The Hobbit (video game)
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| The Hobbit | |
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| Developer(s) | Beam Software |
| Publisher(s) | Melbourne House |
| Designer(s) | Philip Mitchell |
| Release date(s) | 1982 |
| Genre(s) | Adventure |
| Mode(s) | Single player |
| Rating(s) | N/A |
| Platform(s) | ZX Spectrum Commodore 64 BBC (no graphics) Dragon 32 Oric Atmos MSX Apple II PC |
| Media | tape floppy disk |
| Input | keyboard |
The Hobbit is a computer game released in 1982 and based on the book The Hobbit, by J. R. R. Tolkien. It was developed by Beam Software and published by Melbourne House for most home computers available at the time, from more popular models such as the ZX Spectrum, the Commodore 64, Amstrad CPC 464 and the BBC Micro, through to less well-known computers such as the Dragon 32 and Oric. By arrangement with the book publishers, a copy of the book was included with each game sold.
The parser was very advanced for the time and used a subset of English called Inglish. When it was released most adventure games used simple verb-noun parsers (allowing for simple phrases like 'get lamp'), but Inglish allowed you to type advanced sentences such as "ask Gandalf about the curious map then take sword and kill troll with it". The parser was complex and intuitive, introducing pronouns, adverbs ("viciously attack the goblin"), punctuation and prepositions and allowing the player to interact with the game world in ways not previously possible.
The game had an innovative text-based physics system. Objects, including the characters in the game, had a calculated size, weight and solidity. Objects could be placed inside other objects, attached together with rope and damaged or broken. If the main character was sitting in a barrel which was then picked up and thrown through a trapdoor, the player went too.
Unusually for a text adventure, the game was also in real time - if you left the keyboard for too long events continued without you by automatically entering the "WAIT" command with the response "You wait - time passes". If you had to leave the keyboard for a short time, there was a "PAUSE" command which would stop all events until a key was pressed.
The game had a cast of non-player characters that were entirely independent of the player and bound to precisely the same game rules. They had loyalties, strengths and personalities that affected their behaviour and could not always be predicted. The character of Gandalf, for example, roamed freely around the game world (some fifty locations), picking up objects, getting into fights and being captured. The volatility of the characters, coupled with the rich physics and impossible to predict fighting system, meant that the game could be played in many different ways. There were numerous possible solutions and with hindsight we might regard the game as one of the first examples of 'emergent gaming'.
To help people a book called “A guide to playing The Hobbit” was also published. Melbourne House followed up “The Hobbit” with 1986's “The Fellowship of the Ring”, 1987's “The Shadows of Mordor”, and 1990's “The Crack of Doom”. They would later reuse Inglish in “Sherlock”.
There is also a 2003 computer and console game called The Hobbit, published by Vivendi Universal for the Xbox, PlayStation 2, Nintendo GameCube and Windows.
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[edit] Trivia
- A phrase from the game which has entered popular culture is "Thorin sits down and starts singing about gold."
- A bug in the game allowed the player to climb into a chest, close the lid, and continue to walk around.
- Entering "DO" into the parser caused it to generate odd (nonsense) messages. Trying to open unopenable objects or characters, followed repeatedly by the command "BREAK DO" allowed you to kill or break them.
- Some players enjoyed telling Thorin to climb into the fast black river, at which point the game would respond, "The Thorin is dead". Despite this, on completing the game, Thorin would reappear.
- At one point in the game, it was possible to drink wine, getting the player (temporarily) drunk. The game would then substitute "sh" for "s" in its responses (e.g. "You drink shome wine"). This caused extra amusement if the player entered the command "sit".
- To conserve memory, in the tape-based versions scene graphics were not stored as bitmaps, but redrawn every time using a stored series of commands. The slow CPU speed and lack of a graphics chip meant that it would take up to several seconds for each scene to draw. The disk-based versions used prerendered and higher-quality images.
