Tarn Adams (born April 17, 1978) is an American computer game programmer, best known for his work on Dwarf Fortress.

He taught his sons the rudiments of coding at an early age and this shared interest allowed the brothers Tarn and Zach to remain close to each other despite their family's constant shifting due to their father's work.

The brothers grew up playing computer games, drawing their own renditions of the randomly generated creatures they encountered, and logging their journeys in detail.

Tarn stated that the main reason they started writing games was to play them themselves, and they soon began introducing complicated and unpredictable behavior to achieve more replayability.

A few years later, Tarn rewrote it in the C programming language, and it featured minute details and kept track of populations of units in the generated world.

After Dragslay, Tarn and Zach started working on another adventure game, focusing on procedural world generation.

After working on the project for four years and rendering it in 3D graphics, they released it under the title Slaves to Armok: God of Blood.

[3] Tarn said, "you could zoom in on your character, and it'd tell you how curly his leg hairs were, and the melting and flash points of various materials, It was insane.

[1] He began his doctoral studies at Stanford University, completing them in 2005 with a dissertation titled "Flat Chains in Banach Spaces", which was published in The Journal of Geometric Analysis.

With his skill in programming and Zach's background in ancient history and storytelling, together the brothers designed and developed various projects.

[1] After being offered to stay another year and a $50,000 stipend, he agreed and eventually left to devote his full attention to developing Dwarf Fortress and other games, which was until then only a hobby.

Dwarf Fortress was originally started in October 2002 as a two-month side project, but was suspended soon after due to the brothers' focus shifting to Armok.

He realized the need to be able to manage many miners and not only have a high score list, but also store more minute details, which was the beginning of the project.

[1] The game's primary mode is set in a procedurally generated fantasy world in which the player indirectly controls a group of dwarves and attempts to construct a successful and wealthy underground fortress.

Tolkien and tabletop games like Dungeons & Dragons and Cyberpunk 2020 interested him,[1] with fantasy and sci-fi being heavily influential.

[16] Regarding his career, he said, "...but as far as design is concerned, I just think that I've happened to fall into a little sweet spot where I get a lot of freedom, but I guess the cost is my livelihood.