I 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

I 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.