AGttA: The Hobbit (1982)
Oct. 10th, 2011 11:14 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pauraque_bkFirst: By popular demand (two people?), here is the twitter-mentioned King's Quest wank I found, starting at post 65 and ebbing and flowing for several pages thereafter. The general idea is that there's a popular KQ fan game called The Silver Lining (TSL), and this fact makes somebody ANGREE. I don't know these people, I'm merely amused by their antics.
Moving on...
Title: The Hobbit (aka Hobbit Software Adventure)
Year: 1982
Developer: Beam Software
Availability: Freeware. (At least the publisher says it's freeware, though as some have pointed out, the Tolkien estate may have rights over it as well.)
Though apparently a huge success in Europe, this one is more obscure in the US, where it was released as Hobbit Software Adventure. (In the 80s the word "software" was exciting enough to put in a name. A bunch of these early games also advertised on the box that they were "100% machine language!")
Anyway, I could see instantly why this game was popular, beyond being based on a classic novel that every geek in the world has read except me. (No rotten fruit please.) The gameplay is truly innovative and a pleasant surprise.
First, the game happens in real time. If you sit there and do nothing, the other characters will start talking and moving to different rooms on their own. There was nothing remotely like this in adventure games at the time.
The text parser was also very sophisticated, allowing a large vocabulary and more complex sentences (OPEN DOOR AND GO EAST). You feel rewarded for being creative and natural with what you type in, rather than punished because the game only understands 10 words and what you typed wasn't one of them. Early on when I was attacked by wandering trolls, I typed RUN on a whim, and my character actually ran away. That rocks.
I sampled a few of the dozens of different versions and ports of the game that were produced, some of which had more detailed text descriptions, and some of which had no graphics at all. You can certainly do without the graphics, which are just illustrations of what the text says anyway, unlike what On-Line Systems was doing at this time with making the graphics more integral. In one DOS port I played, most rooms open with a picture and short description when you enter them, and then give you a fuller version of the text on a separate screen. It's kind of annoying to play it that way, and if I'd been stuck with that version I would have just played text-only.
I didn't play too far into the game, because it's quite complex and pretty difficult not to die straight away. In adventure games at this time, length of play was considered a selling point and was often talked up in the documentation -- this one was advertised as taking a year to finish. That is probably an exaggeration (Mystery House claimed it took weeks to solve, not even close), but gives an idea of what developers thought players were looking for. It sort of makes sense at a time when there weren't that many games to play on home computers, so if you bought one, especially a big old $40 one like some of these games were, you wanted it to last you a while. This game actually had a book published about how to play it, which was a thing you used to be able to do when people couldn't just google "walkthroughs for every game ever made".
However, it is 2011 and I am a busy man with many other infuriating games I would like to play sometime this year, so I'm putting this one away for now.
Side note: This game came out the year I was born. Goo goo ga ga.
Moving on...
Title: The Hobbit (aka Hobbit Software Adventure)
Year: 1982
Developer: Beam Software
Availability: Freeware. (At least the publisher says it's freeware, though as some have pointed out, the Tolkien estate may have rights over it as well.)
Though apparently a huge success in Europe, this one is more obscure in the US, where it was released as Hobbit Software Adventure. (In the 80s the word "software" was exciting enough to put in a name. A bunch of these early games also advertised on the box that they were "100% machine language!")
Anyway, I could see instantly why this game was popular, beyond being based on a classic novel that every geek in the world has read except me. (No rotten fruit please.) The gameplay is truly innovative and a pleasant surprise.
First, the game happens in real time. If you sit there and do nothing, the other characters will start talking and moving to different rooms on their own. There was nothing remotely like this in adventure games at the time.
The text parser was also very sophisticated, allowing a large vocabulary and more complex sentences (OPEN DOOR AND GO EAST). You feel rewarded for being creative and natural with what you type in, rather than punished because the game only understands 10 words and what you typed wasn't one of them. Early on when I was attacked by wandering trolls, I typed RUN on a whim, and my character actually ran away. That rocks.
I sampled a few of the dozens of different versions and ports of the game that were produced, some of which had more detailed text descriptions, and some of which had no graphics at all. You can certainly do without the graphics, which are just illustrations of what the text says anyway, unlike what On-Line Systems was doing at this time with making the graphics more integral. In one DOS port I played, most rooms open with a picture and short description when you enter them, and then give you a fuller version of the text on a separate screen. It's kind of annoying to play it that way, and if I'd been stuck with that version I would have just played text-only.
I didn't play too far into the game, because it's quite complex and pretty difficult not to die straight away. In adventure games at this time, length of play was considered a selling point and was often talked up in the documentation -- this one was advertised as taking a year to finish. That is probably an exaggeration (Mystery House claimed it took weeks to solve, not even close), but gives an idea of what developers thought players were looking for. It sort of makes sense at a time when there weren't that many games to play on home computers, so if you bought one, especially a big old $40 one like some of these games were, you wanted it to last you a while. This game actually had a book published about how to play it, which was a thing you used to be able to do when people couldn't just google "walkthroughs for every game ever made".
However, it is 2011 and I am a busy man with many other infuriating games I would like to play sometime this year, so I'm putting this one away for now.
Side note: This game came out the year I was born. Goo goo ga ga.
