In The Hobbit the world did not wait for you. Gandalf wandered off on business of his own, and Thorin, the dwarf you were supposed to be leading to the dragon’s treasure, had a habit of sitting down and singing about gold. CRASH noticed that the characters “didn’t always do the same thing twice”, and sometimes turned up dead “as if some disaster had overtaken them while your back was turned”. The game was written in Melbourne, Australia, sold in Britain by Melbourne House at £14.95 with a copy of Tolkien’s novel in the box, and became, in CRASH’s words, “the biggest selling adventure for the Spectrum of all time”.
Fast facts
- Publisher: Melbourne House.
- Developer: Beam Software, Melbourne.
- Programmers: Philip Mitchell and Veronika Megler, with Stuart Richie as the designer of the Inglish parser.
- Released: 1982, for the 48K ZX Spectrum, at £14.95.
- Licence: advertised as published “in association with the Tolkien Estate”.
- In the box: a paperback of The Hobbit, included “at no extra charge”.
- Conversions: BBC Micro, Commodore 64 and Oric 48K by early 1984; Amstrad CPC by 1985.
- Award: Best Strategy Game of 1983, Golden Joystick Awards.
Who made it
The game was Alfred Milgrom’s idea. Computer & Video Games called it “the brain child of Melbourne’s ideas man and managing director”, and in January 1984 it interviewed Philip Mitchell, who had started on the project part-time while studying computer science. It took another two years to finish. Mitchell refused the credit for himself: “I should say at the start that it was a team effort. Alfred assembled a team… myself and another programmer called Veronica”. The period press spelt her name “Veronica Megher”; she is Veronika Megler. CRASH named Stuart Richie as “the designer of Inglish”, the game’s parser.
Inglish
Most adventures of the time understood two words: a verb and a noun, such as TAKE LAMP. The Hobbit accepted whole sentences and chains of commands. Melbourne House called its parser Inglish, and CRASH explained in 1984 how it worked. A database held every word the game knew. An analyser took each command through a series of checks: that the words were in the vocabulary, that the sentence made grammatical sense, and that it made sense at that point in the game. Only then did the program act on it.
You could also talk to the other characters, with commands such as SAY TO GANDALF “READ SIGN”, and C&VG’s review in January 1983 noted that the characters communicated “not only with the player but also with the other characters”.
Players did not always use it. Mitchell told C&VG that people “think they have become used to adventures where you can only use one word commands — and tend to play the Hobbit in the same way… this is a pity”.
A world that kept moving
Melbourne House’s advertising made the most of it. Tolkien’s characters, it promised, “will all have an independent life of their own. They can make decisions and act on them!” They reacted to each other as well as to the player, so that “each time you play THE HOBBIT, events will proceed in a slightly different way”. C&VG agreed that the player “never knew who might turn up in a particular place”. Time passed too: leave the keyboard alone and the game told you so (“You wait… Time passes”), and the world carried on. Sinclair User‘s adventure column in March 1983 found that some of the trolls’ problems were “not half so bad in the daylight” and that a stone troll held the key to a door “when day dawns”.
Independent companions were not always helpful ones. Looking back in 1991, ACE said that all that seemed to happen was that “Thorin kept sitting down and singing about gold and Gandalf kept wandering off”. CRASH said much the same in 1987: talking to the other characters mostly resulted in “Thorin sitting down and singing about gold”. The line became the game’s best-remembered message.
The game had its rough edges. Sinclair User’s columnist reported that the program sometimes crashed after players escaped from the Elven King’s halls in a barrel, which Melbourne House blamed on faulty tapes, and CRASH later described both The Hobbit and its successor, Sherlock, as “rife with bugs”.
Pictures in an adventure
The Hobbit had pictures of many of its locations, drawn on screen as you arrived. CRASH argued in 1987 that the pictures themselves were not revolutionary, but putting them into a quality adventure was: “In 1983 most adventures were text-only”. It also claimed that after The Hobbit, “the big chain stores insisted that any game they stocked had graphics”.
