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Sherlock – “Careful examination shows that the drawer has a false bottom”

When making The Hobbit, Beam Software and Melbourne House apparently knew they were onto a good thing. They decided early that they wanted to make another similar adventure afterwards using what they had built for The Hobbit, and that their second adventure would be based on Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, with the player as Holmes. Philip Mitchell, lead programmer on the resultant Sherlock, credited its mostly original story to Veronika Megler, the other of The Hobbit’s two central programmers, even though she had left the company and the industry even before The Hobbit was even finished. 

They also saw early that Sherlock was going to be a whole new challenge. As Megler later described it, “when we started talking about Sherlock as the next game, it was clear that the adventure engine wouldn’t apply, and we’d need a different model for solving mysteries.” Mitchell told Popular Computing Weekly during Sherlock’s development that “The Hobbit was a starting point. What I want to do is take it a stage further”, and promised that Watson would be much more complex than Thorin sitting down and singing about gold. Attempting this took long enough that on its release the same magazine called Sherlock “possibly the longest delayed program ever”. You don’t have to read history or interviews to see that making it was a challenge, though. You just have to play it.

Sherlock does do many more complex things than The Hobbit, but the language parser that Mitchell and Stuart Richie worked on is still there underneath. It’s also set to the same visual layout with some different stylisation and the addition of a clock to emphasise the importance of time. The pictures are visibly lacking compared to The Hobbit and especially to Mugsy, artist Russell Comte’s previous collaboration with Mitchell. They are not of particularly interesting locations and the few there are don’t show much detail, both aspects casualties of the need for much greater memory for other aspects of the game. Mitchell had argued for removing graphics entirely, but was overruled by Melbourne House co-owner Alfred Milgrom, who presumably considered that would be seen as too much of a backwards step. 

The Hobbit’s independently acting characters are present again and developed enough to explain those memory demands. Watson indeed doesn’t just say one thing to you but can be led into further conversation. You need to coax information from him to even begin the game proper. He likely won’t tell you about the murders he’s read about in the paper until you have said hello and waited a bit, though. Likewise, when you hail a cab out on Baker Street, if you fail to then write SAY TO CABBIE “HELLO” you can land with a confusing series of non-responses to requests to go anywhere, as the cabbie ignores you but the game conveys this through denying that there is a cabbie at all. The game’s manual barely hints at this need for politesse.

Inspector Lestrade and the police also have a whole lot to say to various characters in the mystery. This is largely how Sherlock addresses one obvious challenge. Any confusion and limited information that the player faced as Bilbo Baggins in The Hobbit could be helpfully explained by the fact that Bilbo was new to this whole adventure thing. By contrast, Holmes is the opposite of a beginner when it comes to detective work. He needs to be shown to understand much more complex information. And so the police are there to prompt it, in long multi-screen dialogues with witnesses and suspects. As long as you make sure that you are in the room to hear it.

Sherlock’s reliance on navigating to particular places to hear important information feels like it foresees several types of modern game. It just does a lot less to make sure that you’re there to experience the plot. It’s like a text-based walking simulator where you can walk right out of the plot and it will go on without waiting for you to come back. Doing so is easier than following it, in fact. Popular Computing Weekly ended their review by saying “After several hours I still hadn’t even found the right train for Leatherhead and the program told me to give up”. Perhaps having the player control Watson might have been a better replacement for Bilbo.

Personally, I managed to find the train, but the first time I did so I then had a bit of a mishap with the game’s clock. As Crash’s Derek Brewster explained, “time passes as in real life when in a train or cab which can be profitably used conversing with Watson or examining objects. Of course, being an impatient reviewer, I just WAITed”. I similarly got on the train to Leatherhead and typed WAIT UNTIL 10:00 to skip time. That worked. The train still wasn’t time-tabled to arrive for a bit longer, so I tried WAIT UNTIL 10:20. Some combination of a missing AM and a struggle with the format meant the game interpreted this as a request to wait until 10 PM. I arrived at Platform 1 at Leatherhead. The train got shuttled to Platform 2. The train headed back to King’s Cross… with Holmes and Watson still on-board. I watched powerlessly as it turned around and repeated this, several times. I have not often laughed at a game so hard.

