Brian Howarth

Brian Howarth is a British video game designer and computer programmer who wrote many interactive fiction computer games in the early 1980s in a series called Mysterious Adventures. Born in Blackpool in 1953, he worked as a telephone engineer until 1981. Inspired by Dungeons & Dragons and the UK television show The Adventure Game, he wrote his first adventures on the TRS-80, taking cues from Scott Adams. After frustration with BASIC, he learned machine language to create his first adventure, The Golden Baton, published by Molimerx in 1981. Molimerx then encouraged him to produce The Time Machine and Arrow of Death. In 1982 he finished developing his own interpreter based on Scott Adams' Adventureland source code published in Byte magazine, using a database format that sped up development. He ported his games from the TRS-80 to the BBC Micro under his own label, Digital Fantasia, staffed by family and friends. Later ports to the Acorn Electron, Atari 8-bit, Commodore 16, and with added graphics to the Commodore 64 and ZX Spectrum were released by Channel 8 Software and Paxman Promotions. Howarth also created games based on the film Gremlins and the TV shows Robin of Sherwood and Super Gran in 1985. After working on Theme Park Mystery and SSI's Heroes of the Lance, he relocated to the USA in July 1990 to work for Cinemaware. After Cinemaware went out of business in 1991, he continued on console titles for a company set up by co-founder Bob Jacobs. More recently he has worked on creating applications for tablets and iPhones.