The conversions show what the pictures cost. When Personal Computer Games compared them in February 1984, the Commodore 64 version was “very similar to its Spectrum parent”. The BBC Micro version had lost its pictures; the explanation given was that the text alone needed all of the machine’s available memory. The Oric version kept its pictures, in two colours and drawn so slowly that the player could become “a very frustrated little hobbit”; its “round green door” came out shocking pink.
Price and sales
At £14.95 The Hobbit cost more than twice as much as most Spectrum games. Advertisements in the first issue of Personal Computer Games listed it beside Melbourne House’s own shooter Penetrator at £6.95; the same pages offered a 48K Spectrum for £129.95.
It sold anyway. CRASH named The Hobbit and Penetrator as the two best-selling Spectrum programs of 1983, and C&VG introduced Mitchell in January 1984 as “the man who has sold a hundred thousand cassettes”. Later claims of a million copies sold appear in no period source. The game kept selling for years: in September 1986 it was at number 7 in CRASH’s adventure chart, nearly four years after its release.
The Golden Joysticks
Readers of C&VG voted The Hobbit Best Strategy Game of 1983, ahead of Football Manager, and runner-up to Jetpac for Game of the Year. The Golden Joystick Awards entry lists the other winners.
What came next
The same team’s next adventure, Sherlock (1984), took Inglish further, with Holmes questioning suspects and trying to convince Inspector Lestrade; CRASH reported that it needed the parser “refined and improved enormously”. Beam’s adventure system went on to The Lord of the Rings (1986) and Shadows of Mordor (1987). The Australian Commodore and Amiga Review recorded in 1988 that Mitchell had “mainly developed the adventure system” before he left, and the team that finished Shadows of Mordor said the system used for The Hobbit had “changed quite a lot” by then. The Melbourne House and Beam Software entries follow the company that made it.
Sources
- Computer & Video Games issue 15, January 1983: review of The Hobbit (48K Spectrum, £14.95, book included; characters communicating with each other).
- Sinclair User issue 12, March 1983: Melbourne House advertisement, p. 44 (the Tolkien Estate; the characters’ “independent life”; the book “at no extra charge”); “Mind Games” column, p. 93 “Mind Games” column (day and night, the stone troll, the crash after the barrels).
- Personal Computer Games issue 1, 1983: mail-order advertisements (The Hobbit £14.95, Penetrator £6.95, 48K Spectrum £129.95).
- Computer & Video Games Book of Adventure, supplement to issue 27, January 1984: Philip Mitchell interview (“the brain child of” Milgrom; the team; how Inglish works; characters turning up anywhere; “a hundred thousand cassettes”; conversions for BBC, Oric and Commodore 64).
- Personal Computer Games issue 3, February 1984: the BBC Micro, Commodore 64 and Oric conversions compared.
- Computer & Video Games issue 29, March 1984, p. 15: Golden Joystick Awards for 1983.
- CRASH issue 3, April 1984, pp. 56–58: Melbourne House feature (“the biggest selling adventure for the Spectrum of all time”; the two best-selling Spectrum programs of 1983; how Inglish works; the characters’ independent lives; the Sherlock team, with “Veronica Megher” and Stuart Richie).
- Amstrad Action issue 1, October 1985: The Hobbit on the Amstrad CPC. Issue 2, November 1985: “You wait… Time passes”.
- CRASH issue 32, September 1986: Adventure Top 30.
- CRASH Christmas Special 1987 (issue 48), p. 38: feature on book tie-ins (text-only adventures in 1983; the chain stores and graphics; “Thorin sitting down and singing about gold”; “rife with bugs”).
- The Australian Commodore and Amiga Review vol. 5 no. 4, April 1988: interview with the Shadows of Mordor team.
- ACE issue 41, February 1991: “Thorin kept sitting down and singing about gold”.
- Edge issue 46, June 1997: Beam Software profile (1982 release).
- Wikipedia, “The Hobbit (1982 video game)” (web, secondary): the spelling of Veronika Megler’s name. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hobbit_(1982_video_game)