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.
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.
I almost finished the game. I seem to be getting my victory stomped on from a bug, but this game is of the nature it is hard to tell what is really considered a bug, and it is also hard to tell if there’s some alternate method of getting by something or if a softlock is at hand.
Normally I would look up what’s going on and make this my finishing post, but I’m going avoid hints and do one more run from scratch (and consequently, one more post). There’s enough dense mechanics going on (and enough extra history I need to cover) it’s worth spending the time.
In 1989, The Hobbit landed in a Tolkien Trilogy collection. Via Spectrum Computing.
First, regarding Gollum’s riddle: I have no idea. I never solved it and I don’t think I need to solve it.
The format I’ve been using is SAY TO GOLLUM “WORD” and everything that’s managed to go through causes Bilbo to get strangled. The parser is such that you can’t say arbitrary things; it has to be a “recognized” word in the parser. These words work, but cause death:
space, empty, water, dark, darkness, light, wind, pause, A through Z (except X and Z), heart, food
These words aren’t recognized by the parser at all:
Gollum frankly can just be ignored. If you’re carrying (not wearing) the gold ring, he’ll snatch it from you, but otherwise you can invisible-icize your way out. Or, alternately, you can KILL GOLLUM WITH SWORD, and there doesn’t seem to be any penalty for doing so.
No penalty other than perhaps a bad end result to the Lord of the Rings trilogy, but that’s a problem for a different hobbit.
Besides that, I did manage to make a more or less sensible map of the Goblin Dungeon.
Until you have the ring, you can’t just blaze through the map; there’s a fairly high chance of hitting a goblin who tosses you in Goblin Jail™. With the ring it’s still possible to get caught but the probability I have ascertained (after enough tests) to be much less. It’s possible to get out of Goblin Jail and I’ll show you how but the process is so convoluted (with an apparently useless “reward”) that on my Final Run, For Real This Time I plan to just restore my save game if it happens.
Let’s talk about that “reward”:
There’s sand you can dig, revealing a trap door which is locked. Since neither the golden key nor the large key worked on it, I experimented with getting in the forceful way, and found that a.) HIT is interpreted as attacking which only works on creatures b.) STRIKE on the other hand can be used to damage objects, and STRIKE TRAP DOOR WITH SWORD will annihilate it.
This is only a problem because it also annihilates the sword, which is additionally your light source. (It was only at this moment that I realized the sword was doubling as my light source.) However, this let me know destruction is possible, so I tried it with my fist the old-fashioned way.
This is just bad RNG! You just have to keep going. I’ve even gotten the breaking to happen in just one hit. (For more on the theoretical implications of this, see my old post on Adventure 500. I don’t think that one applies so clearly here because authors seemingly intended a situation like the one above.)
With the trap door broken by hand, there’s no exit: it simply reveals a “cache” which has a “small curious key”. As far as I have been able to find this small curious key is needed absolutely nowhere in the game (it certainly doesn’t work on the dungeon door!) So there’s no reason to deal with this room at all.
Still, since it turned out to involve all the game’s systems, let me show off how I got out of the goblin dungeon. You can either get tossed in by a goblin, or walk in yourself. If you walk in yourself, there’s a “goblins door” you need to open first, and then upon going southeast the door is shut behind you.
My first attempt at being creative was using orders to the companions. I discovered you don’t have to just give one command (SAY TO THORIN “GO EAST”) but you can give a whole list of them (SAY TO THORIN “GO EAST THEN TAKE RASPBERRY THEN THROW RASPBERRY AT GANDALF THEN GO WEST”). Given the one-way door behavior described above, I tried timing out having me enter the room while Thorin waited a turn, then having Thorin open the door after Bilbo’s been trapped, letting me head back out the room again.
That didn’t work; I tried instead having Bilbo being the one handling the door on the outside. That is, I would say THORIN, WAIT THEN GO SOUTHEAST THEN DIG SAND THEN SMASH TRAP DOOR THEN TAKE KEY THEN GO NORTH. After giving this command, I’d have Bilbo OPEN GOBLINS DOOR, then keep doing that to make sure the door stays propped open while Thorin is rummaging inside the room. I found that the digging was successful but not the smashing. The smashing RNG is so uneven it is possible this technique would eventually work, but I eventually found a much easier way.
