“You’re spending £24 on one of our games not £9 for a quill-written adventure,” Anita Sinclair told Commodore Computing International in 1987. She was in her mid-twenties and ran Magnetic Scrolls, the small London company whose first game, The Pawn, had made it, in Computer & Video Games’ words, “England’s answer to the mighty Infocom”. The magazine profiling her that summer opened by guessing that 99% of the people who wrote computer games were men, and called her “one woman who is now recognised as a strong international influence”. Magnetic Scrolls’ adventures won Computer & Video Games’ Golden Joystick awards for 1986, 1987 and 1988. Sinclair, no relation to Sir Clive, was its public face: she gave the interviews, demonstrated the parser to journalists and programmed some of the conversions herself.
Fast facts
- Co-founded: Magnetic Scrolls, London, 1984, with Ken Gordon and Hugh Steers.
- Games: The Pawn (1985), The Guild of Thieves (1987), Jinxter (1987), Corruption (1988), Fish! (1988), Myth (1989), Wonderland (1990).
- Publishers: Rainbird, then Virgin.
- Later: an international bridge player, with a gold medal at the 2014 World Bridge Series.
Before Magnetic Scrolls
Sinclair told her own story to Commodore Computing International in August 1987. At eleven she went to a school in Normandy that had been boys only (“I was the second girl there”) and left at 15 for a secretarial course. She worked in a typing pool and a travel agency, and helped run a glass importing business in Hampstead. Her first computer, in 1980 when she was 17, was a UK101, put together from a list of parts around a 6502 processor. After a VIC-20 she worked in a computer shop in Edgware Road, selling BBC Micros and Apple systems: “That’s how I met most of the people who are important to Magnetic Scrolls.” She wrote programs on commission, including business programs that “dreadfully bored” her.
The Pawn
The founding story, as Computer & Video Games told it in October 1987, began with a disagreement. Ken Gordon and Hugh Steers wanted to use Steers’s new parser for an adventure on Sinclair Research’s new QL. Sinclair wanted to write arcade games for the machine, because they could be finished quickly and earn money that year. “In the end, Ken and Hugh won.” The Pawn came out on the QL without pictures and sold few copies. With Tony Rainbird, of British Telecom’s new Rainbird label, the company then rewrote it with painted location pictures for the Atari ST, and that version made its name. “The reason the ST version made such a stir was primarily because of the graphics and the parser,” Sinclair said. Her own sales figures, given in 1987, were 20,000 copies in Britain and 150,000 worldwide.
She was proud of how open the game was. “The Pawn has seven different solutions,” she said. “You are not important to The Pawn. You do not have a role. The game will go on without you.”
Building a system first
Magnetic Scrolls wrote its games in its own adventure system on a DEC VAX minicomputer and produced versions for each machine from there. Sinclair explained the reasoning: “If we wrote a game, we’d need as much time to write another, perhaps thirty man years. By creating a system first, Guild of Thieves took only five man years.” The parser of The Guild of Thieves knew 147 verbs, she said, and still fitted in 64K.
When CRASH visited in 1988, about two months before each release the company handed each version to one programmer: Ken Gordon was writing the Amiga Corruption, and Anita Sinclair the Atari ST one. She was candid about her rivals. “I make no secret of my admiration for Infocom,” she told Computer & Video Games, and she called Infocom’s adventures “the best”. That did not stop her calling Infocom’s romance adventure Plundered Hearts “one of the worst games ever written” in ACE.
Corruption and the audience
ACE called her “the brains behind Scrolls” in January 1988 and reported her estimate that women made up about 25% of the company’s players. Not that she saw herself as a feminist, the magazine added: “I cannot stand or tolerate feminism of any form.”
Corruption (1988) swapped fantasy for insider dealing in the City of London, and Sinclair worried it would disappoint people who had liked Jinxter. “If we hyped this to the ends of the earth a lot of people who would end up buying it wouldn’t like it because they’d prefer a fantasy game,” she told CRASH. “And that would put them off our future releases.” It won the Golden Joystick for the best 8-bit adventure, and Fish! won the 16-bit award the same year.
When BT sold Telecomsoft to MicroProse in 1989, Sinclair explained to ACE that Magnetic Scrolls’ contract was not “assignable”, so the games did not go with the sale, and blamed Telecomsoft for how Fish! had been distributed. The company moved to Virgin for Wonderland and the Magnetic Windows system, and stopped publishing in 1992.
Bridge
Sinclair later became one of the most successful women in English bridge. The English Bridge Union lists her wins in the Gold Cup (2018), the Crockfords Cup (2017), the Schapiro Spring Foursomes (2014) and the NICKO (2013–14), and a gold medal in the Mixed Teams at the 2014 World Bridge Series in Sanya, China. In 2017, when Hugh Steers and Stefan Meier set up Strand Games to remaster The Pawn from Magnetic Scrolls’ recovered source code, they did it with the support of Sinclair and Ken Gordon.
Sources
- Commodore Computing International, August 1987, pp. 19–21: profile of Anita Sinclair (her age in 1980, school, early jobs, the UK101 and VIC-20, the Edgware Road shop, Gordon and Steers, the system and its man-years, 147 verbs in 64K, Tony Rainbird, UK and worldwide sales, Infocom “the best”, seven solutions, the Quill comparison).
- Computer & Video Games issue 72, October 1987, p. 80: “The A Team” (the founding argument, the QL and ST versions, “England’s answer to the mighty Infocom”, her admiration for Infocom).
- ACE issue 4, January 1988, p. 110: feature on women and computer games (her age, “the brains behind Scrolls”, women players, Plundered Hearts, feminism).
- CRASH issue 55, August 1988: “Message in a Microchip”, visit to Magnetic Scrolls (the VAX, the programmers’ formats, Sinclair on the ST version of Corruption, her quote on hype).
- Sinclair User issue 58, January 1987: The Pawn review (Sinclair demonstrating the parser).
- Computer & Video Games issue 66, April 1987; issue 79, May 1988; issue 92, June 1989: Golden Joystick Awards for 1986, 1987 and 1988 (The Pawn, The Guild of Thieves, Corruption and Fish!).
- ACE issue 22, July 1989, p. 9: “Scrolled off…” (the contract with BT, Sinclair on Telecomsoft).
- PC Player (Germany), April 1999: adventure feature, caption on Sinclair showing The Pawn in 1986.
- English Bridge Union, “Anita Sinclair” biography, last updated October 2018 (web, secondary): her bridge record and her Magnetic Scrolls career. https://www.ebu.co.uk/biographies/anita-sinclair
- “The return of Magnetic Scrolls? (Sort of)”, Ziggurat, 18 June 2017 (web, secondary): Strand Games, with support from Anita Sinclair and Ken Gordon. https://ziggurat.co.nz/news/2017/6/18/the-return-of-magnetic-scrolls-sort-of/