Disk CleanupWelcome to Disk Cleanup, our regular weekend column delving into the PCs of PC gaming luminaries. Come back every weekend to read a new interview, digging into the important questions, like “How tidy is your desktop?” and “What game will you never uninstall?”Tarn Adams cannot recall exactly when he first got into gaming, describing his formative computer years as “a haze of learning BASIC”. “I remember there was MS-DOS, but we also had a TRS-80, and I remember the little demon game, little ASCII dude jumping back and forth, which is all just BBS games,” says the co-founder of Bay 12 Games. “We had Rogue and other things like that. But that was more in 1984 when I was six, so I already would have played more things by then.”A lifelong programmer, Adams has developed dozens of games. But he is best known for Dwarf Fortress, the fantasy colony sim co-created by Tarn and his brother Zach. From its debut in 2006, Dwarf Fortress has grown into one of the most ambitious and beloved games on the PC, celebrating its 20th anniversary this year. Following Dwarf Fortress’s hugely successful Steam release in 2022, Adams now splits his time “half and half” between supporting the existing game and working on new additions to it. “I’ve been doing these cool workshops, procedurally generated magic workshops,” he says. “If you want a nice little plant and some skulls on another table and a big crystal with lightning around it, I got you.”Adams…