You see, the inside of the room has a window, and to the northeast, you can find the outside of the same window. I was visualizing the window as very high because Bilbo couldn’t reach it, but Bilbo is a Hobbit. Even the dwarves are taller than him. Thorin can open the window!
See the “no”. Sometimes orders are refused for no apparent reason other than RNG, making everything even more difficult to coordinate.
Furthermore, with an open window, while Bilbo can’t walk through, Thorin (and Gandalf) can.
I was still stuck for a bit before I realized I could ask Thorin to carry Bilbo, then drop him off again once outside. With this, I was able to simply
a.) walk into the dungeon with Thorin following
b.) dig the sand, spend however much time it took to smash the trapdoor and get the key
c.) have Thorin pick Bilbo up
d.) have Thorin open the window, then go west
e.) have Thorin drop Bilbo
Without Thorin around, I managed to have Gandalf just show up once on his own, for a true escape rather than an intentional-walk-into-the-dungeon scenario.
It seems like Gandalf will eventually show up if you’ve lost Thorin somewhere (maybe).
Finally I got to use the much-touted character interaction system, but as I already mentioned, there’s no reason to go through with this setup in the first place. Argh!
With that nonsense out of the way (and my curious key which I was eager to use, but never did) I went over to the Mirkwood gate. This is the gate last time where in one iteration it was closed and in another it was open; I went with a save file version where it was open so I could go in farther. It turns out with an invisibility ring on, rather than getting thrown in elf-prison by the wood elf there you have an opportunity to use the short sword and get an elf corpse.
However, the river remained impassible, so I figured — based on the actual content of the real book — I wanted to get captured.
I had inadvertently ditched Thorin by this point. I think he would have made this section more complicated.
There’s a red door to the west and a red door to the southwest, both locked. Waiting long enough, there was a sound of a red door unlocking. I used the opportunity to toss the door open and go west (with the ring on). This leads to a small area where one direction is blocked by a “magic door” (may or may not be openable) and the other direction has a wine cellar with a butler.
Invisibility is very important here; while there’s some RNG, the butler is pretty much guaranteed to toss you back in the dungeon if you’re spotted. The goal here is to go for a ride in a barrel. He has a sequence where he drinks some wine, then when the barrel is empty he tosses the barrel down a trap door. Right when the barrel is tossed you can JUMP.
That “I SEE NOTHING TO JUMP ONTO” message is how I figured this out in the first place; I knew the context would have to be either a platform or a moving thing where Bilbo was hitching a ride.
This leads down past the portcullis and Bilbo now is in Lake Town!
A fairly important character is here: Bard. He’s the one that shoots the dragon down with an arrow.
You might think there’s some convoluted events here to get Bard in the right spot in order to kill the nearby dragon, but you can actually just give him orders until he’s with the dragon…
…then SAY TO BARD “SHOOT DRAGON” and he’ll do his thing.
The treasure is right there, and there’s a path that seems like it returns to the main nexus area (as a one way trip) but there’s a huge issue: it passes through that bugged room that said the game was FULL.
It’s still “FULL” and there’s nothing I can do with it. According to Alastair in the comments “The Place Too Full to Enter is a left over diagnostic which we used while debugging the program. We forgot to take it out after testing and it should be ignored.” That’s great, but what if the bug is preventing progress? Remember, I found in the Macintosh version the room was appropriately empty.
The reason why this might not be a softlock is that it is still possible to go back through the forest. If you go south of the lake you land at the “waterfall” to the far east of Mirkwood where a spider lurks. The problem is the spider is still doing its thing and I haven’t been able to sneak (or sprint) through without being detected.
Me trying to see if adverbs mentioned in the manual make a difference. They do not.
I fully acknowledge it is possible this is the “intended” route and is just a specific puzzle I’m supposed to nail down, but the game ought to be clear if a bug is a bug or not. The main problem with the spider is you can’t refer to it before it pounces (the eyes don’t register as something in the room); I’ve even tried murdering Bard and nabbing his bow (the version of the book where Bilbo gets affected by the One Ring real early, my precioussssssssssss) but his arrow, despite killing everything else, doesn’t work.
I think I’m due for a restart. Either victory next time or glorious defeat!
