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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
The article warns of spoilers at the top. Those wishing to experience the game for themselves can try the emulator link [1] at the bottom.<p>[1] <a href="http://torinak.com/qaop#!hobbit" rel="nofollow">http://torinak.com/qaop#!hobbit</a>
Another long article about this game: <a href="https://www.filfre.net/2012/11/the-hobbit/" rel="nofollow">https://www.filfre.net/2012/11/the-hobbit/</a>
> 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.”<p>> She accepted an entry-level job at IBM<p>What did <i>that</i> involve? These seem hard to reconcile.
Wonderful story, such an amazing and inspiring game.<p>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.
Was 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.
Wow, the nostalgia.<p>I never completed the Hobbit on the family BBC. My Dad did.<p>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.<p>I don't remember too much of the game, other than:<p>"Ask Gandalf carry me"<p>And those bug eyes appearing in a forest and feeling a sting and dieing.
Infocom'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 <i>Zork I</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 <i>The Hobbit</i>.<p>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 <i>Adventure</i>. If she had played Infocom games before Melbourne House hired her, <i>The Hobbit</i>'s parser would likely be similar but I doubt that the other unique elements would be present. Out of naivite and ignorance came greatness.
> 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.<p>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.
There 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.<p><a href="https://vintageisthenewold.com/zx-spectrum-the-hobbit-128k-edition/" rel="nofollow">https://vintageisthenewold.com/zx-spectrum-the-hobbit-128k-e...</a>
I 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.<p>Still, achieving that complex text adventure on a Spectrum it's a brilliant task.<p>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.
Great 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!
I 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.
My 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.
I 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...