For me, it was Scott Adams. The first adventure I played was Adventureland. That got me hooked. Then I gradually worked through his other games and bought every adventure I could get my hands on. Colossal Cave for the Atari 400/800 was one of those. I played a lot of magazine/book type-ins and still have a soft spot for those. I really liked the early illustrated text adventures from Sierra Online (i.e. everything before King's Quest) and all the Apple II games that were ported to the Atari.