My first piece of progress since last time was fairly unique to the Hobbit-playing experience in general. Recall I had tested various versions of the game, including Macintosh and ZX Spectrum, before settling on the MSX version of the game. In the Macintosh version here is what it looks like at the start of the Misty Mountains (just east of Rivendell):
I was then informed (see above) there were exits going north, south, and west, and mapped things out appropriately. Even though I switched over to the MSX, I still had a partial map going and kept with that, not noticing that in the MSX version that same room had exits going north, south, west, and east.
But wait, it gets even stranger! I went back to check the Macintosh version again just in case, and this time the exit was there.
Sometimes it appears and sometimes it does not. This is not dependent on time; I’ve had it happen upon waiting and I’ve had it happen upon just making a beeline straight there. It is not dependent holding the map, looking at the map at any time during the game, or even having it physically present. This quixotic behavior seems to be a general feature of the game; I expected having the creatures running around with their own agents to cause chaotic effects, but I never expected sometimes to have an exit be possible and sometimes it just not be there.
I don’t know how to make progress otherwise; I can reach the sword, rope, large key (from the troll) and golden key (from randomly walking around the mountains) but otherwise can make no progress when the game is in this state. However, I am fairly sure there’s some intentionality going on because there’s a geographic exit later that does a similar disappearing trick.
Going east on the MSX version, through the exit in question. I don’t think FOLLOW ME actually does anything, or at least the companions only follow the command half the time, which matches roughly what happens when they just are left on their own.
My next map shot is most definitely a work in progress and there’s some cryptic spots I’ll clear up in context:
Passing by to the north is a “dry cave” with a “crack” — that will be useful later; for now we can pass further east until arriving at Beorns House.
Tolkien’s own illustration.
In The Hobbit Thorin’s group arrived at the hall needing aid after dealing with goblins (by this point in the game I hadn’t met any, I’ll meet many more later) and wargs (in game, I had seen one that got killed by Elrond). Quoting the Tolkien Gateway:
Gandalf and Bilbo Baggins approached Beorn while the dwarves waited. Sitting upon the veranda the wizard told their tale as pairs of dwarves arrived, thus holding Beorn’s interest and preventing him from shooing away a crowd of beggars. Beorn aided the company once he confirmed their story. Months later, at Yule-tide, Gandalf and Bilbo returned with Beorn after the Battle of Five Armies to Beorn’s Hall. There they stayed until spring when the wizard and the hobbit could recross the Misty Mountains on their way to Bilbo’s home.
Here, it’s just a room with some food. There’s no character interaction, nor does any character you bring in seem to do anything interesting while here. (Please note, however: any assertions I make about what characters can or cannot do is quite unsteady at the moment.)
There’s a “heavy curtain” revealing a cupboard and the cupboard has some food. Adding the curtain seems like overkill unless it is part of a puzzle somehow.
This place serves as a nexus to essentially four branches. I will take the north branch first, out to the Great River.
Farther past the Great River are some mountains and then a very curious direction that says THE PLACE IS TOO FULL FOR YOU TO ENTER.
I’ve left and come back multiple times with no luck. What’s even more baffling is I went back later with the Macintosh version and found it described as a “barren empty high place” with no exits other than the way back.
Southeast of the mountains is a room described as “forestriver”; trying to enter the river causes poor Bilbo to get rammed against a portcullis. I am assuming it is possible to raise this portcullis later for a possible route.
Rewinding back to our nexus and taking the northeast branch:
This is another part of truly disappearing geography, although less puzzling than the first. I have sometimes been able to go east and I assume a “wood elf” who appears sometimes is responsible for opening it; sometimes the wood elf additionally will toss Bilbo (and anyone else who happens to be around at the time) in prison.
No progress on an escape yet but I haven’t tried that hard, as I was working on a goblin cell instead you’ll see later.
On the occasion where I was able to bust through there was a “west bank” but the same sort of issue with the river came up. So let’s go back to the Nexus and take the south branch:
This leads to Mirkwood proper. Heading east eventually leads to a “waterfall” but I haven’t been able to see it for more than a moment because a spider comes down and has Bilbo for a snack. This is true even when invisible wearing the One Ring (spoilers! yes I managed to get the One Ring later).
