasy game World of Warcraft. And, he added, “flying a jet is a lot more interesting than just riding in a jet.”ĭwarf Fortress is too willfully noncommercial to have any discernible influence on gaming at large, but it is widely admired by game designers.
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“Playing Dwarf Fortress is like taking the controls of a plane right as it’s taking off,” says Chris Dahlen, editor in chief of the gaming magazine Kill Screen. A micromanager’s dream, the game gleefully blurs the distinction between painstaking labor and creative thrill. To control your world, you toggle between multiple menus of text commands seemingly simple acts like planting crops and forging weapons require involved choices about soil and season and smelting and ores. “But we’d written them as carnivorous and roughly the same size as dwarves, so that just happened, and it was great.”ĭwarf Fortress may not look real, but once you’re hooked, it feels vast, enveloping, alive. “We didn’t know that carp were going to eat dwarves,” Zach says. The brothers themselves are often startled by what their game spits out. The story of a fortress’s rise and fall isn’t scripted beforehand - in most games narratives progress along an essentially set path - but, rather, generated on the fly by a multitude of variables. Beneath the game’s rudimentary facade is a dizzying array of moving parts, algorithms that model everything from dwarves’ personalities (some are depressive many appreciate art) to the climate and economic patterns of the simulated world. Many simulation games offer players a bag of building blocks, but few dangle a bag as deep, or blocks as small and intricately interlocking, as Dwarf Fortress. This bare-bones aesthetic allows Tarn to focus resources not on graphics but on mechanics, which he values much more. The goal, in the game’s main mode, is to build as much and as imaginatively as possible before some calamity - stampeding elephants, famine, vampire dwarves - wipes you out for good.
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Unlike those games, though, Dwarf Fortress unfolds as a series of staggeringly elaborate challenges and devastating setbacks that lead, no matter how well one plays, to eventual ruin. As with popular simulation games like the Sims series, in which players control households, or the Facebook fad FarmVille, where they tend crops, players in Dwarf Fortress are responsible for the cultivation and management of a virtual ecosystem - in this case, a colony of dwarves trying to build a thriving fortress in a randomly generated world. Its various versions have been downloaded in the neighborhood of a million times, although the number of players who have persisted past an initial attempt is doubtless much smaller. The brothers - both heavyset, with close-cropped brown hair and sweetly sheepish demeanors - were conversing, as they do every day, about Dwarf Fortress, the computer game they began devising in 2002.ĭwarf Fortress is barely a blip on the mainstream radar, but it’s an object of intense cult adoration. It was a chilly afternoon in Silverdale, Wash., a town about 20 miles west of Seattle, and Tarn was wearing one of his favorite sweatshirts, a beige hoodie decorated with rows of strutting cats. Seated nearby was Tarn’s older brother, Zach, squinting thoughtfully and jotting ideas into a notepad. “Maybe they have to bite you three times before you’re infected?” “That would be no fun.” He was silent for a moment. “If they just run wild biting people, half the dwarves in the colony will be infected in no time,” he said, shaking his head. Tarn Adams was in the carpeted spare bedroom that serves as his work space, trying to avert an apocalyptic outbreak of vampire dwarves.