Magnetic Scrolls | Code Like It's 198x

Magnetic Scrolls began with a parser and the wrong computer. In 1984 two programmers, Ken Gordon and Hugh Steers, wanted to use Steers’s new parser to write “the definitive adventure game” for Sinclair’s new QL, and Anita Sinclair, who would rather have written quick arcade games, came round to their plan. The QL flopped, and the first version of The Pawn sold few copies. Rewritten with pictures for the Atari ST in 1986, it made Magnetic Scrolls, in Computer & Video Games’ words a year later, “England’s answer to the mighty Infocom”. Over the next four years the company won the adventure awards of the Golden Joysticks three years running, and then, as the text adventure lost its market, tried to reinvent the form with windows and a mouse.

Fast facts

Founded: 1984 in London, by Anita Sinclair, Ken Gordon and Hugh Steers.
First game: The Pawn, for the Sinclair QL (1985), then the Atari ST and most other machines through Rainbird (from 1986).
Games: The Pawn, The Guild of Thieves, Jinxter, Corruption, Fish!, Myth and Wonderland.
Publishers: Rainbird, part of British Telecom’s Telecomsoft, until 1989; then Virgin.
Ended: stopped publishing in 1992.

The QL and The Pawn

Computer & Video Games told the founding story in October 1987. Gordon and Steers wanted to build an adventure on Steers’s “newly developed parser”; Sinclair, “a mental over-achiever”, wanted to write arcade games for the new machine because they could be finished quickly. “In the end, Ken and Hugh won, and Magnetic Scrolls and The Pawn were born.” The QL version had no pictures, but it had the same parser as every later version. It was due out in October 1984 and did not ship until September 1985. Sinclair was blunt about how it was sold: “Sinclair Research did a pitiful selling job on the original Pawn, it deserved better. In fact we’ve sold more for the Spectrum 128K than they ever managed to ship for the QL.”

The version that made the company’s name was the Atari ST one, published by Rainbird. The ST was new, owners wanted to see what it could do, and The Pawn’s painted location pictures showed them. “The adventure itself hadn’t really changed from the QL version,” Sinclair said. “The reason the ST version made such a stir was primarily because of the graphics and the parser.” ZZAP!64 gave the Commodore 64 version a Sizzler in December 1986, and its reviewer had “never been so impressed by a company’s first product”. Computer & Video Games readers voted The Pawn Adventure of the Year for 1986.

The parser was the other half of the reputation. Where most adventures took a verb and a noun, The Pawn accepted sentences that referred to objects by their properties and positions. Sinclair User’s reviewer remembered Sinclair demonstrating “the various ways of referring to different keys that could be either in her pocket or a tree trunk”. “Her enthusiasm was not so much contagious as exhausting,” he wrote.

One game, eleven computers

ZZAP!64 visited in July 1987 and found Sinclair, Gordon and “newcomer” Hugh Steers working from “a small office near London Bridge”. The company wrote its games once, in its own adventure system running on a DEC VAX minicomputer, and cross-assembled them for eleven formats. That is how The Pawn came to run on machines from the Apple Macintosh to the Amstrad PCW.

Magnetic Scrolls wrote for the new 16-bit machines first and brought the games down to 8-bit ones where it could. On the Spectrum The Pawn needed a 128K machine: Sinclair User called it “an essential purchase for anyone into adventures who has just upgraded to a 128”, at £14.95. The Guild of Thieves and Jinxter reached the Spectrum only on +3 disk, at £15.95. CRASH’s adventure column gave them 90% and 92% in April 1988 and thought Jinxter improved again on both earlier games.

The Rainbird years

After The Pawn, the games came roughly one a year:

Game	Year	Notes
The Guild of Thieves	1987	Scripted by Rob Steggles; Golden Joystick Adventure Game of the Year
Jinxter	1987	Text partly by Georgina Sinclair
Corruption	1988	Golden Joystick, best 8-bit adventure
Fish!	1988	Golden Joystick, best 16-bit adventure
Myth	1989	A short adventure, given to members of an adventure club

The Guild of Thieves was Adventure Game of the Year in the Golden Joysticks for 1987, and for 1988 Magnetic Scrolls took both adventure awards: Corruption for 8-bit machines and Fish! for 16-bit ones. ACE rated Jinxter 916 out of 1000 in February 1988.

Sinclair told Computer & Video Games that Steggles, “an excellent writer”, had written the original script for Guild while the rest of the company was finishing The Pawn, with a brief to write “a get the treasures type of adventure” and keep character interaction to a minimum. Jinxter, ACE noted in December 1987, had “some great text, in part written by Georgina Sinclair, sister of the infamous Anita Sinclair”. Myth went only to people who joined the Official Secrets adventure club for £19.95; ACE found it “barely half the size of a normal Mag Scrolls game” but “pretty good fare”.

Anita Sinclair, 25 in January 1988 and “the brains behind Scrolls” according to ACE, reckoned that women made up about a quarter of the company’s players. Six months earlier she had told ZZAP!64 that pictures mattered to buyers, and not to the game: “a lot of people won’t buy games without them. But they’re not at all important.”

Leaving Telecomsoft

In 1989 British Telecom sold Telecomsoft, and with it Rainbird, to MicroProse. The Magnetic Scrolls games did not go with it. ACE reported in July 1989:

According to MS’ Anita Sinclair, Scrolls’ contract with BT was not ‘assignable’: that is, in the event of BT being sold, the rights to distribute Scrolls product was not to be sold with it.