Finally, back to the nexus, there’s the northwest branch, leading to “Goblins Gate”.
Inside is a big messy maze and I have not mapped everything out.
The main issue with mapping at least at the start was in some cases a goblin would nab Bilbo and toss him in the goblin dungeon. The dungeon has some “sand” with a trapdoor found via DIG SAND but the trapdoor is locked, and neither of my keys (large or golden) fit the lock. The trapdoor does not react to BREAK or similar verbs (at least as far as I could find); I was even inside with Thorin and having him whack the trapdoor didn’t help either. (SAY TO THORIN “HIT TRAPDOOR” actually works — it just doesn’t cause any forward progress.)
Here’s part of the map in progress, and I hope you understand why it won’t be helpful to show the whole thing yet:
Despite all the rooms being a “Dark Stuffy Passage” it does seem like the exits are unique; that is, if a room has exits northwest, west, and southwest, that’s going to be the only room in the maze like that. However, I really don’t trust that and it is so easy to befuddle things — especially with goblins randomly tossing the player in the dungeon — I’ve been having to check carefully just in case. I may have found the important things anyway. First of all, Gollum:
I tried SAY TO GOLLUM “SPACE” and got strangled from behind, which I guess means the answer was wrong.
Secondly, a certain golden ring which just happens to be lying around:
You can WEAR RING and it sort of seems to work. Here Gollum is acknowledging the invisibility:
However, goblins can still throw you in the dungeon even with it on (it ends up being “unworn” when this happens). I also wrapped back to a “goblin hall” that I had been unable to get to due to always being thrown into the dungeon while trying to enter but now the game just decides there isn’t an exit there anymore.
I managed to wander with the ring over to a “crack” and a goblin helpfully opened and went through the crack. I was able to follow, which dropped me right at the place west of “Beorns House” that I started at. Unfortunately, as I already mentioned, the ring doesn’t help with Mirkwood, nor does it help with either river. I think I have to get caught by the elves next so I’ll muck about there next time; the only catch is sometimes I don’t find an elf! I’m assuming some of the went the wrong direction and fell off into a river.
I’m not doing a general system evaluation yet, but look: the fact characters are somewhat inconsistent is interesting, but in terms of concrete gameplay, it’s just been a pain to deal with because I haven’t been able to predict anything. Sometimes — sometimes — I can kill a goblin with a sword, but that’s as far as I’ve been able to get with anyone.
I assume answering Gollum’s riddle(s) might get me something, but since I already have the One Ring and managed to escape, I’m not so sure about that.
Oh, and sometimes my items disappear for no reason. I had the golden key, now I don’t. Character took it, I assume, and dropped it somewhere? I’ve also had the One Ring just go poof on me once while running about outside but at least that feels thematic.
Hopefully more progress next time, and still, just as a reminder since many people know this game, no hints whatsoever, thank you. I’ve managed to be unspoiled for 40 years so I might as well enjoy the result now.
The early 1970s were some of the most tumultuous years in Australian politics. The Australian Labor Party, defeated since 1949, finally regained power in 1972. Gough Whitlam took the spot of Prime Minister, running on an agenda of progressive reforms and a slogan of It’s Time.
In that span, amongst other things:
The last Australians returned from the Vietnam War in December 1972, the same month Whitlam took office
The Health Insurance Bill was proposed in 1973 and passed in 1974, giving universal health insurance
An Aboriginal Land Fund was created
There was a significant increase in the education budget, and college school fees were abolished in 1974 (this one didn’t last, University fees came back in 1989)
The “White Australia” policy favoring Europeans for immigration was ended
Due to complex reasons including budgetary stalemate, in December of 1975 Governor-General Sir John Kerr terminated Gough Whitlam’s appointment, explaining that he has the power to do so under section 64 of the Constitution. (This is as wildly abnormal as it sounds, and constitutional scholars are unclear if the move was even legal.) Labor lost the election that followed, and while Whitlam maintained party leadership, he eventually lost that too in 1977 and resigned.
In the middle of these progressive years, 1973, Outback Press was founded.
There would be whole years when no one would publish a single Australian novel … No one was publishing, so we decided, in the pub, there were four of us.
