A screenshot of the starting screen of The Hobbit for ZX Spectrum, edited to read: The Hobbit Melbourne House 1982 ZX Spectrum #1 in MRIB all formats 18 June 1983

Far over the misty mountains cold
To dungeons deep and caverns old
We must away ere break of day
To seek the pale enchanted gold

Sinclair Research released the ZX Spectrum in April 1982, and it was to prove central to shifting the medium of computer games in the UK to a whole new scale. Sinclair named it the Spectrum to highlight a key difference from the company’s previous relatively low-priced microcomputers, the ZX80 and ZX81: the Spectrum could do colour. Fifteen of them. One of the early games which was strong in selling the appeal of the ZX Spectrum for games, though, was initially conceived of as being not just monochrome, but text-only. It began development before the Spectrum was announced. And the person who conceived many of the game’s most remarkable features had left games behind for good before it was even completed.

Melbourne House released The Hobbit, adapting the Tolkein book into computer adventure game format, at the end of 1982. It was so far ahead of the pack that six months later, when Personal Computer News started its UK-wide, multiple outlet games chart, The Hobbit was the top Spectrum game. It was #2 in PCN’s very first chart, behind Donkey King on the Dragon 32. After that, The Hobbit spent two fortnights as the outright #1. Its whole development was a story of the advantages of doing things early and of being unconstrained by too much knowledge of what had gone before and what might be possible.

By the time of The Hobbit’s run at #1, Sinclair was close to having sold half a million ZX Spectrums and it was increasingly obviously the place to be for games. Melbourne House didn’t originally get in so soon on Sinclair computers as a games publisher at all, though. It was a publisher of books, mostly focused on bringing Australian writers to the UK, and published an early book of programs for the ZX80. Co-owner Fred Milgrom was interested in computers, and they ended up gradually switching focus as they gained success from first those program books and then selling programs on cassette. 

Milgrom and his partner Naomi Besen (Australia’s 124th richest person as of 2023) set up a subsidiary to develop games for Melbourne House to publish, and called it Beam Software. They took on an employee dedicated to making games, William Tang, who would get his own turn at the top of the UK charts later in 1983. Then Beam hired another computing student, Veronika Megler, and Milgrom asked her to “write the best adventure game ever”. 

A screenshot of Colossal Cave Adventure, with the opening instructions and first location

Colossal Cave Adventure (originally Willie Crowther/Don Woods, 1976/1977, adapted for the web by Eric Adams)

Adventure at this point meant a game which tells you a story in text and which you interact with by typing in commands. The most famous originating example was the untitled game known then as Adventure or, increasingly, Colossal Cave Adventure. Megler had some ambitious ideas, and successfully recommended Milgrom also bring in fellow final year student Philip Mitchell, who she had worked with on group projects. The two of them worked part-time in Melbourne House’s offices alongside their studies, with expenses paid for trips to arcades. The Hobbit is largely the product of Megler and Mitchell working together but with clearly delineated responsibilities. Mitchell developed the parser which turned whatever the player wrote into actions for the game. Megler developed the game’s world, characters, and adventure.  

A screenshot from The Hobbit for ZX Spectrum, with a graphic of a narrow path along the side of the cliff. Words below read "You are in a narrow place with a dreadful drop into a dim valley."

Mitchell’s parser is the easier advance to immediately grasp. Colossal Cave Adventure dealt in verb and noun pairs alone. The Hobbit adds much more complex structures (although as with some other advances, Infocom were doing similar with their Zork games during The Hobbit‘s development). You can write Say to Gandalf “give me the map” and it will understand and execute just that. It lets you use ‘and’ to do more than one thing at once. You can even give strings of instructions to Gandalf or Thorin, as long as you write them in fewer than 128 characters. There are still large limitations. It doesn’t even include the verb ‘use’, which I found slightly alienating as someone raised on LucasArts’s all-purpose use of use. With the manual’s dictionary to hand, though, the fun of trying out combinations outweighs the awkwardness of those limitations.

The parser was impressive, but Megler’s advances were far-reaching enough to have implications well beyond the world of text adventures. She explains her process as having started from the fact that she enjoyed Colossal Cave Adventure, mapped it out, and then put it down forever. She thought about what would have made it enjoyable for longer, chiefly making it less predictable and its characters and scenarios less static. And then, as she later told The Guardian: “I saw the possibility of what could be done – so I just did it”.

A screenshot of The Hobbit for ZX Spectrum. Part of the screen is black. Underneath words read "You are in a dark dungeon in the elvenkings halls The the southwest there is the red door To the west there is the red door You see: Nothing It is dark. Someone closes the red door.

When you play The Hobbit and enter Say to Gandalf “give me the map”, he may give you the map. But he might not. You might need to tell him again. He might walk off, and you might need to follow him. Megler gave each character a programmed list of actions, and she and Mitchell made a randomiser choose where in the list to put them each time you played. The game doesn’t even hang around waiting for you to type something for things to happen. On following Gandalf, there is a chance you might encounter a corpse of some variety, say warg or goblin. You also might not. It depends on whether one of the game’s characters has happened to have been and killed them or not. You are Bilbo Baggins and you are the star of the show, but other characters are all actors too, not just fixed points waiting for you to arrive and press the button to make them go. They run on their own systems and their own time.

