The Hobbit

Melbourne House, 1982

Written by Chris Owen, HTML'd by Arnt Gulbrandsen.

Controls

Keyboard

N.B : It is advisable to play this game at the maximum speed possible on your machine - this will speed up parsing and graphics drawing.

Aim of the game

Gandalf the wizard has talked you - Bilbo Baggins, the eponymous hobbit - into entering a new and exciting adventure to help out Thorin, the dwarf. Your mission is to seek out the evil dragon Smaug and return the treasure he hoards back to your home and place it for safe keeping in the chest. As a secondary mission, you must look after Thorin and protect him.

Game play

The Hobbit is an adventure game... it is played much like any other adventure, and has a pretty good parser (for its time, at any rate).

Comments

"It is one of the most complex games for the Sinclair machine that I have yet seen." (Sinclair User, March 1983!)

Now

By modern standards, The Hobbit has a lot of faults and is pretty primitive - spotting the bugs is probably as much fun as actually playing the game. However, it is an all-time classic adventure game and no adventurer should think himself worthy until he's got out of the famous Goblin's Dungeon!

SPECIAL COMMANDS:

WAIT - allows the passage of time
@ - repeats the last command
PRINT - dumps the text to the printer
NOPRINT - disables the PRINT function
SCORE - gives the current score
PAUSE - suspends the game (it is played in real-time) until any key is pressed.

Nettverksgruppa, 5/10-94, sinclair@nvg.ntnu.no