Pale, bulbous eyes and having Thorin singing about gold are a couple of examples that will undoubtedly spark fond memories of playing The Hobbit on the Spectrum, C64, Dragon or BBC computers back in 1982.
The Hobbit is one of those games that everyone of a certain age has played at least once in their lives. Regardless of whether you owned one of the aforementioned 8-bit machines or not, there was a pretty good chance that at some point in your youth you viewed the line-by-line loading of the images and marvelled at the block fill colouring.
If you were lucky, you not only owned the large black box, with the tape inside, but you also got a copy of JRR Tolkien’s master novel as well. The last time I remember a book being sold with a game was The Forest of Doom, which came with the Fighting Fantasy book of the same name.
According to World of Spectrum, The Hobbit was the first Spectrum game to sell over a million copies, but other sources put that figure closer to 500,000 over its entire lifetime. Either way, at a whopping £14.95, it certainly made a fair profit for the publisher, Melbourne House, and the developer, Beam Software.
Its History
The Hobbit was coded by Veronika Megler and Philip Mitchell, students at the University of Melbourne. Megler and Mitchell were mid-way through their computer science degree when Megler applied for a part-time programmer position at Melbourne House, a then fledgling publisher.
Megler then brought in Mitchell to help with The Hobbit after being asked by Alfred Milgrom, one of the founders of Melbourne House, to write “the greatest
adventure game ever”. As such, the pair spent an estimated 20 hours per week breaking the components of The Hobbit down and creating one of the most intricate game engines of the time.
The Hobbit used a text innovation called Inglish, which was a system Megler created to better allow the player to interact with the game world. Where traditional adventures relied on the verb and noun entry system, such as ‘get sword’, Inglish let the player enter entire sentences to combine several moves. A famous example was “Ask Gandalf about the curious map, then take sword and kill the troll with it.”
Secondly, the use of bright and colourful graphics was an excellent selling point for the game. Although other graphical text adventures existed, they never quite had the same effect as The Hobbit in terms of the scenes drawn.
Amazingly, Megler only found out about a decade ago just how successful and how much of a cultural impact The Hobbit was on an entire generation. The Hobbit and Penetrator were the only games she ever wrote and were often credited to Philip Mitchell alone rather than the partnership of Mitchell and Megler.
The Good
The closest experience to actually being in the Tolkien world (from an early 80s point of view). Amazingly technical game and great images.
The Bad
Timing some of the portions of the game, waiting in the dungeon etc. Those damn pale bulbous eyes!
Conclusion
The Hobbit soon became the adventure that other games measured themselves against. It was an incredible work of art that many of us will have fond memories of.
Did You Know?
• Megler had only ever played one adventure game at the time of writing The Hobbit.
• Megler and Mitchell when hired, became employee’s number two and three at Melbourne House.
• Megler eventually left Melbourne House after graduating, because she felt she needed a proper job instead of programming games.
• One of her most frustrating things to this day is that there’s an assumption that Philip Mitchell must have done most of the programming because she’s a woman.