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Back in 2024, Dwarf Fortress surpassed 800,000 copies sold, more than enough to make co-creators Tarn and Zach Adams millionaires. At the time, they seemed to be taking a low-key approach to the whole mo’ money thing, so when our intrepid interviewer Joshua Wolens caught up with Tarn at the recently-concluded Gamescom, he asked if, in the two years since then, he’d more fully adjusted to his moneybags lifestyle.
“I guess, a bit, somewhat. I mean, I live in a house now. I have two cats and they love me. That’s great,” Adams said. But, he added, it wasn’t so much a matter of adjusting to something new as just going back to what used to be.
“I know what [having a house] is like because I grew up in one. It’s basically like reattaining what my parents could do with regular jobs. It’s not much different from that.
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“And I don’t want to make light of financial security, right? I mean, yeah, that’s great, and I wish it for everybody.”
It makes me think of Adams’ comments in the same interview about enabling a more equitable, better-functioning society in Dwarf Fortress by walling up dwarf nobles and abolishing the dwarf cops: He said there’s perhaps a “lesson to be had there.” Maybe there’s a lesson to be had here, too.
Anyway, lest anyone worry about the impact Adams’ growing wealth—Dwarf Fortress moved past one million copies sold in 2025—will have on the game’s future, that too is moving ahead pretty much unchanged. “We’re back to work,” Adams said. “I mean, work is the same.”
That work is presumably Dwarf Fortress’ first Myth and Magic update, slated to go live later this year, which aims to bring magic to the game. And not just the occasional fireball or invisibility cloak: Adams said in August that the goal is to create “procedural magic systems that go beyond combining spell effects and go straight to the fundamental cosmological makeup of the universe.” Sounds very Dwarf Fortress indeed.
