Tarn was born in Silverdale, Washington, US,  in 1978.
His father, Dan, worked at a waste water treatment plant and used to manage data.
He credited his father for teaching him to code and his closeness to his brother, Zach, to their family's constant shifting due to their father's work.
Tarn and Zach grew up playing computer games and, with notebooks in hand, drawing their own renditions of the randomly generated creatures they encountered and logging their journeys in detail.
In fifth grade, Tarn wrote his first animation game with Zach.
Explaining his reluctance to socialize, he said, "I was a get-home-from-school, get-on-the-computer kind of kid."
Tarn stated that the main reason they started writing games was to be able to play them themselves, and complicated and unpredictable behavior guaranteed replayability.

In high school Tarn and Zach created a spacecraft game that simulated sections of a rocket blowing off and released their first publicly available game on America Online.
In sixth grade, they started their first fantasy game called dragslay written in BASIC.
It consisted of single battles leading to a final one with a dragon.
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 world generation.
The role-playing video game Ultima inspired them regarding world development.
For four years, after working on the adventure title and rendering it in 3D graphics, they completed Slaves to Armok: God of Blood. "
Armok" was the name of the game's deity from the variable "arm_ok", which was used in dragslay to indicate how many arms were left on a particular unit.
The random story generator was originated by both of them writing stories.
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."
The brothers posted it on their website in 2000, but by 2004 the project started to face increasing problems.
Tarn announced in 2004 on his forums that he was going to shift his main project from Armok to a side project called Dwarf Fortress.

Tarn earned a degree in mathematics at the University of Washington.
He applied for his doctorate at Stanford University, completing it in 2005 with a dissertation titled "Flat Chains in Banach Spaces", which was published in The Journal of Geometric Analysis.
During his first year at Stanford, he said he was under pressure, that the professional environment and competitiveness affected him negatively.
He cited the conflict between studying mathematics and developing video games as the reason.
This stressful situation left him depressed and he admitted to having a brief encounter with drugs.
Tarn was born in Silverdale, Washington, US,  in 1978. His father, Dan, worked at a waste water treatment plant and used to manage data. He credited his father for teaching him to code and his closeness to his brother, Zach, to their family's constant shifting due to their father's work. Tarn and Zach grew up playing computer games and, with notebooks in hand, drawing their own renditions of the randomly generated creatures they encountered and logging their journeys in detail. In fifth grade, Tarn wrote his first animation game with Zach. Explaining his reluctance to socialize, he said, "I was a get-home-from-school, get-on-the-computer kind of kid." Tarn stated that the main reason they started writing games was to be able to play them themselves, and complicated and unpredictable behavior guaranteed replayability.
In high school Tarn and Zach created a spacecraft game that simulated sections of a rocket blowing off and released their first publicly available game on America Online. In sixth grade, they started their first fantasy game called dragslay written in BASIC. It consisted of single battles leading to a final one with a dragon. 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 world generation. The role-playing video game Ultima inspired them regarding world development. For four years, after working on the adventure title and rendering it in 3D graphics, they completed Slaves to Armok: God of Blood. "Armok" was the name of the game's deity from the variable "arm_ok", which was used in dragslay to indicate how many arms were left on a particular unit. The random story generator was originated by both of them writing stories. 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." The brothers posted it on their website in 2000, but by 2004 the project started to face increasing problems. Tarn announced in 2004 on his forums that he was going to shift his main project from Armok to a side project called Dwarf Fortress. 
Tarn earned a degree in mathematics at the University of Washington. He applied for his doctorate at Stanford University, completing it in 2005 with a dissertation titled "Flat Chains in Banach Spaces", which was published in The Journal of Geometric Analysis. During his first year at Stanford, he said he was under pressure, that the professional environment and competitiveness affected him negatively. He cited the conflict between studying mathematics and developing video games as the reason. This stressful situation left him depressed and he admitted to having a brief encounter with drugs.
Tarn Adams