I’ve finished the game, and my previous posts on The Hobbit are needed for context.
I did not need to reset.
This resolved, after the fact, one of the more cryptic aspects of the game.
First of all, regarding that THIS PLACE IS TOO FULL TO ENTER message — I was still so baffled about it that I checked the book which supposedly mentions it (see above) and it is indeed right there in print, as a feature of the game. Importantly, it said the message always happens from the two particular locations I had seen it at. (Why did the authors leave it in after v1.0?) It certainly was considered a bug by the time the Macintosh version came out, which fixed the issue (but it was made after the Guidebook). The important thing is that I knew the game definitely intended an alternate exit and I wasn’t just running into a random glitch (as opposed to an intentional one), so I resumed multiple whacks at what seemed to be the only method of exit, the forest with the spider.
I still was not having any luck evading the creature, and I found out after the fact it is designed such that you can never get through by going west. Fortunately, I found an alternate route in the process, as the wood elf would occasionally wander in and toss me in the elf dungeon.
I already still had the red key from the butler, so I could unlock the door right away and go out. There was one alternate exit I hadn’t used yet because it seemed a bit broken: a “magic door” just north of the room with the barrels. I was able previously to get a description of an elf coming, but I hadn’t tried the WAIT command to see if anything would happen.
I was able to then GO THROUGH MAGIC DOOR to get out.
Going west exits directly to the main nexus area so I was able to take a beeline for the exit. Thorin found me along the way so he was able to share in my victory.
Crowther/Woods adventure ending, except this time the dwarves and hobbits are joining in the cheering crowd.
There’s enough lingering questions I’m going to list them all first before I start answering:
- What was the curious key all about?
- Why is it that exits sometimes seemed to be missing?
- What was going on with Gollum’s riddle?
- What do you actually need to do to win?
- Why was this game so popular?
- Why did credit for the game “drift” over time?
Onward with:
What was the curious key all about?
After everything was over (this is on the way home) I got a hint from Thorin as to the utility of the key
I had seen the effect of this without even realizing the key was causing the effect. It turns out to be completely unnecessary, but here it is:
This allows a “side route” around the dragon so Bilbo can theoretically go into the lair and nab the treasure, I assume without confronting the dragon at all. It is so blatantly obvious to coax Bard into shooting the dragon (and so difficult to get the key) this really seems mis-adjusted.
To put it another way, if you have two alternate routes to solve a puzzle, and one is quite straightforward and doesn’t require any extra preparation, having a second route which is much harder to solve for and provides no benefit is unhelpful (and even provides extra danger, as the dragon can wander back in its lair and find you anyway!)
Incidentally, the golden key from the mountains — at least according to the Guide — serves no purpose whatsoever. That whole piece of geography is meaningless.
Why is it that exits sometimes seemed to be missing?
There was a game mechanic I had missed here. At the start of the game you get a curious map that nobody can read, and I had additionally taken the first NPC encountered (Elrond) and tried to get him to read it too, and he was just responding “no”. This was early on when I wasn’t understanding yet just how bad the RNG could get; the key is to simply keep asking.
This also explains my sometimes-missing-exit problem: an exit is picked at random at the start of the game to be missing from the map. If it’s the one above, it isn’t essential to the game, but sometimes the exit is quite important, like the one from the Misty Mountains going east (the one that was missing quite often in the Mac version of the game!)
Map that came with some editions of the game. Via eBay.
What was going on with Gollum’s riddle?
Petter Sjölund indicated in the comments that he got a different (very famous) riddle with his port, and sometimes the right answer would get him strangled anyway. Even if he answered the riddle correctly and survived, Gollum would just immediately ask the same riddle over again.
I think the answer probably is “dark” or “darkness” but after many attempts I never was able to deliver this answer to Gollum and live. The walkthroughs just say to kill him; you don’t even need to do that because he doesn’t toss you in the dungeon so it’s easy to simply walk on by. (The only reason killing him is helpful is his corpse serves as a marker on a map space in order to tell if you’ve gone back to a particular room.)
What do you actually need to do to win?
With everything going it may be unclear what the winning sequence is. As far as I can tell the simplest way is:
1. Get Elrond to read the map (in case of bad route)
2. Wait a beat and get the key from the trolls after they have turned to stone, then use that to get the sword (Sting), the rope can ignored; the rope can be used for an alternate route over to Lake Town but it’s fairly obtuse
3. Do a rush in the Goblin area and grab the one ring. From Inside Goblins Gate I found the route NE, N, W, SE, SW to be pretty good at evading being caught. With the ring in hand and then worn it easy going the rest of the way.
