Working: The Two Brothers Who Changed Video Games Forever
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3.9 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 26 February 2023
⏱️ 50 minutes
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| 0:42.0 | The focus of this was to get stories to come out of the game. People aren't going to tell a story, an interesting story, but I got hit and I lost 7 hit points. |
| 1:01.0 | But if it was, I got hit and I lost my right hand and dropped my weapon, then suddenly that's a moment. Everyone understands that. |
| 1:11.0 | Welcome back to Working, I'm your host, Karen Han. |
| 1:15.0 | And I am your other host, Isaac Butler. |
| 1:18.0 | Hello, Isaac, so who did you talk to for this week's episode? |
| 1:21.0 | This week I talked to Tarn and Zach Adams, their brothers and together they created the video game Dwarf Fortress, which is one of the most important games of the century. |
| 1:34.0 | Well, can you explain to us number one how you came across Dwarf Fortress and the number two why it's one of the most important games of the century? |
| 1:42.0 | Yeah, absolutely. I actually don't remember how I first came across it, probably just because I like colony sim games, which is at its heart what Dwarf Fortress is. |
| 1:50.0 | It actually kind of birthed that genre and it remains both the most complicated and the weirdest game in that genre. |
| 2:00.0 | And so I've wanted to interview the Adams brothers for a long time because Dwarf Fortress is just it's a totally bizarre, quixotic, eccentric experiment of a game that not only created the genre of the colony sim, but it's incredibly influential. |
| 2:15.0 | Without Dwarf Fortress, there's no The Sims, there's no Minecraft, there's no Don't Star, there's probably no Fortnite, actually, it's like that influential. |
| 2:25.0 | And it's also the life's work of these two brothers, they've been working on it for 20 years, they have at least 20 more years of things they want to put in the game. |
| 2:34.0 | Because the game involves all these in-depth systems that are running in the background of procedural generation and stuff and they just have systems upon systems upon systems that they still want to build. |
| 2:44.0 | It's really a kind of original achievement and no one else has done anything like it in this extremely young art form of video games. |
| 2:52.0 | The other thing is that it was in an open beta for 20 years, which means people could play it for free. |
| 2:57.0 | And they recently started selling it, they decided they would like put nice graphics on it and sell it and they became like instant multi-millionaires as a result when they had only ever made money off a PayPal tip jar up till that point. |
| 3:09.0 | So I was also just like really interested in like, why would you do any of this? |
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