The quartet above formed the leadership aiming for a young market. Quoting the writer Colin Talbot from a contemporary account:
The books we plan to publish will rely heavily on fiction, on poetry, on large format graphic and photographic works, sociojournalistic studies, that higher consciousness stuff, but not ecology. We will be relying on offset printing, eye-grabbing graphics and unconventional typography. The new journalism is one of our strong things.
They set up offices in what Morry Schwartz calls a “barn of place” that was “previously a junk shop for used plumbing fitments”. Three of the four — excluding Milgrom — moved in and “in between incessant debate, chess play-offs and live rock practice, some publishing actually happened.” It helped that they started the same time as the Whitman government was in full swing, as part of their educational push they established grants in literature, giving Outback Press $5000.
They managed to get some significant poetry, plays, and art photography books, although rather infamously the print quality was low and the books now are known to fall apart; however, keep in mind this was a time when Australian publishing was still being built from very little.
Part of the issue was the Traditional Market Agreement, which essentially gave Britain stewardship of the Australian market. If a British publisher got rights from an American publisher they immediately got the Australian rights by default. This understandably upset Australian publishers who in 1976 — via an anti-trust case in the United States — forced the agreement to be abandoned.
Outback saw this as an opportunity to get American authors, and while they had luck with some titles, on a trip of Milgrom’s he found that the publishers were still reluctant to sell to an Australian market without a British market attached; the Traditional Market Agreement, no longer law, held in spirit.
This led him to decide, if what publishers wanted was a British publishing company, he needed to make one; that way he could get American rights for both markets. Once finishing his work for Outback he moved with to London his wife Naomi Besen to form Melbourne House.
Speaking of Naomi Besen, now known as Naomi Milgrom (current job, billionaire philanthropist), despite being brought up in a rich family she always had a progressive bent, studying language and education in college and spending the three years before moving to London teaching language to autistic and schizophrenic children. Prior to the 70s, education to disabled children in Australia was not considered a right, and it wasn’t until ’73-’74 (Whitlam administration, again) that government funds started to be put towards precisely this issue. This means both directors of Melbourne House were involved in cutting-edge progressive causes immediately before founding their new company.
The selection of Melbourne House varied widely, with everything from the The Complete Book of Walking (by exercise expert Dr. Charles Kuntzleman) to the Commies-in-the-Vatican novel The Last Conclave (by the exorcist Malachi Martin).
The co-directors had interest in computers — Alfred even had supercomputer and mainframe experience from his college days — and they formed an offshoot company, Beam Software, in 1979. This is contrary to a date of 1980 you may have seen elsewhere but 1980 is when they were founded in Australia; the initial Beam Software was London-based, and you can see some of their catalog from this August 1980 ad:
Note their sales of “Adventure”: specifically, they offered the Scott Adams games up through Pyramid of Doom, selling for TRS-80, Apple II, Commodore Pet, and Exidy Sorcerer.
ADVENTURE by Scott Adams is incredibly complex, detailed and fascinating. It is like no other program you have ever seen! Defeat exotic wild animals to get treasures, or work out how to get out of a quicksand bog. You can communicate through two-word commands such as ‘go south’, ‘climb tree’, ‘throw ax’, ‘look around’, etc.
Unlike most available games ADVENTURE is full of surprises. It may take you more than an hour to ‘find a treasure’ and will probably take days or weeks of playing to get a good ‘score’.
This same ad also contains, importantly, their first original product. Milgrom had read an article in the Australian newspaper Financial Review mentioning a need for books for home computers users, so Milgrom went on to write 30 Programs for the Sinclair ZX80. The launch of the book coincided with him and his wife moving back from London, starting the (always planned) Australian versions of their two companies.
I should emphasize — for anyone thinking of Milgrom as “just” a publisher — that the ZX80 book has some very technical stunts, like a version of Gomoku that manages to wrangle 1k of memory by using the screen itself as memory storage and requiring the user to POKE memory locations outside of the regular type-in. Programming technical proficiency became a signature of Melbourne House and it was only years later that they hired a “designer” that was a non-programmer.
Speaking of hiring programmers, Milgrom made his first hire in December 1980, William Tang. They had no office at the time and the ZX80 was so low on capability their first program was sketched out on paper.
