Unexpected nudity and vomit-covered cats: how Dwarf Fortress tells some of gaming’s most bizarre stories

For around 20 years, brothers Zach and Tarn Adams have been working on their idiosyncratic fantasy game - and it's only just got graphics

In 2015, players of the video game Dwarf Fortress - a wildly influential cult hit that has appeared at New York's Museum of Modern Art, and been cited as the inspiration for Minecraft - started finding vomit-covered dead cats in taverns. When the game's creator, 44-year-old Tarn Adams, attempted to determine the cause, he discovered that cats were walking through puddles of spilled alcohol, licking themselves clean, and promptly dying of heart failure due to a minor error in the game's code, which overestimated the amount of alcohol ingested.

Most games don't simulate anything nearly as complex as alcohol poisoning and feline grooming, but Dwarf Fortress does, and the way that its code generates these bizarre situations is symbolic of what people love about it. Dwarf Fortress has a unique, incredibly complicated approach to storytelling and play, but it looks like pure Matrix code, composed entirely of coloured text. Any casual observer would find it indecipherable.