4. Get caught by a wood elf. (It’s possible for the wood elf to be dead by accident. Reset.)
5. Wait for the butler to open the red door while imprisoned, then sneak out while wearing the ring. Jump onto a barrel at the right moment to escape.
6. From Lake Town, instruct Bard to go north and SHOOT DRAGON. Grab the treasure.
7. Get caught by the wood elf again.
8. Instead of going the barrel route, go to the room with the magic door and WEAR RING, then EXAMINE MAGIC DOOR. It should show an elf approaching, at which point you can WAIT, then GO THROUGH MAGIC DOOR.
9. Walk home and put the treasure in the chest.
You don’t need Thorin if you’re simply going to avoid getting caught by the goblins (given Gandalf seems to be inclined to randomly show up).
Regarding the point with the rope, you can take the rope over to the river and snag yourself a boat. This is utterly baffling to me. “THROW ROPE ACROSS – Repeat until the rope lands in the boat on the other side of the river.”
I do wonder if it’d be possible to simply murder both the pesky dwarf and wizard at the start and still make it through, which segues somewhat into…
Why was this game so popular?
The Slovenian magazine Moj mikro had a brief profile of adventure games in 1984, when they were first starting to appear in Yugoslavia. The text of the article mentions three games: Crowther/Woods Adventure, Kontrabant (the first Slovenian adventure game) and The Hobbit. It was considered an urtext.
When The Hobbit game came out, the ZX Spectrum was still getting started with software. This is in a game that managed to be in development for longer than the lifetime of the system, and any ZX Spectrum text adventures that had come out by this point tended to be fairly weak, like The Zolan Adventure. So first mover advantage could be considered part of the explanation.
However, that doesn’t fit the absolutely huge spread to this game, far out of proportion from what seems the quality. This is a game with bugged rooms that gets left in the game just because, Gandalf stumbling about purely at random, Gollum telling a riddle where the right answer can kill the player, and highly uneven design on puzzle difficulty. However, it also — like when Grand Theft Auto 3 first came out — invites experiment. I normally have zero temptation to replay adventure games, but I truly wonder if there’s some method through that avoids picking up the One Ring at all (you’d need to get the curious key, at least). I also wonder how far I can take the “multi-command” trick with NPCs and if can have Thorin go grab the ring for me while Bilbo just hangs out in comfort. The slight train-wreck experience (including key NPCs just randomly being dead when you need them) is actually beneficial to the feel of the game as world-toolkit, where it doesn’t matter if you’re trying to win but to see if Thorin can do hobbit-tossing. Strident mentions in the comments that:
I should point out that, despite myself and my father playing this game for probably a hundred hours… and having the guidebook… I don’t think we ever actually “completed” it.
That is, if a character literally falls off the map into void taking a key item with them, that’s not contrary to the alternate goal of having a world to muck about in.
Each object had a set of characteristics, and you could perform actions on the object based on the characteristics. For example, it could be alive (an animal) or dead. It had weight associated with it. So you could pick up any object that was light enough and use it as a weapon, whether it was a “weapon” or not. If it was a dead animal, that was no different from any other heavy object. If it was a live animal, it would probably struggle or fight, depending on it’s character profile.
Each animal’s “character” was a list of actions that they could choose between. Sometimes, they would just cycle through the actions one after the other, and sometimes they would change to a different set based on what had happened before – like the friendly dwarf, who could become violent once he’d been attacked (or picked up). An action could invoke a general routine – like, choose a random direction and run, which was the same for all animals; or, it could be an action specific only to this animal, like, choose any live object and kill it.
Why did credit for the game “drift” over time?
I certainly do think something went awry nearly right when the game came out, as Mitchell started to get the lion’s share of the credit. There is for example this interview from Computer Answers May 1984…
…and there’s another mention in Crash a few years later which credits Mitchell with the Inglish system. (It mentions how, despite it having fancy affordances, people were still sticking to much simpler inputs.)
I’m going to put blame mostly on the magazines. Ian Malcolm who worked at the company pointed out to me on Bluesky that Mitchell was not a “interact with the public” type of person and “mostly wanted to be left alone”. That is, his face was being put up because the magazines wanted one, not that he was ever keen on the idea. While there was valiant effort in early articles to credit all four, there was a strong tendency then (as there still is now) to assume a single auteur behind a creative effort and leave everyone else behind. Malcolm also points out that Mitchell was the only one who stayed at Melbourne House (Megler only worked at Beam for a year while finishing her degree before going to IBM, I am not sure where Ritchie went) so interviews after 1983 would naturally gravitate towards a person the magazines could reach.
(Possibly in Megler’s case there was some sexism. She’s on record being annoyed about people thinking she wasn’t doing programming, which does seem related to gender-perception, but as far as credit goes I think the evidence is more toward it being a general issue.)