This farce was, in its own way, illustrative of the appeal of Sherlock. Messing about with the unexpected and divergent possibilities of The Hobbit was great fun, but its story was a relatively simple frame. Sherlock, as a much more complex and intricate mystery, is both more impressive when it does work properly, and able to go off the rails in so many more ways (or, you know, stay on the rails for twelve hours). Almost every review went out of its way to mention various bugs and issues in a similar tone of glee, with Computer & Video Games illustrating nicely: “The dreaded Hobbit-bug will soon be a thing of the past! The trend will be towards the more advanced, state-of-the-art Sherlock-bugs!”

You don’t even need to leave Holmes’s lodgings for some of those bugs to make themselves clear, as well as the possibilities of the game’s structure and its interchangeable sentence elements. There is a side room with two disguises. One is an old man disguise, and the other I won’t name since in concept and name it imports the anti-Chinese racism of the original era. (It’s not alone in that among modern adaptations, given the second episode of BBC’s more famous Sherlock in 2010.) You can TAKE one disguise but, for no logical reason, to take the other with you it is necessary instead to wear it and take it off. Sort that out and wear a disguise, and the word ‘you’ gets replaced in text descriptions, such that instead of YOU OPEN THE PLAIN DOOR you get THE OLD MAN OPENS THE PLAIN DOOR. Plus sentences like THE OLD MAN IS HOLDING YOUR MONEY, which is a striking and fantastic way to reflect mastery of disguise.

You can also get into some of the character idiosyncrasies within the first room, as Keith Campbell asked Philip Mitchell about for Computer & Video Games’s spin-off Book of Adventure. “On the subject of Watson, I couldn’t resist mentioning the fact that he had the most annoying habit of sitting in the same armchair as Holmes, even to the extent of following him around from chair to chair. Was this a Sherlock-bug?” Mitchell’s explanation has its own echoes of more recent takes. “Students of Conan Doyle have recently formed the opinion that Watson was gay”. In the same interview, Mitchell warned against players talking to Watson too much, because “[his] knowledge could completely fill the available space and give you an out of memory error!” (to be fair, something with echoes of this recently happened to Blue Prince players on PS5).

Sherlock is an ambitious mess, salvaged by the emergent ingenuity of all the ways it could fall apart. Review scores were largely positive, sometimes in ways that were at odds with their own wording. It sold well enough for two weeks at number one in the UK non-arcade chart, before being replaced by the Spectrum version of Twin Kingdom Valley, a slightly less wild take on the genre. Melbourne House quickly released a Commodore 64 version of Sherlock too, but unlike The Hobbit there was no array of other computer versions to follow. This reflected both the increasing consolidation of the UK computer market and the lack of an equivalent level of demand. In Crash’s yearly readers’ poll, Sherlock picked up just 10% of the vote for Best Text/Graphical Adventure, way behind The Lords of Midnight’s 51%. 

Philip Mitchell and Melbourne House didn’t follow it up with more Sherlock Holmes adventures or continue trying to fit new sources of stories to their format. Instead they retreated to further Tolkien adaptations, to diminishing commercial returns. Lord of The Rings reached #7 in the all formats chart in early 1986, and Shadows of Mordor #28 in July 1987. Before either of those, Melbourne House would provide a revolutionary breakthrough for a genre once more, but it wouldn’t be for text adventures.

  • ASP individual formats chart (non-arcade) for week ending 29 September 1984, Home Computing Weekly
  • ASP individual formats chart (non-arcade) for week ending 06 October 1984, Home Computing Weekly

Sources:

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2 Comments

  1. Sarahc

    2025-07-14

    Fascinating! Thank you.

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