Revolutionary video game The Hobbit turns 40

https://www.theguardian.com/games/2022/sep/22/i-saw-the-possibility-of-what-could-be-done-so-i-did-it-revolutionary-video-game-the-hobbit-turns-40

by yung_steezy • 4 years ago

25 11 4 years ago

theguardian.com

causi• 4 years ago

Megler enlisted fellow student Phillip Mitchell to assist with the game’s parser

Why's Mitchell get top billing in the game credits?

leoc2• 4 years ago

A nice blog history and review of the Melbourne House Hobbit https://www.filfre.net/2012/11/the-hobbit/ .

An article about exhibiting it https://www.kinephanos.ca/2014/the-hobbit/ including reference to Wilderland http://veronikamegler.com/WL/wl.htm , a Hobbit ... visualiser? debugger?

It seems that Megler is currently the Principal Data Scientist at Amazon.com Packaging: http://veronikamegler.com/ .

Some other Megler interviews: https://www.theregister.com/2012/11/18/hobbit_author_veronik... https://goodgravy.media/the-hunt-for-the-hobbit-missing-hero... .

crtasm• 4 years ago

Thanks for the links, I'll add the 50 Years of Text Games piece on it: https://if50.substack.com/p/1982-the-hobbit

brutus1213• 4 years ago

Never heard of this particular game (know LOTR of course). Seemed to look like the Monkey Island series. Is this the original?

leoc2• 4 years ago

The 1982 Hobbit game and the Monkey Island series don't really have much in common beside both being graphical adventure games with a (broadly speaking) fantasy setting. The Hobbit has a command-line user interface with (some limited) first-person graphics. It's also, very unusually for any kind of "adventure" game either then or since, not a tightly-controlled theme-park ride but a genuine simulation of the actors and situation which lets the chips fall where they may, even though some runs of the simulation will produce "broken" outcomes. At the time Sierra had already started to put graphics into much more conventional text adventures (see eg. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mystery_House ) and those led directly to the third-person graphical point-and-click Sierra adventures which Monkey Island spoofed and imitated.

clarge11202• 4 years ago

I thought it would be an interesting article about the how someone, a woman, created an innovative game 40 years ago that I’d never heard of.

But, it came right out of the gate with The Message (Get Woke!) and I lost interest.

I am a black (descendant of American slaves) engineer who’s done well during his career, part of it writing video games. I don’t like leading with that info, but unfortunately it’s important to give context lest this comment be downvoted out of existence bc too many will assume I’m white.

I wish we could just tell the story of someone who did something noteworthy. If some physical attribute is noteworthy, then show a picture or tell the relevant attributes in order to surprise and/or delight the consumer.

But, please, enough finger pointing and nasty accusations in the name of The Message.

The Struggle is Real, but it ain’t all bad all the time, and I’m weary of hearing that it is.

vimacs2• 4 years ago

I thought this would be an interesting comment about the article but it came right out of the gate with The Message (Wokeism Bad!) and I lost interest.

In all seriousness though, do you not see how incredibly self absorbed and outright anti-empirical this comes across as? The article briefly mentions the directly relevant and real existence of sexism in computing in the first paragraph (40 years ago mind you!) and then goes on to be almost entirely about the woman and her game, and you couldn't manage to contain your faux outrage at being reminded of uncomfortable truths.

I think the fact that you thought being a minority gives you a free pass for not reading the article and giving this nonsense sermon about wokeism tells me you don't really understand the movement you're lecturing against.

clarge11202• 4 years ago

Yes, I know. Another enlightened Woke One eager to tell the “minority” how ignorant he or she (see what I did there?) is for not understanding just how much The Message is truly helping him or her.

If only the minority would shut up and listen all the troubles would woke themselves out.

drcongo• 4 years ago

`kill Gandalf`

Maursault• 4 years ago

I see a weird synchronicity here. The developer's surname, Megler is superficially similar to the name of a Tolkien character from The Silmarillion, Maglor[1], Fëanor's second son. Maglor is depicted on the cover of the The Silmarillion Illustrated Edition throwing a Silmaril into the sea. Maglor's name came up somewhere (?reddit) months prior to the Rings of Power release as a possible candidate for the identity of the RoP character Adar, based only on promotional posters. As RoP producers do not have rights to The Silmarillion or its characters, the theory is unlikely to be confirmed.

[1] https://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Maglor

diggernet• 4 years ago

https://archive.org/details/zx_Hobbit_The_v1.2_1982_Melbourn...

Revolutionary video game The Hobbit turns 40

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