Scott Adams

Adventure International was an American video game publishing company that existed from 1979 until 1986. It was started by Scott and Alexis Adams. Their games were notable for being the first implementation of the adventure genre to run on a microcomputer system. The adventure game concept originally came from Colossal Cave Adventure which ran strictly on large mainframe systems at the time.

After the success of Adams' first text adventure, Adventureland, other games followed rapidly, with Adventure International (or "AI") releasing about two games a year. Initially the games were drawn from the founders' imaginations, with themes ranging from fantasy to horror and sometimes science fiction. Some of the later games were written by Scott Adams with other collaborators. 


On the TI-99/4A System, the Scott Adams adventures required the Adventure Command Module in order to run. You would then load each game via cassette or floppy disk. The Adventure Module included your first game, Pirate Adventure. Additional games were sold at a lower price as they did not include the Adventure Module. 

Published by Adventure International and the second game of the series, after Adventureland. The setting was inspired by Robert Louis Stevenson's 1883 novel Treasure Island and involved a quest to retrieve Long John Silver's lost treasures. Gameplay involved moving from location to location, picking up any objects found there, and using them somewhere else to unlock puzzles. Commands took the form of verb and noun, e.g. "Climb Tree".

The player starts the game in a London flat, and progresses via a bit of magic to Pirates Island. Here, the player has to build a ship to reach Treasure Island and there find two pieces of treasure. The player also has to contend with an unpredictable pirate ally; it was the first text adventure game of the Adams series in which the player shared the adventure with a second character.

The magic phrase to reach the island, 'Say Yoho', was the name of a long-running column in SoftSide magazine by Scott Adams.