BONUS: What’s the deal with Arkenstone?
This is something I ran across rather at accident.
Back in January I wrote about a game from the book ZAP! POW! BOOM! Arcade Games for the VIC-20 by Mark Ramshaw. It was entitled “Adventure” in its UK version and “Arkenstone” in its UK version. It played like an extremely abbreviated version of The Hobbit where you could take a spear and kill the dragon yourself.
It has the same “abbreviated geography” as parts of the Melbourne House version of The Hobbit, although with everything crunched into two printed pages for an unexpanded VIC-20. The game came out before The Hobbit and could just be coincidence, except, well — let me bring up this picture I posted on Sunday —
Over the Spectrum was one of the Melbourne House books of type-ins that was still bulking up their finances, with the BASIC code produced by Neil Streeter and Clifford Ramshaw. The adventure game may or may not have been written by Clifford (he’s credited, at least, with a “Caves and Pitfalls” game in a ZX81 book); the important point is that Clifford is the brother of Mark. In other words, there is strong chance Mark saw an early version of The Hobbit (maybe even the TRS-80 version) so was inspired to make his own VIC-20 extremely-pruned-down version as a result. Rob has done more investigation here in the comments.
…
If you’re wanting to read further takes on The Hobbit in general, there’s Jimmy Maher, Data Driven Gamer (with a dissection of the internal logic, like how the goblins follow patrol patterns), Aaron Reed, and Helen Stuckey. I don’t particularly disagree with anyone’s game evaluation; Jimmy Maher points out the parser despite having fancy features is also terribly finicky in other respects (you can’t ENTER BOAT, you can only CLIMB INTO BOAT). Megler also has a long retrospective here on her webpage, including this part, which seems a good place as any to close out:
The division between inanimate object and NPC was left intentionally a little blurry, giving extra flexibility. For example, the object overrides could also be used to modify character behavior. I actually coded an override where, if the player typed “turn on the angry dwarf”, he turned into a “randy dwarf” and followed the player around propositioning him. If he was later turned off, he’d return to being the angry dwarf and start trying to kill any live character. Fred and Phil made me take that routine out.
Coming up: the last game of 1982.
Renga in Blue 
Naive question but have you tried unlocking the side door with the curious key? I feel like some guide I saw had you do that.
ha! I was reading the “three feet up” and thinking that also meant the size of the hole was proportional. It’s a _little_ hole
still absolutely bonkers because the dragon can still catch you walking in the other way just as easily as walking through the front
Sorry this comment isn’t about The Hobbit, but you mentioned Kontrabant. I thought I’d let you know a port of it in English (and French, and still Slovenian) has just come out for the Apple II. https://www.brutaldeluxe.fr/products/apple2/kontrabant/ Also the sequel’s been ported.
That’s an old Quilled game so I guess they could’ve just popped the the Spectrum database into the Apple II version of the program… It seems like it’s been completely reprogrammed, though. Always nice to see a translation into English.
I remember playing this game on a friend’s ZX Spectrum (so obviously a long time ago), and from what I remember we never managed to find the ring. Or if he did, he did it on his own. But we still managed to beat the game at least once, so I guess the ring just makes it easier to escape from the elves?
Another thing I clearly remember is getting all the way to the dragon with Bard in tow. Knowing that the parser was kind of stupid we explicitly told bard to “KILL DRAGON WITH BOW”. He refused several times, and then proceeded trying to beat the dragon to death with it. Oh dear…
I also remember my friend saying that he once encountered Smaug in the elf dungeon. I still don’t know if he was just pulling my leg.
It’s easy to poke fun at the game’s failings, but I can’t help admiring it for what it was trying to do. I still have vivid memories of the game, while other games from the same era have faded to the point where I may recall the names but not much else. I remember there was quite a bit of excitement for the Fellowship of the Ring adventure that came later, but what I mostly remember of that one was how abominably slow it ran.
I remember this being a “Make a cup of tea. And then another.” loading time on the C64. I twigged quickly there was some randomness but also some seemingly RPG-lite where weapons could break and you could put adverbs in that seemed to change your chances of success in combat, though this was very elusive to prove. It’s a bit hazy now but I think when I made it through the Misty Mountains I would always go to Smaug and muck about there and never figured out how to get Bard to do his thing. Never finished it.As an aside, Bard is introduced in the book about a page before he deus ex machinas Smaug’s butt. Master storytelling that part was not!Still, I have very fond memories of the complexity of this game and if you think the real world is part deterministic and part random then you’ll love the mechanics.
