I
couldn’t talk about adventure games without mentioning the Hobbit.
Developed
by Philip Mitchell and Veronika Megler in 1982. It achieved 1m sales which probably makes it the best selling single
adventure game ever. First
developed for TRS-80 but ported. The
first Spectrum version was called 1.1 to make it seem more complete.
Unusually,
it used a licence well – adapting it to fit the style of game and to to create
characters, settings and expectations but without spelling out how to solve the
puzzles (in fact the book was given away with the game). I haven’t researched this, but I wonder if it was the first licence
game.
It
used simple graphics to show locations to the player. It had a good parser which allowed limited communication with NPCs as
well as complex sentences. Above
all, it was also well-executed and fun.
I want to leap ahead by about 12 years to the point where I think that adventure games died
*
Click here to play The Hobbit in a Java browser and here for a walkthrough.