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1982: The Hobbit
- crtasm 6y agofrom "50 Years of Text Games" - an excellent ongoing series of articles.
- dwd 6y agoThe nostalgia hit me like a wall. For an instant I could smell the house I lived in during the mid 80s and played The Hobbit.
- christoph 6y agoSame. The amount this game got played when I was a child, on my own, with my parents, with my grandparents, is crazy to think about. They’d all sit and play it after I went to bed as well. Still to this day, whenever anybody mentions the Hobbit, the first image that comes to mind is the front cover box art of the Spectrum game.
- raleighm 6y agoWas unaware of this. Can’t wait to play this with my kids this weekend. We recently finished The Hobbit and have been reading Choose Your Own Adventure books. They’ll love this.
- derriz 6y agoA warning before filling your kids with anticipation: I loved The Hobbit and Choose Your Own Adventure books as a kid but I remember being very disappointed with this game - maybe it demanded more commitment but I gave up on it after a few days. I found it inscrutable at the time - characters coming and going at random, fighting with the parser trying to express my intentions, unclear progression, not enough humor, etc. I reckon later graphical adventures - the Lucasarts ones for example, would provide a better shared experience. Can’t wait to try Monkey Island with mine when old enough.
- divbzero 6y agoThe article warns of spoilers at the top. Those wishing to experience the game for themselves can try the emulator link [1] at the bottom. [1] http://torinak.com/qaop#!hobbit http://torinak.com/qaop#!hobbit
- sunshineforever 6y agoThank you!
- thaumasiotes 6y ago> Megler for years was little aware of the game’s success. After graduating, Melbourne House offered her a full-time position, but she was sick of assembler debugging and turned it down: “I have a very low tolerance for doing the same thing over and over again.” > She accepted an entry-level job at IBM What did that involve? These seem hard to reconcile.
- stevekemp 6y agoShe's one of the few people I went out of my way to track down and send an email to say "Thanks for that thing you did many many years ago". She seemed pretty mellow, and I got the impression this had happened a lot to her.
- fiftyacorn 6y agoThere were a lot of students who wrote games during this time to pay their way thru uni, then moved on I think Megler is at Amazon now
- vba 6y agoI was wondering where she is now - her LinkedIn says Amazon. Looks like she went back into academia before that. Wonder if she worked on any more projects like this during her 2nd stint at university.
- morsch 6y agoAnother long article about this game: https://www.filfre.net/2012/11/the-hobbit/ https://www.filfre.net/2012/11/the-hobbit/
- MarcScott 6y agoWow, the nostalgia. I never completed the Hobbit on the family BBC. My Dad did. He'd stay up until the early hours of the morning, the floor of the study littered with A3 hand drawn annotated maps of Middle Earth that connected together, so that he could efficiently replay when he died. I don't remember too much of the game, other than: "Ask Gandalf carry me" And those bug eyes appearing in a forest and feeling a sting and dieing.
- momentoftop 6y agoI think that was when you were stuck in a prison with a high window. The typical exchange was: # say to Gandalf "carry me" GANDALF says no. GANDALF goes east. # wait You wait. Time passes... # wait You wait. Time passes... ...hoping that Gandalf would show up later and be in a more cooperative mood. Maybe I was just stuck in a mindset of adventure games having exactly one solution. Reading about this game, The Hobbit seems to be even more sophisticated than I'd assumed.
- moonchild 6y ago> she realized the root of her boredom was [adventure]'s static, unchanging structure: “It played the same way every time. Each Non-Player Character (NPC) was tied to a single location, and always did the same thing.” She decided her game would be different. I think this is interesting, as it seems to have been a common sentiment at the time. The OP mentions MUDs, but another response in the same vein were the roguelikes, which largely pioneered procedural generation.
- elvis70 6y ago> everything had to fit into those 48,000 bytes of RAM 48K minus the 6K VRAM and system variables! It's actually more like 41K.
- varjag 6y agoAlso, it's 49152. System variables were irrelevant after loading if you never called into ROM, but yes, that 6912 byte display block was fundamental. However some games and demos did steal a kb or two by using only a part of the screen and masking the rest with black on black color attributes.
- benttoothpaste 6y agoIn addition the lower 16KB was much slower than the upper 32KB since it was shared with ULA. So one had to make sure to place the code that needs speed in the proper part of the memory.
- tluyben2 6y agoHa! I never knew this game changed on purpose after every new run; I thought it was buggy as a kid.