ZX80 doesn’t even do machine language by default so hacky methods (detailed in the ZX80 book) had to be used in order to do input. The first Melbourne House tape — a ZX80 version of Space Invaders — came out in February 1981, just in time for the ZX81 to drop and make all the retailers want to wipe the slate clean.
Melbourne House incidentally ran into some difficulty with the Beam Software name as well, clashing with another company. From Personal Computer World, December 1980:
As you may be aware, we advertised in the August issue of PCW, offering software and books under the name Beam Software.
Our advertisement attracted not only useful business but an objection from Beam Office Equipment who have established extensive trademarks and other rights in the Beam name.
As you know, we have discontinued use of the name Beam Software, and apologised to Beam Office Equipment for the inadvertent infringement of their right.
We will be continuing our business in software and books under our registered name, Melbourne House Publishers.
This was eventually smoothed over as Beam Software started to be used in Melbourne House products, but one certainly gets the impression there was hardscrabble chaos and Melbourne House made their finances work purely with their book sales. Even that aspect was in danger at the transition from ZX80 to ZX81 in early 1981 as the ZX80 book suffered the same fate as the ZX80 tape, and the only reason the company hung on is that the US version of the ZX81 wasn’t out yet; Melbourne House kept selling the US version of their book, giving enough time for Melbourne House to produce a ZX81 edition.
The Hobbit was always the project I wanted to do. I think it is the premier fantasy adventure in British literature and that’s why we went for it. We had some contingency plans if the Tolkien Estate could not give us permission to do it, but luckily they were delighted with the idea.
Space Invaders obviously isn’t The Hobbit, but it was clearly what was in mind when Melbourne House started advertising for a programmer at the University of Melbourne. Veronika Megler, a computer science student in her last year, responded and brought her friend Philip Mitchell on board; they became hires number 2 and 3 after Tang.
Alfred’s dream was to provide a natural language interface, and he hired Stuart, who was a language expert, to figure out how to do that.
That’s a team of four, and that’s what gets stated in the 1984 book titled Guide to Playing the Hobbit…
The program was written as a group effort by Philip Mitchell and Veronika Megler, with Alfred Milgrom and Stuart Ritchie over a period of 18 months.
…as well as an interview with Milgrom made right at the game’s release, where he refers to the “four of us” making the game. I’m emphasizing this point clearly because I have seen elsewhere a.) just crediting Philip Mitchell as “writing the Hobbit” b.) just crediting Megler and Mitchell.
Milgrom’s directive was to write the best text adventure ever.
We looked at ordinary adventure games and decided that we wanted to do something that would gо further and really stretch micros to the limit.
The micro in question they were using was a TRS-80 (the ZX81 clearly not being up to the task at hand, and the TRS-80 being the original home of the Scott Adams games that Beam Software briefly was a reseller of). It was written entirely in machine code — remember, all four of them were quite technical — and as Mitchell notes, by the time the ZX Spectrum came out (early 1982) they had done enough development to have a “basic TRS-80 version”; since both machines were Z80 based it was possible to port machine code from one to the other.
Megler designed the overarching structure of the game, selecting locations and designing the characters as well as the underlying artificial intelligence engine behind them. Philip worked on the overall engine as well as screen interface, while Ritchie worked on the parser.
We were very fortunate to have the services of Stuart Ritchie who developed what he calls his Inglish program. Stuart did a dual major in English Linguistics and Computer Science so he was really the ideal person to do it.
(I’m curious if the other language expert of the company — co-director Naomi Besen with experience in teaching language to autistic people — had any input into this, but she isn’t mentioned in any of the materials.)
There’s other materials out there on the history, and I haven’t gotten into the bizarro existence of Arkenstone, but I’m going to leave that behind all for now and get into the game itself. It launched to a spectacular reception, spreading from the original ZX Spectrum version to many other computers, and sold copies in the hundreds of thousands. There are numerous testimonials about this game forming core memories, so I was looking forward to finally popping it open, but the question arose: which version to play with?
I could use version 1.0, as the Data Driven Gamer did, but that version is allegedly quite buggy; a version 1.2 works a bit better, and if I go far enough along there’s Apple II and Macintosh versions with lengthier text. A shot from the admittedly lovely Macintosh port:
Original text: “You are in a comfortable tunnel like hall”. I’m keeping this version as a backup.