It does seem to me that Tolkien deliberately subverts the Chosen One narrative that so many of his followers play straight. Smaug gets killed by a previously unseen guy from the town and Bilbo’s contribution is that he happens to mention his weak spot in earshot of a little bird who flies and alerts Bard to it. Frodo brings the Ring to the cracks of Mount Doom, but at the last moment his will fails and it’s destroyed by a one-sentence Gollum pratfall. In this way perhaps this game allowing the NPCs to do important things off-screen is true to Tolkien’s vision.
Congratulations!
Another acomplished feat! It is amazing that you have completed the game “your way” XD
About the questions: this game was so popular because it was played by little boys and girls of the 80’s. It was just a game that sparkled the imagination.
In the Spain it sparkled it even more, becuase we tried to play it with little sense of proper english, with dictionary in hand. For a lot of us, it was the first entry to learning english. I presume this is the very same effect gamebooks had on Miyazaky from Dark Souls fame, when he mention that “the fascination of read something you still don’t hald understand, and the imagination fills the gaps” (not a verbatim quote).
Also, the when the game came to Spain, it was on every printed magazine. The game was widely covered, with plenty guides and step by step solutions, so, for us, in the eighties, it was quite playable, because we used to play with pokes, hints, tricks and solutions.
To end, Another optional step by step guide to finish the game would be:
Yeah, having a solution to this doesn’t “ruin” the game in the same way as a different adventure. As Strident’s comment was implying, even with a solution at hand people weren’t even always going for that.
Forgive me for getting stuck on this point, but what IS the actual answer to Gollum’s riddle in this game supposed to be? Is it something we haven’t guessed, or is it a case like with Elrond, where you’ve done the right answer, but game logic is dictating that Gollum murders you anyway?
I’ll observe that a contributor to the game’s popularity was likely that it was a big, official licensed title too. This was before the days when such things would start becoming more of an indicator of questionable quality, especially in the computer section of the market.
I’m guessing it’s “darkness” or “dark” because this is a “pre-made” riddle that comes from outside the game and that’s the answer. But I have not, after six or so attempts, gotten it to “register”. So there might as well be no answer at all.
I think The Hobbit is so well regarded because it’s a game that people who don’t really like adventure games remember fondly.
It’s hard to remember what I really thought about this game 40+ years ago but I know that if we weren’t already into Tolkien as a family already then this game and the paperback copy of The Hobbit that came with it certainly cemented our love of J.R.R’s novels. I must have gone on to buy and then read the LOTR trilogy about twenty times in the next couple of years.
Throwing in a copy of the book was a genius move… it made The Hobbit a multi-media experience. The fact that you were exploring the landscape of the book probably made up for most of the game’s shortcomings. It never encouraged me to play any other adventure games… it was several years later before I really grew to love the genre.
Although it presents itself as an adventure, it hides a lot of RPG elements and probably succeeds most as a crude simulation of Tolkien’s world. There wasn’t really much else like it at the time. Games like Valhalla, which followed in 1983, threw away a lot more of the adventure elements and really leaned heavily into the whole aspect of characters with their own personalities & desires, independently living their digital lives irrespective of what the player was doing.
I think we must’ve played the game almost as a rogue-like. I certainly can’t remember saving out to tape very often (that was always slow and unreliable). I think we very much tackled the game fresh every evening… seeing how far we could get on each run.
It is interesting how Mitchell became almost the sole name associated with the game. The original documentation credits the team in the way the guide book does. Version 1.2 added Mitchell and Megler’s name to the loading screen but Mitchell tended to be the one mentioned in later promotional articles.
As you surmise, I think it’s likely due to the fact that he stayed with the company and then was the personality used to sell the Lord of the Rings games and also Sherlock. Although these later works tried to do some interesting things (LOTR: Game One had multiple playable characters and Sherlock had its ambitious “Foggy London” simulation) I’ve never found them much fun to play.
Not all these work on MSX. Bilbo can’t tote people around and the spider strategy you mention just kills you.
Ah, I was not aware that there were such differences. I mostly played on C64 (tape and disc versions) and a little on the Spectrum. What a maze of twisty little passages.
I tried the MSX version, and waiting twice at each location to get you past the pale bulbous eyes seems to work.
hmm, managed to get it and I know I’ve tried it before. Maybe the wood elf was mangling with things?
I just found this 2002 interview with Veronika Megler which partly echoes some of my thoughts in section 3 above.
https://www.avventuretestuali.com/interviste/megler-eng/
Thinking again, are you sure that this is not just an effect of how well you have eaten? I think it affects your carrying as well as your fighting ability.
Not sure on _anything_ on this game. But I was never able to get it to work and supposedly (from other things I read) Bilbo being able to CARRY THORIN and so forth was eventually patched.