1982: The Hobbit

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.

[1] http://torinak.com/qaop#!hobbit

For an instant I could smell the house I lived in during the mid 80s and played The Hobbit.

> She accepted an entry-level job at IBM

What did that involve? These seem hard to reconcile.

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.

48K minus the 6K VRAM and system variables! It's actually more like 41K.

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.

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.

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.

https://vintageisthenewold.com/zx-spectrum-the-hobbit-128k-e...

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.