[HN Gopher] 1982: The Hobbit
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1982: The Hobbit
Author : makaimc
Score : 181 points
Date : 2021-03-25 11:56 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (if50.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (if50.substack.com)
| morsch wrote:
| Another long article about this game:
| https://www.filfre.net/2012/11/the-hobbit/
| MarcScott wrote:
| Wow, the nostalgia.
|
| 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.
| momentoftop wrote:
| I think that was when you were stuck in a prison with a high
| window. The typical exchange was: # say to
| Gandalf "carry me" GANDALF says no. GANDALF
| goes east. # wait You wait. Time passes...
| # wait You wait. Time passes...
|
| ...hoping that Gandalf would show up later and be in a more
| cooperative mood.
|
| Maybe I was just stuck in a mindset of adventure games having
| exactly one solution. Reading about this game, The Hobbit seems
| to be even more sophisticated than I'd assumed.
| Jare wrote:
| Wonderful story, such an amazing and inspiring game.
|
| 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.
| elvis70 wrote:
| > everything had to fit into those 48,000 bytes of RAM
|
| 48K minus the 6K VRAM and system variables! It's actually more
| like 41K.
| varjag wrote:
| Also, it's 49152.
|
| System variables were irrelevant after loading if you never
| called into ROM, but yes, that 6912 byte display block was
| fundamental. However some games and demos did steal a kb or two
| by using only a part of the screen and masking the rest with
| black on black color attributes.
| benttoothpaste wrote:
| In addition the lower 16KB was much slower than the upper 32KB
| since it was shared with ULA. So one had to make sure to place
| the code that needs speed in the proper part of the memory.
| crtasm wrote:
| from "50 Years of Text Games" - an excellent ongoing series of
| articles.
| moonchild wrote:
| > she realized the root of her boredom was [adventure]'s static,
| unchanging structure: "It played the same way every time. Each
| Non-Player Character (NPC) was tied to a single location, and
| always did the same thing." She decided her game would be
| different.
|
| 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.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > Megler for years was little aware of the game's success. After
| graduating, Melbourne House offered her a full-time position, but
| she was sick of assembler debugging and turned it down: "I have a
| very low tolerance for doing the same thing over and over again."
|
| > She accepted an entry-level job at IBM
|
| What did _that_ involve? These seem hard to reconcile.
| stevekemp wrote:
| She's one of the few people I went out of my way to track down
| and send an email to say
|
| "Thanks for that thing you did many many years ago".
|
| She seemed pretty mellow, and I got the impression this had
| happened a lot to her.
| fiftyacorn wrote:
| There were a lot of students who wrote games during this time
| to pay their way thru uni, then moved on
|
| I think Megler is at Amazon now
| vba wrote:
| I was wondering where she is now - her LinkedIn says Amazon.
| Looks like she went back into academia before that. Wonder if
| she worked on any more projects like this during her 2nd
| stint at university.
| dwd wrote:
| The nostalgia hit me like a wall.
|
| For an instant I could smell the house I lived in during the mid
| 80s and played The Hobbit.
| christoph wrote:
| Same. The amount this game got played when I was a child, on my
| own, with my parents, with my grandparents, is crazy to think
| about. They'd all sit and play it after I went to bed as well.
|
| Still to this day, whenever anybody mentions the Hobbit, the
| first image that comes to mind is the front cover box art of
| the Spectrum game.
| aphrax wrote:
| I remember this, a particularly cool thing for the time is that
| Thorin appeared to be doing his own thing, singing, going in and
| out of the room, that kind of thing. For the time it seemed
| incredible...
| Angostura wrote:
| But mainly singing about gold
| klondike_klive wrote:
| I never played the Hobbit but The Lord of the Rings game that
| followed made a big impression on me. It came in an enormous box
| with the Fellowship book and two cassette tapes for my Amstrad
| 464. Something about the sparse graphics, the super-slow speed
| and the fathomless Tolkien lore gripped my young imagination. I
| never beat the game, but I still remember how gripped I was by
| possibility.
| bunsenhoneydew wrote:
| "You are lost in the misty mountains" seemed to be the only thing
| on my dad's computer screen for a large part of my childhood
| Angostura wrote:
| On my Spectrum, I'm surprised 'Thorin sits down and sings about
| gold' wasn't burned in to the screen of the living room TV
| raleighm wrote:
| Was unaware of this. Can't wait to play this with my kids this
| weekend. We recently finished The Hobbit and have been reading
| Choose Your Own Adventure books. They'll love this.
| derriz wrote:
| A warning before filling your kids with anticipation: I loved
| The Hobbit and Choose Your Own Adventure books as a kid but I
| remember being very disappointed with this game - maybe it
| demanded more commitment but I gave up on it after a few days.
| I found it inscrutable at the time - characters coming and
| going at random, fighting with the parser trying to express my
| intentions, unclear progression, not enough humor, etc.
|
| I reckon later graphical adventures - the Lucasarts ones for
| example, would provide a better shared experience. Can't wait
| to try Monkey Island with mine when old enough.
| Angostura wrote:
| To think that the person who have me so much pleasure as a kid is
| now priciple data scientist at AWS
| quotha wrote:
| Great game and it came with the book! Does anyone remember the
| music that played in this? It is a classic song that I've been
| trying to find out for years!
| greedo wrote:
| My first exposure to computers of any type was in early 1980. My
| brother and I visited one of his friends who had an Apple ][ and
| we played Adventure into the early hours of the morning. I was
| enthralled.
| TMWNN wrote:
| Infocom's text adventures have a similarly sophisticated text
| parser and are based on a far more flexible development language
| (ZIL) and virtual architecture (Z-Machine). The early games have
| the occasional randomly moving NPC (Example: The thief in _Zork
| I_ ) or time limit, and such elements are more fleshed out in
| later games, but there is never any potential for truly emergent
| gameplay as in _The Hobbit_.
|
| 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.
| tluyben2 wrote:
| Ha! I never knew this game changed on purpose after every new
| run; I thought it was buggy as a kid.
| divbzero wrote:
| The article warns of spoilers at the top. Those wishing to
| experience the game for themselves can try the emulator link [1]
| at the bottom.
|
| [1] http://torinak.com/qaop#!hobbit
| Steve44 wrote:
| I remember the Hobbit very well, it came in a large pack and
| included a full copy of the book. It was great to play and the
| language parsing felt way ahead of all the other games of the
| time. Playing it, you got a real feel that you were inside a real
| living environment, not just solving a sequence of steps to
| complete it.
|
| 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.
| doublejay1999 wrote:
| indistinguishable from magic, for this 11 year old boy.
| anthk wrote:
| I never played that, I mainly played Spanish for the ZX and
| English/Spanish IF for the zmachine, because ZX Brit English
| games tend to have a more difficult lexicon to me as a non
| native.
|
| 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
| Archipielago or the ZX Van Halen pentalogy. And the opposite, I'd
| love a Spanish translation of Anchorhead.
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