The Hobbit (video game)
Encyclopedia
The Hobbit is a computer game released in 1982
and based on the book The Hobbit
, by J. R. R. Tolkien
. It was developed at Beam Software by Philip Mitchell and Veronika Megler 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 MSX
, 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 one 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.
ing the enclosed areas on the screen. The slow CPU speed meant that it would take up to several seconds for each scene to draw. The disk-based versions of the game used pre-rendered, higher-quality images.
The game had an innovative text-based physics system, developed by Veronika Megler. 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.
Unlike other works of interactive fiction, 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, though it could also lead to problems (such as an important character being killed early on and rendering the game unfinishable). There were numerous possible solutions and with hindsight the game might be regarded as one of the first examples of 'emergent gaming
'.
Developer Beam Software followed up The Hobbit with 1986's Lord of the Rings: Game One
, 1987's Shadows of Mordor: Game Two of Lord of the Rings
, and 1989's The Crack of Doom. They would also reuse Inglish in "Sherlock
".
In 1986 a parody of the game was released by CRL, The Boggit
.
A phrase from the game which has entered popular culture
is "Thorin sits down and starts singing about gold."
Also, the game is mentioned in Nick Montfort
's, 'Twisty Little Passages,' a book exploring the history and form of the interactive fiction genre.
Discworld Noir
referenced The Hobbit: when the protagonist, Lewton, discovers that someone concealed themselves in a wine barrel, he wonders why that brings to mind the phrases "You wait - time passes" and "Thorin sits down and starts singing about gold.".
1982 in video gaming
-Events:* December 27 - Starcade, a video game television game show, debuts on TBS in the United States.-Notable releases:*October 13 - Mystique releases the Custer's Revenge adult video game for the Atari 2600 home console....
and based on the book The Hobbit
The Hobbit
The Hobbit, or There and Back Again, better known by its abbreviated title The Hobbit, is a fantasy novel and children's book by J. R. R. Tolkien. It was published on 21 September 1937 to wide critical acclaim, being nominated for the Carnegie Medal and awarded a prize from the New York Herald...
, by J. R. R. Tolkien
J. R. R. Tolkien
John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, CBE was an English writer, poet, philologist, and university professor, best known as the author of the classic high fantasy works The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Silmarillion.Tolkien was Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Pembroke College,...
. It was developed at Beam Software by Philip Mitchell and Veronika Megler and published by Melbourne House
Melbourne House
Krome Studios Melbourne, originally Beam Software, was a video game development studio founded in 1980 and based in Melbourne, Australia. The studio operated independently from 1987 until 1999, when it was acquired by Infogrames, who changed the name to Melbourne House...
for most home computers available at the time, from more popular models such as the ZX Spectrum
ZX Spectrum
The ZX Spectrum is an 8-bit personal home computer released in the United Kingdom in 1982 by Sinclair Research Ltd...
, the Commodore 64
Commodore 64
The Commodore 64 is an 8-bit home computer introduced by Commodore International in January 1982.Volume production started in the spring of 1982, with machines being released on to the market in August at a price of US$595...
, Amstrad CPC 464 and the BBC Micro
BBC Micro
The BBC Microcomputer System, or BBC Micro, was a series of microcomputers and associated peripherals designed and built by Acorn Computers for the BBC Computer Literacy Project, operated by the British Broadcasting Corporation...
, through to less well-known computers such as the MSX
MSX
MSX was the name of a standardized home computer architecture in the 1980s conceived by Kazuhiko Nishi, then Vice-president at Microsoft Japan and Director at ASCII Corporation...
, Dragon 32
Dragon 32/64
The Dragon 32 and Dragon 64 are home computers that were built in the 1980s. The Dragons are very similar to the TRS-80 Color Computer , and were produced for the European market by Dragon Data, Ltd., in Port Talbot, Wales, and for the US market by Tano of New Orleans, Louisiana...
and Oric. By arrangement with the book publishers, a copy of the book was included with each game sold.
The parser
Parsing
In computer science and linguistics, parsing, or, more formally, syntactic analysis, is the process of analyzing a text, made of a sequence of tokens , to determine its grammatical structure with respect to a given formal grammar...
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 one to type advanced sentences such as "ask Gandalf
Gandalf
Gandalf is a character in J. R. R. Tolkien's novels The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. In these stories, Gandalf appears as a wizard, member and later the head of the order known as the Istari, as well as leader of the Fellowship of the Ring and the army of the West...
