Joseph Warren Robinett Jr. (born December 25, 1951) is an American video game designer. He is most notable as the developer of the Atari 2600's Adventure and as a founder of The Learning Company, and Robot Odyssey. More recently he has worked on virtual reality projects.
Robinett graduated in 1974 with a B.A. from Rice University, After graduating from Rice University, he was a Fortran programmer for Western Geophysical in Houston, Texas. While he was working on it, he had discovered and played Crowther and Woods' Colossal Cave Adventure at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and decided that a graphical video game version "would be really cool".
He has since worked on virtual reality projects for NASA In 2018 Robinett stated that the initial book was being split into two books: The Annotated Adventure focusing on the technical aspect of the game and Making the Dragon focusing on the political story. As of December 2022 only the table of contents has been made public.
Robinett's Adventure Easter egg is a plot element in the 2011 novel and 2018 film Ready Player One.
References
Further reading
External links
- Warren Robinett's homepage
- Warren Robinett at MobyGames
- Warren Robinett on the history of Adventure, speaking at the Classic Gaming Expo 2002