Euuurg. A few days late on this one, but there’s an interview I did with Scott Adams, say, about four days ago. Who’s Scott Adams, and why did I squeal with excitement when he gave me the okay?
Scott wrote a game called Adventureland back in ‘78 - this is now recognised as the first text adventure for home computers. It was preceded by Crowther and Woods’ Colossal Cave Adventure - which was, in fact, what inspired Scott to write Adventureland - but it was only available for mainframes, and took a gigantic 300K of memory to run it. Scott managed to write Adventureland for the Radio Shack TRS-80 Model I using only 16K. Following that, he went on to sell the game, also making it the first commercial adventure game.
However, the thing that got me really excited was the fact that he also produced the first Marvel Comics games: the Questprobe series. There were three games in the series; Spider-Man, Hulk and Fantastic Four (Thing and Human Torch). There was, apparently, another Fantastic Four game planned - but as well as that, Scott held the rights to the whole Marvel universe. Unfortunately, his company, Adventure International, went bankrupt in 1985, which left the public to put up with almost 15 straight of crap Marvel games (with a few exceptions). Sad day.