Keeping track of all of that with the programming tools available was a nightmare, and the game is not fully in control of itself at all. Megler and Mitchell could not have said everything that might happen in the game. You might get stuck and unable to win through no fault of your own. It’s a trade-off with the degree to which it feels like you’re in a living world and on a genuine adventure. When you fall down a cliff to a dark room with a red door, there is something startling and magical about waiting and the door being unlocked and opened and closed and locked at irregular intervals by forces unseen. A fantasy adventure where everyone around you acts unpredictably on their own motivations based on a pile of interlocking systems — that’s already a decent proportion of the appeal of The Elder Scrolls. You can even kill people who you need alive (or at least try to).

"You wait. Time passes... Gandalf says "Hurry up" You attack Gandalf. But the effort is wasted. His defense is too strong. Gandalf attacks you. With one well placed below Gandalf cleaves your skull. You are dead. You have mastered 7.5% of this adventure.

It seems to have been a joint idea of Megler and Mitchell, enthusiastically received by Milgrom, to make their particular adventure an adaptation of The Hobbit. When they started work it had been just a few years since Ralph Bakshi’s animated Lord of the Rings film, and not much longer since Rankin/Bass’s less successful one of The Hobbit in the US. The idea of adapting Tolkein into a different format can’t have been a big leap. Milgrom’s international publishing contacts and the then-insignificance of the computer games medium both helped Melbourne House to secure the rights. The only condition was that a copy of the book of The Hobbit should be included with each copy of the game. 

That arrangement meant that The Hobbit ended up selling at more than twice the price of most other Spectrum games. We are at this stage talking about an audience of early adopters who had just spent rather a lot of money on a computer, so that didn’t prove too much of a detriment. The inclusion also let Melbourne House sell the idea that the book might offer clues in the game, something picked up by reviewers and which could appeal on the basis of both novelty and sophistication. There was no real chance of the game meaningfully living up to the book, but for a moment players might have a sense that there could be.

Beyond that, the choice of material helps soften some of the necessary compromises in its characters. Elrond and Thorin, for example, barely have anything to say or do beyond, respectively, giving you lunch and sitting down and singing about gold. In the novel, though, Bilbo starts off completely out of his depth and often has little idea what is going on. At least some of the game’s idiosyncrasies can be explained away on the same basis, as being from the perspective of the Bilbo who got himself immediately captured by trolls in the second chapter. The game can’t then offer the same growth from there as the book, but it’s something.

The development of the game seems to have gone along a somewhat free-wheeling path over the best part of two years. This was, in the early ‘80s, a very long period of time to spend working on one game. It was quite late on that Beam decided that the Spectrum was the ideal machine for it. Luckily it had been wisely specced to use 48KB of memory before that was the consumer norm, and that turned out just right. The 48K version of the Spectrum was already outselling the 16K one by enough for that to work. It was similarly late that Beam added in graphics for some locations in the game. The crude versions of Kent Rees’s pictures, filled in in front of the waiting player, are evocative in their lack of detail. Their scarcity makes it a bit more special when you do reach a room with a view.

A screenshot of The Hobbit for ZX Spectrum. A graphic of a cauldron in a clearing in woods. Text reads "You go east. You are in the trolls clearing"

Philip Mitchell had to work alone on the coding to add in the pictures, finish off the game, and port it to the Spectrum. Veronika Megler graduated before the game’s completion and left Beam to work for IBM, the start of a long and successful tech career outside of games. It’s not clear how hard Fred Milgrom worked to try to keep hold of the student who had come up with and implemented a whole new way of approaching adventure games. He perhaps didn’t see the potential for just how much the game was going to succeed. What is clearer is what Beam and Melbourne House did afterwards, which was to strongly imply for years that the genius of The Hobbit was entirely down to Mitchell, the man they still employed. They left him to awkwardly dodge questions like “what did each of you actually do in the development?”.

It’s not hard to see sexism in how this played out. Megler certainly saw it that way. It was apparently already a lot easier for a man to see the new space of computer games as one that it might be worth trying out for a longer career in. Eventually, thirty years on, Megler set out her own history of The Hobbit’s development in a lot of detail. In recent years she has generally been the one to give interviews for retrospectives of this bit of games history. She has said that part of her motivation for talking about it is wanting to help correct the gender bias that prevents people from seeing that women can be computer programmers.

Megler was the one who was asked to write the best adventure game ever, and the successful collaboration that resulted more than achieved that within the world of the Spectrum and its competitors in the UK. At the end of 1984, Sinclair User published a special supplement on the fifty greatest Spectrum games ever. This was two years after The Hobbit’s release, with the medium evolving further. The list didn’t just declare The Hobbit the best adventure game, but the outright best game.

  • MRIB individual formats chart for fortnight ending 23 June 1983, Personal Computer News
  • MRIB individual formats chart for fortnight ending 07 July 1983, Personal Computer News

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