The Hobbit is an illustrated text adventure computer game released in 1982 for the ZX Spectrum home computer and based on the book The Hobbit, by J. R. R. Tolkien. It was developed at Beam Software by Philip Mitchell and Dr. Veronika Megler[1][2] and published by Melbourne House. It was later converted to most home computers available at the time including the Commodore 64, BBC Micro and Oric computers.[3] By arrangement with the book publishers, a copy of the book was included with each game sold.
One of the first computer games based on Tolkien's works are based, appropriately enough, on his first Middle Earth novel The Hobbit. The game follows the book's plot very closely, as you guide Frodo's ancestor Bilbo the hapless Hobbit and his band of equally clueless neighbors into their first grand adventure. Play The Hobbit by Beam, Melbourne House 1982 with online ZX Spectrum emulator. Press F11 for full screen. The Hobbit text adventure game was developed by Beam Software and published by Melbourne House in 1982. It was released for Apple II PC Commodore 64 and many more consoles. This was a illustrated text adventure game its based on the Novel the game came with a copy of the Novel as well. It had a advanced one touch word command system. As you probably have guessed, the game is based on the famous book of J.R.R. Tolkien, the predecessor of the much more famous Lord of the Rings. You play the role of Bilbo Baggins, a Hobbit that lived happily in his hole until one day his friend Gandalf came with the dwarfs and offered him an adventure. The Hobbit is an illustrated text adventure computer game released in 1982 and based on the book The Hobbit, by J. It was developed at Beam Software by Philip Mitchell and Veronika Megler and published by Melbourne House for most home computers available at the time, from more popular models such as the ZX Spectrum, the Commodore.
The parser was very advanced for the time and used a subset of English called Inglish.[4][5] When it was released, most adventure games used simple verb-noun parsers (allowing for simple phrases like 'get lamp'), but Inglish allowed the player to type advanced sentences such as 'ask Gandalf about the curious map then take sword and kill troll with it'. The parser was complex and intuitive, introducing pronouns, adverbs ('viciously attack the goblin'), punctuation and prepositions and allowing the player to interact with the game world in ways not previously possible.
Gameplay[edit]
Many locations are illustrated by an image, based on originals designed by Kent Rees. On the tape version, to save space, each image was stored in a compressed format by storing outline information and then flood filling the enclosed areas on the screen.[6] The slow CPU speed meant that it would take up to several seconds for each scene to draw. The disk-based versions of the game used pre-rendered, higher-quality images.
The game has an innovative text-based physics system, developed by Veronika Megler.[7] Objects, including the characters in the game, have a calculated size, weight, and solidity. Objects can be placed inside other objects, attached together with rope and damaged or broken. If the main character is sitting in a barrel and this barrel is then picked up and thrown through a trapdoor, the player would go through.
Unlike other works of interactive fiction, the game is also in real time, insofar as a period of idleness causes the 'WAIT' command to be automatically invoked and the possibility of events occurring as a result. This can be suppressed by entering the 'PAUSE' command, which stops all events until a key is pressed.
The game has a cast of non-player characters (NPCs) entirely independent of the player and bound to precisely the same game rules. They have loyalties, strengths, and personalities that affect their behaviour and cannot always be predicted. The character of Gandalf, for example, would roam freely around the game world (some fifty locations), picking up objects, getting into fights and being captured.
The volatility of the characters, coupled with the rich physics and impossible-to-predict fighting system, enabled the game to be played in many different ways, though this would also lead to problems (such as an important character being killed early on). There are numerous possible solutions and with hindsight, the game might be regarded as one of the first examples of emergent gameplay. This also resulted, however, in many bugs; for example, during development Megler found that the animal NPCs killed each other before the player arrived. The game's documentation warned that 'Due to the immense size and complexity of this game it is impossible to guarantee that it will ever be completely error-free'. Melbourne House issued a version 1.1 with some fixes, but with another bug that resulted in the game being unwinnable, forcing it to release version 1.2, and the company never fixed all bugs.[4]
Reception[edit]
Info in 1985 rated The Hobbit on the Commodore 64 three-plus stars out of five, stating that the graphics were 'pleasant but no show-stoppers', and that the game's parser and puzzles were 'typical of most adventures today'. The magazine concluded that 'Tolkien fans will most likely be pleased with this title'.[8]
The Hobbit was a bestseller in the UK on the ZX Spectrum in 1983[9] and both the C64 and BBC the following year.[10] The game won the 1983 Golden Joystick Award for best strategy game.[11] The game was also a huge commercial success, selling over 100,000 copies in its first two years at a retail price of £14.95.[12] There are no records of sales figures but in an article from March 1985 it was estimated in the range of 100,000 to 200,000[13] and a figure of 500,000 copies is possible, making it an 'excellent candidate for the bestselling text adventure of all time, challenged, if at all, only by Infocom’s Zork I'[4]. The use of images on many of the locations as opposed to mostly text-only adventure games of the time, the flexibility of the Inglish parser, the innovative independence of the non-player characters, the popularity of Tolkien's work, all attributed to the game's phenomenal success.
Legacy[edit]
To help players a book called 'A guide to playing The Hobbit' by David Elkan was published in 1984.[14]
Developer Beam Software followed up The Hobbit with 1985's Lord of the Rings: Game One, 1987's Shadows of Mordor: Game Two of Lord of the Rings, and 1989's The Crack of Doom. They would also reuse Inglish in 'Sherlock'.