Both sides were polite in public. Sinclair called MicroProse “a very competent organisation”, and MicroProse’s UK head, Stuart Bell, called the games “quality adventures that we’d be proud to sell”. But nothing had been agreed, and ACE reported that Magnetic Scrolls had been “canvassing software houses around the country in a bid to secure a new publisher”. Sinclair told the magazine that the company’s products had not been properly distributed during the months of the sale and that Fish! had been “very badly affected”. CU Amiga recalled the episode in 1992 in the same terms: Sinclair had felt Telecomsoft handled Fish! badly, and “as a result, the next release went to another publisher”.

Virgin, Wonderland and Magnetic Windows

The new publisher was Virgin Mastertronic. ACE reported the deal in February 1990, with a new style of adventure promised for that summer on the ST, Amiga, PC and Archimedes. Virgin’s product manager explained the thinking: “the days of the pure text adventure are over, you have to offer the user a lot more these days”.

The result was Wonderland, an adaptation of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and the system behind it, Magnetic Windows. ACE previewed it in July 1990 as “a multi-window, mouse-driven system with drop-down menus”. The text went in a story window that worked like any adventure, but every other window could be moved and resized: an inventory drawn as icons, a compass, the objects in the current room, pictures with animation. You could drag objects in and out of windows and click on them. The magazine’s argument was that parsers had been turning players away, and that Wonderland’s interface “might just achieve the impossible and put adventure scenarios back on the map”.

In 1991 Virgin released The Magnetic Scrolls Collection, with The Guild of Thieves, Corruption and Fish! reworked for Magnetic Windows. It was the last new Magnetic Scrolls product. Edge, looking back in 2001, called Magnetic Scrolls “one of the most important softcos in Britain” and said it “folded in 1992 after only releasing seven titles”. Later accounts say MicroProse bought the company that year, and that its staff went on to work on MicroProse’s PC horror game The Legacy: Realm of Terror (1993).

The source code comes back

In 2017 Hugh Steers set up Strand Games with Stefan Meier, who ran the Magnetic Scrolls Memorial website, with the support of Anita Sinclair and Ken Gordon. Their first release was a remaster of The Pawn for Windows, Mac and Linux. The company’s original source code turned up on old backup tapes, which were recovered by baking them at a low temperature in a kitchen oven so that they could be read. Remastered versions of The Guild of Thieves and Jinxter followed, built from the original sources.

Sources

Computer & Video Games issue 72, October 1987, p. 80: “The A Team”, the founding of Magnetic Scrolls (Gordon, Steers and Sinclair; the QL; the release date and first shipments of the QL Pawn; Sinclair on Sinclair Research, the ST version and the graphics; “England’s answer to the mighty Infocom”; Rob Steggles and The Guild of Thieves).
ZZAP!64 issue 20, December 1986: The Pawn review (Sizzler).
ZZAP!64 issue 27, July 1987: The Guild of Thieves preview (the three developers; the office near London Bridge; the VAX development system and eleven formats; Sinclair on the graphics).
Sinclair User issue 58, January 1987: The Pawn review (Rainbird, £14.95, 128K Spectrum only; Sinclair’s demonstration of the parser).
CRASH issue 51, April 1988, Adventure Trail: The Guild of Thieves (90%) and Jinxter (92%), Spectrum +3 disk only, £15.95.
ACE issue 3, December 1987: Jinxter preview (Georgina Sinclair).
ACE issue 4, January 1988: feature on women and computer games (Anita Sinclair’s age and role; the share of women players; her view of arcade games).
ACE issue 5, February 1988: Jinxter review (916).
Computer & Video Games issue 66, April 1987; issue 79, May 1988; issue 92, June 1989: the Golden Joystick Awards for 1986, 1987 and 1988.
ACE issue 22, July 1989, p. 9: “Scrolled off…” (the contract; Sinclair and Stuart Bell; the search for a new publisher; Sinclair on distribution and Fish!). The same issue’s adventure column: Myth and the Official Secrets club.
CU Amiga, July 1992: “The way we were: three years ago” (Sinclair, Telecomsoft and Fish!).
ACE issue 29, February 1990, p. 8: Magnetic Scrolls signs with Virgin Mastertronic; the company’s founding in 1984.
ACE issue 34, July 1990: Wonderland and Magnetic Windows.
Amiga Action issue 29, February 1992: advertisement for The Magnetic Scrolls Collection volume 1 (The Guild of Thieves, Fish!, Corruption).
Edge issue 97, May 2001: Magnetic Scrolls, its founding and its end.
“Magnetic Scrolls”, Wikipedia (web, secondary): the MicroProse purchase, The Legacy, the recovery of the source code. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_Scrolls
“The return of Magnetic Scrolls? (Sort of)”, Ziggurat, 18 June 2017 (web, secondary): Hugh Steers and Stefan Meier form Strand Games; support from Anita Sinclair and Ken Gordon. https://ziggurat.co.nz/news/2017/6/18/the-return-of-magnetic-scrolls-sort-of/
Strand Games, “The Pawn by Magnetic Scrolls, Remastered From Original Source Code” (web, secondary): the remasters and the recovered sources. https://strandgames.com/blog/the-pawn-by-magnetic-scrolls-remastered-from-original-source-code
ZZAP!64 issue 27, July 1987: Anita Sinclair on graphics (“a lot of people won’t buy games without them. But they’re not at all important”).