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.
Gameplay
Many locations were illustrated by an image, based on originals designed by Kent Rees. On the tape version, to save space, each image was stored in a compressed format by storing outline information and then flood fillFlood fill
Flood fill, also called seed fill, is an algorithm that determines the area connected to a given node in a multi-dimensional array. It is used in the "bucket" fill tool of paint programs to determine which parts of a bitmap to fill with color, and in games such as Go and Minesweeper for determining...
ing the enclosed areas on the screen. The slow CPU speed meant that it would take up to several seconds for each scene to draw. The disk-based versions of the game used pre-rendered, higher-quality images.
The game had an innovative text-based physics system, developed by Veronika Megler. 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.
Unlike other works of interactive fiction, 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
Gandalf
Gandalf is a character in J. R. R. Tolkien's novels The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. In these stories, Gandalf appears as a wizard, member and later the head of the order known as the Istari, as well as leader of the Fellowship of the Ring and the army of the West...
, 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, though it could also lead to problems (such as an important character being killed early on and rendering the game unfinishable). There were numerous possible solutions and with hindsight the game might be regarded as one of the first examples of 'emergent gaming
Emergent gameplay
Emergent gameplay refers to complex situations in video games, board games, or table top role-playing games that emerge from the interaction of relatively simple game mechanics....
'.
Reception
The Hobbit won the 1983 Golden Joystick Award for best strategy game. The game was also a huge commercial success, selling over 100,000 copies in its first two years at a retail price of £14.95. By the late 1980s it had sold over a million copies. There was general agreement that the major causes of its success were the popularity of Tolkien's work and the innovative Inglish parser created by Stuart Richie.Legacy
To help players a book called "A guide to playing The Hobbit" by David Elkan was published in 1984.Developer Beam Software followed up The Hobbit with 1986's Lord of the Rings: Game One
Lord of the Rings: Game One
Lord of the Rings: Game One is a computer game released in 1985 and based on the book The Fellowship of the Ring, by J. R. R. Tolkien...
, 1987's Shadows of Mordor: Game Two of Lord of the Rings
Shadows of Mordor
Shadows of Mordor: Game Two of Lord of the Rings is a text adventure game for the Commodore 64, Amstrad CPC and ZX Spectrum. It is based on the second part of The Lord of the Rings story....
, and 1989's The Crack of Doom. They would also reuse Inglish in "Sherlock
Sherlock (video game)
Sherlock is a 1984 text adventure developed under the lead of Philip Mitchell by Beam Software. It was published by Melbourne House. Five programmers worked for 18 months on the title and a Sherlock Holmes expert was employed full-time for a year to advise the team on accuracy.Technically, the...
".
In 1986 a parody of the game was released by CRL, The Boggit
The Boggit
The Boggit: Bored Too is a text adventure game by Delta 4 released in for the Commodore 64, Amstrad CPC and ZX Spectrum home computers. The game is a parody of the J.R.R. Tolkien novel The Hobbit and of the earlier game based upon it also called The Hobbit...
.
A phrase from the game which has entered popular culture
Popular culture
Popular culture is the totality of ideas, perspectives, attitudes, memes, images and other phenomena that are deemed preferred per an informal consensus within the mainstream of a given culture, especially Western culture of the early to mid 20th century and the emerging global mainstream of the...
is "Thorin sits down and starts singing about gold."
Also, the game is mentioned in Nick Montfort
Nick Montfort
Nick Montfort is an associate professor of digital media at MIT in the Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies. He is also a poet, computer scientist, and author of interactive fiction. Montfort has collaborated on the blog Grand Text Auto, the sticker novel Implementation, and the contemporary...
's, 'Twisty Little Passages,' a book exploring the history and form of the interactive fiction genre.
Discworld Noir
Discworld Noir
Discworld Noir is a computer game based on Terry Pratchett's Discworld comic fantasy novels, and unlike the previous Discworld games is both an example and parody of the noir genre. The game was developed by Perfect Entertainment and published by GT Interactive. It was originally released in 1999...
referenced The Hobbit: when the protagonist, Lewton, discovers that someone concealed themselves in a wine barrel, he wonders why that brings to mind the phrases "You wait - time passes" and "Thorin sits down and starts singing about gold.".