In 1986 a parody of the game was released by CRL, The Boggit.
A phrase from the game which has entered popular culture is 'Thorin sits down and starts singing about gold.'[15]
Also, the game is mentioned in Nick Montfort's, Twisty Little Passages, a book exploring the history and form of the interactive fiction genre.
Discworld Noir references The Hobbit: when the protagonist, Lewton, discovers that someone concealed themselves in a wine barrel, he wonders why that brings to mind the phrases 'You wait – time passes' and 'Thorin sits down and starts singing about gold.'
References[edit]
^Simon Sharwood (2012-11-18). 'Author of 80's classic The Hobbit didn't know game was a hit'. The Register. Retrieved 2012-11-18.
^Original game packaging
^'Personal Computer Games' (3). February 1984: 4. Retrieved 3 May 2016.Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
^ abcMaher, Jimmy (2012-11-16). 'The Hobbit'. The Digital Antiquarian. Retrieved 10 October 2014.
^Ruminations On 'The Hobbit' FandomArchived 2014-10-10 at the Wayback Machine
^'The Hobbit: Phil Garratt, after a brief sojourn in Middle Earth, takes time off to tell us what he found there' Garratt, Phil (1983) ZX Computing issue 8304, page 76
^'The Hobbit and his Lady'. L'avventura è l'avventura. April 2002. Retrieved 10 October 2014.
^Dunnington, Benn; Brown, Mark R. (December 1985 – January 1986). 'C-64/128 Gallery'. Info. pp. 4–5, 88–93. Retrieved 2019-03-19.
^'Melbourne House Advertisement'. Sinclair User (13): 4. April 1983. Retrieved 3 May 2016.
^'Chart Toppers', C&VG issue 28, page 163,
^'The Golden Joystick Award', C&VG issue 29, page 15
^Mike Gerrard: Adventuring into an Unknown World. In: The Guardian, 1984-08-30, section Micro Guardian/Futures, page 13.
^[1], C&VG issue 41
^David Elkan: A Guide to Playing the Hobbit. Melbourne House, 1984, ISBN0-86161-161-6
^Campbell, Stuart (December 1991). 'Top 100 Speccy Games'. Your Sinclair (72): 28.
External links[edit]
The Hobbit at MobyGames
The Hobbit at SpectrumComputing.co.uk
The Hobbit can be played for free in the browser at the Internet Archive
The Hobbit at Curlie
Retrieved from 'https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=The_Hobbit_(1982_video_game)&oldid=909341133'
The Hobbit is an old DOS fantasy adventure game set in the The Lord of the Rings universe, developed by Beam Software, designed by Philip Mitchell - Veronika Megler and published by Addison - Wesley Publishing Company in 1983. The Hobbit was based on a novel. It's available for download. The Hobbit is also part of the Tolkien software adventures series.
Genres:
Philip Mitchell, Veronika Megler
fantasy, based on a novel, The Lord of the Rings
Downloads for The Hobbit
The Hobbit Text Based Game In Python
Main executable file (run this to play the game): thehobbit/Hobbit.comGta 4 exe file download.
The Hobbit Free Game Download
The .zip contains only two files: hobbit.com and hobbit.dat. The executable file is hobbit.com. If you're having problems, try mounting The Hobbit using D-Fend.
Video
Video courtesy of Squakenet.com.
Additional info
Screenshots taken by Abandonware DOS. Open The Hobbit screenshots in a new tab.
Player modes: single player
Input: keyboard
Distributed on: 5,25 floppy disk
Graphics: 80 columns text, CGA, Hercules
Abandonware DOS views: 7786
Comments
Hi Ralle! You can run it easily with a DOS emulator like DOSBOX.
Hi! Tried this today on my old PC-XT from 1988, DOS 5.0, Adlib Card, VGA, Mouse. Copied the files on a real 360kb disc and tried to start it. It simply hangs. A COM-File that is only 584 Bytes long looked strange. Today I learned something new - after all that time : 'PC Booter'. Thied to put it on a system disk with a very small DOS (3.21). No way. Has anyone a disk image?
The reason is that it doesn't work with FreeDOS. It's fine with MSDOS.
If I type SAVE, I get the prompt ENTER DISK POSITION [ 1-20 ]: After entering a number in the suggested range, nothing happens (just a flashing cursor). The game freezes and I have to reboot the computer. Anyone know what's going on here? The game isn't really playable unless you can save.
Hi Bob, the screenshots you see on this page were taken using the game in the zip you downloaded. You should see two files, one named hobbit.com, the other hobbit.dat. There is NO exe, and that's normal for a game so old: the .com is the executable. I played The Hobbit using D-Fend, it saves a lot of DOSBOX tweaking. Try it, you should be able to run it without problems.
no way to mount game - if, you are probably using DOS BOX & have mounted the HOBBIT folder - there is NO .exe to start game - the files within folder are both titled HOBBIT but, when you enter HOBBIT, it says illegal command -- no way to start game as the .exe is missing
Tell others what you think about The Hobbit: did you play it? Did you like it or hate it? If you have problems running The Hobbit, please read the F.A.Q. first. Your e-mail will NEVER be used for spam.
The Hobbit Text Game
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Tolkien software adventures series
games in the Tolkien software adventures series:
games in this series
Awards:
The Hobbit Game Download
1983 - Strategy Game of the Year, Golden Joystick Awards.