Warren Robinett

Who is Warren Robinett?

Joseph Warren Robinett, Jr. is a designer of interactive computer graphics software, notable as the developer of the Atari 2600's Adventure — the first graphical adventure video game — and as a founder of The Learning Company, where he designed Rocky's Boots and Robot Odyssey. More recently he has worked on virtual reality projects.

Robinett graduated in 1974 with a B.A. from Rice University, with a major in "Computer Applications to Language and Art". After graduating from Rice University, he was a Fortran programmer for Western Geophysical in Houston, Texas. He received an M.S. from University of California, Berkeley in 1976, and went to work at Atari in November 1977.

His first effort at Atari was Slot Racers for the Atari 2600. 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". However, with 128 bytes of RAM and 4096 bytes of ROM, Atari's Adventure was a much simpler program, and with only a joystick for input, the set of "commands" was necessarily brief. Even so, Adventure was a hit upon its 1979 release, and eventually sold a million copies.