The other issue, other than bugs and changing text, is that of graphics. The early ZX Spectrum versions have art — part of the whole point of switching from TRS-80 — although the art was re-worked later.
Something about the ZX Spectrum version made me quite uncomfortable to play, and as I’ve written about before with Demon’s Forge, I don’t always feel obliged to play the earliest version of a game. Especially here, based on the timeline, many people played one of the later ports (either 1.2 ZX Spectrum or a different platform). I did worry the augmented text may have been a step too far, but I found a port that had both the original text and the new art: the MSX version.
Mind you, I was still a bit uncomfortable playing, and you’ll see why in a moment. The premise has us as Bilbo Baggins, where Gandalf the wizard and the dwarf Thorin accompanying us on a quest whilst following a “curious map”, on the way to get the dwarf treasure from the dragon Smaug. Notice: only one (1) dwarf. Understandable.
The opening room has a wooden chest. Trying to open it, examine it, or search it reveals nothing. I have no idea what the chest is about. The curious map is similarly unrevealing, where trying to read it just shows curious symbols. Trying to talk to either Gandalf or Thorin generally leads to no response or “No.” Gandalf in particular starts wandering on his own with on apparent rhyme or reason, and while Thorin follows me, I have yet to get him to do anything helpful. The closest I was able to do in terms of interaction was (following the manual) give the command SAY TO GANDALF (or THORIN) “READ MAP” but neither one has anything useful to say, as they can’t read the symbols either.
The manual comes with a verb list…
…but none of them seem specific to character conversation. I admit perhaps being a bit spoiled by the setup of Deadline, with a host of autonomous characters that you can talk to and will react to most every normal action. Here the characters seem a little more abstract, kind of like mobs in a MUD, but the intent seems to be to have characters that respond to commands but not to conversation. Deadline’s characters tended to the opposite, responding to conversation but not commands.
The map has the same “geographic jumping” as Arkenstone, but is more mixed:
That is, the spans are unequal between jumps; getting to Rivendell (see above) is just a matter of going EAST and then SOUTHEAST, but other times a single “step” is more like a traditional adventure. I also don’t understand how (on the map above) NORTH and EAST from the Lonelands lead to the troll clearing while NORTHEAST leads to a new area. (If nothing else, if you’re planning to have raw beginners play the game as Helen Stucky did with a museum exhibit, this aspect is bound to be confusing.)
Inevitably, with either route, you start by coming by a troll which has a key you need:
If you linger here, or head back in while the troll is still around, the troll will kill you. The idea here is — following the book — noting that this game has time pass (you’ll see the sun rise/set) so if you leave and come back not long after the trolls will now be stone.
Fortunately the key itself does not turn to stone, and you can head north over to a troll lair and unlock it.
The lair has a “strong short sword” and a “rope” that seem like they’ll be useful. With the troll area done we can go back past the troll to Rivendell, where Elrond hands over some lunch but I’m otherwise unable to make conversation.
Surely there’s some actions that work? Otherwise he feels like a prop here.
Past this the game suddenly switches to traditionalist mode with what is more or less a regular maze. I had to drop items to map it out properly.
There’s a “narrow path” that eventually leads to a “steep zig-zag” where at the end there’s a “deep misty valley” with a golden key, but the only exit I could find goes back to the narrow path.
I assume I’m missing an exit although I’ve combed over twice already. Maybe there’s some character that needs to be at a particular spot at a particular time. Gandalf still acts erratically; here he is grabbing the large key I had (which unlocked the troll lair) and asking “what’s this?”, a question I have no way of answering.
I have a feeling I’m dealing with very different norms than traditional adventure gameplay and I’ll need to puzzle out things like a.) are there hidden secrets in random spots? b.) do the characters give mention of these spots? c.) even though it seems like the characters act at random, is there anything useful they can do?
For now, please no hints whatsoever! Two more Mac pictures to close things out for now:
Not every room in the ZX Spectrum (and the corresponding room in the MSX version) is illustrated, but the Macintosh version has pictures everywhere.
The extra text may serve to make the game harder, not easier; there’s no reference to a Homely House in the MSX game, and it can’t be referred to in either version.
Renga in Blue 