I count myself among this group. I actually emailed Adams sometime around 1999 or so to ask him a question about a game that I thought was his. Turns out, the game was included in a collection of Adams's games on the TI-994a (the game was called Knight Ironheart) and was in the same exact style and used the same interpreter as his own games.

He was super nice about it, explaining that he didn't actually author that game. We exchanged a few more emails back and forth, but overall a great experience chatting with him over the earlyish Internet. I feel very fortunate that I grew up in an era of computing where it seemed much smaller than it does today.

I taught myself to program typing out games and apps from Rainbows magazines in the mid-eighties. I was obsessed with text-adventures, and creating my own, from about age eight and onward.

Playing games back then was a wildly different experience; pre-internet, there was no way to find hints. You'd come to a wall, somehow, and be stuck. I never got to the end of Raaka-Tu, or Madness and the Minotaur, or Bedlam. I wasn't even ten-years-old, and those games were an impossible undertaking.

That said, in 2021, finally got to the end of the first graphical RPG I ever played, Dungeons of Daggorath, and killed the final wizard. I was absurdly pleased with myself that day. That goddamn wizard had been a regret-tinged concern of mine for 39 years.