- bunsenhoneydew 6y ago“You are lost in the misty mountains” seemed to be the only thing on my dad’s computer screen for a large part of my childhood
- Angostura 6y agoOn my Spectrum, I'm surprised 'Thorin sits down and sings about gold' wasn't burned in to the screen of the living room TV
- Jare 6y agoWonderful story, such an amazing and inspiring game. I was equally fascinated by the game itself, and the pixel filling algorithm (a word I didn't even know as a 13yo heh). On the other hand, I took the parser for granted - I had seen an Eliza listing for Apple ][ BASIC and just imagined the parser as a giant list of IFs.
- aphrax 6y agoI remember this, a particularly cool thing for the time is that Thorin appeared to be doing his own thing, singing, going in and out of the room, that kind of thing. For the time it seemed incredible...
- Angostura 6y agoBut mainly singing about gold
- Steve44 6y agoI remember the Hobbit very well, it came in a large pack and included a full copy of the book. It was great to play and the language parsing felt way ahead of all the other games of the time. Playing it, you got a real feel that you were inside a real living environment, not just solving a sequence of steps to complete it. The illustrations were slow but comparable with the computer speed and we marvelled at the sheer number of them in the game. I think they used guts of an internal tool that later became Melbourne Draw, also by Philip Mitchell, which was controlled by commands rather than just storing a bitmap. This meant each image could be stored in just a few bytes. At one of the computer shows I went to, probably Earls Court in 1984, Melbourne House had the animated film of the Hobbit continually running in a ‘tent’ on one of their stands. It was always packed in there and I’m fairly sure the air was thick with rather aromatic smoke, this was back in the days when indoor smoking was allowed. Melbourne House set up a UK development team about that time based in Richmond, West London. The Australian team were Beam Software and the UK ones called Studio B, Melbourne House remained the publisher. In the article it talks about assembler as if it’s some kind of magic voodoo. It was cumbersome with few development tools and very little in the way of real time debugging, but was very satisfying producing not only the game but optimising for size and speed. Almost all of the video games were written in assembler back then. There were a few games written in BASIC but it wasn’t for a while before high level languages because mainstream.
- doublejay1999 6y agoindistinguishable from magic, for this 11 year old boy.
- quotha 6y agoGreat game and it came with the book! Does anyone remember the music that played in this? It is a classic song that I’ve been trying to find out for years!
- Angostura 6y agoTo think that the person who have me so much pleasure as a kid is now priciple data scientist at AWS
- greedo 6y agoMy first exposure to computers of any type was in early 1980. My brother and I visited one of his friends who had an Apple ][ and we played Adventure into the early hours of the morning. I was enthralled.
- anthk 6y agoI never played that, I mainly played Spanish for the ZX and English/Spanish IF for the zmachine, because ZX Brit English games tend to have a more difficult lexicon to me as a non native. Still, achieving that complex text adventure on a Spectrum it's a brilliant task. Sometimes I wish sp IF games got translated into eng, like El Archipiélago or the ZX Van Halen pentalogy. And the opposite, I'd love a Spanish translation of Anchorhead.
- klondike_klive 6y agoI never played the Hobbit but The Lord of the Rings game that followed made a big impression on me. It came in an enormous box with the Fellowship book and two cassette tapes for my Amstrad 464. Something about the sparse graphics, the super-slow speed and the fathomless Tolkien lore gripped my young imagination. I never beat the game, but I still remember how gripped I was by possibility.
- TMWNN 6y agoInfocom's text adventures have a similarly sophisticated text parser and are based on a far more flexible development language (ZIL) and virtual architecture (Z-Machine). The early games have the occasional randomly moving NPC (Example: The thief in Zork I) or time limit, and such elements are more fleshed out in later games, but there is never any potential for truly emergent gameplay as in The Hobbit. Infocom games' size require disk drives, something rare in personal computers outside the US until the late 1980s. Megler, in Australia, in any case came from the mainframe world and had no exposure to microcomputers and thus microcomputer games other than Adventure. If she had played Infocom games before Melbourne House hired her, The Hobbit's parser would likely be similar but I doubt that the other unique elements would be present. Out of naivite and ignorance came greatness.
- lproven 6y agoThere is now an enhanced edition of the game for the Spectrum 128 (and of course emulators thereof). It takes higher-res graphics from other editions of the original game, for more capable computers, and has other improvements. https://vintageisthenewold.com/zx-spectrum-the-hobbit-128k-edition/ https://vintageisthenewold.com/zx-spectrum-the-hobbit-128k-e...