Realizing that statistics weren’t for her, Megler answered a newspaper ad for a part-time programming job at a local software company called Melbourne House. It was 1980 and he was halfway through his career focusing on operating system design and programming language development. “The day I was hired, the first thing my boss said to me was ‘write the best adventure game ever,’” he recalls. The end result of this teaching was The Hobbit, a landmark 1982 text adventure game that is still fondly remembered today. “The best adventure game ever” … The Hobbit. Photo: ArcadeImages/Alamy Although the 20-year-old didn’t have much experience with video games, she really enjoyed it. “I had found Colossal Cave Adventure addictive to the point where I had mapped the game and solved it. Then it got boring straight away and I never played it again. So I thought about what made this game stop being interesting and designed a game that didn’t have any of those problems.” Megler recruited fellow student Phillip Mitchell to help with the game’s parser – the code that helps the game and the player understand each other by turning words into commands and vice versa. The story was originally a generic fantasy adventure. However, as fans of Tolkien’s work, Megler and Mitchell suggested using one of his works as the basis for the game. The sprawling and epic The Lord of the Rings stories were the most famous. the developers suggested that the Hobbit’s less complicated and tighter plot would be a better fit. Melbourne House boss Fred Milgrom loved the idea and Megler began adapting the book. “I went through it and identified key locations, characters, puzzles and events,” he says. “I then tried to map it into the game. It seemed possible. But it was a stretch. And probably a little too ambitious.” By the time Melbourne House secured the Hobbit license, Megler had already designed much of the game’s engine. Megler created an innovative system that allowed the player to experiment with different commands and items. Photo: ArcadeImages/Alamy In most text adventures of the time, the player typed in commands – examine the sword, go north – and the program responded according to a set of predefined responses. But writing code on a TRS-80 computer from Australian manufacturer Dick Smith Electronics, Megler created an innovative system that allowed the player to experiment with different commands and objects. “The classic example was ‘turn on the light bulb.’ Turns on the light bulb, right? But turn on the angry dwarf and you turn him into a dwarf who keeps propositioning you,” laughs Megler. (Unfortunately, this particular interaction was removed from the final game.) In an era where most text adventures could be boiled down to a game of “guess the correct verb,” The Hobbit allowed for adverbs and the use of objects, eliminating the problems that had plagued it in Colossal Cave Adventure. The game also allowed for time lapse: if you wandered too long in the wrong place, Bilbo soon became a juicy snack for a troll. “I saw it as a super interesting puzzle to solve – and I saw the possibility of what it could be – so I just did it,” says Megler. “There were essentially message patterns and a dictionary of words, and much of the power of the game comes from the fact that there are only three or four basic ideas that interact with enough randomness to create what might be called emergent behavior.” At a time when most home computer video games were still coded in the Basic language, this was extremely progressive work. Megler had the foresight to structure her system so that it could be cleaned up and used as a base for more games. “I planned [The Hobbit] so that it has connecting parts: you could use the same base for the game and then just change the character lists and map and sell it as a different game.” Unfortunately, apart from a sequel based on Sherlock Holmes, Melbourne House failed to capitalize on it.It seemed like the world wasn’t ready for a customizable game engine. I have had letters from people talking about how Veronika Megler changed their lives About halfway through writing The Hobbit, Megler and Mitchell were asked to work on another game called Penetrator – Melbourne House’s transparent knock-off of Konami’s seminal scrolling shoot-’em-up Scramble. They created an excellent clone with an innovative feature: a level designer. “After we wrote Penetrator, we came up with the idea of adding a widget to The Hobbit,” Megler recalls. Artist Kent Rees designed the famous images, which Mitchell expertly rendered in the game using a minimal amount of precious memory. If there’s one thing that remembers with a smile – or a grimace – someone who played The Hobbit in the 80s, it’s that annoying dwarf king in exile and his enthusiastic singing. “One of the iconic things about Thorin in the book was that he would often sit and sing about gold,” smiles Megler. “Well, I picked it as something that was basically him… The problem with Thorin was that the line was too short! So he ended up sitting and singing about gold a lot more than in the book.” “I saw it as an extremely interesting puzzle to solve” … Veronika Megler. Photo: Kimberly Ransom Released in the UK and Australia in 1982, The Hobbit garnered glowing reviews and awards in the press. The ambition, skill, and determination of these two part-time students, tasked with creating the “best adventure game ever,” has influenced an entire generation of gamers and coders. “I think solving a problem within tight constraints – which is the space we were in – unleashes a very different type of creativity,” Megler concludes. “And that in itself can be very powerful.” Why did The Hobbit make such an impression? Forty years later, why is it still being talked about? “I think it was because it was revolutionary compared to the other games available at the time,” says Megler. “I mean, I’ve had letters from people talking about how it changed their lives. others who were interested in relationships and people and not just games. And people who have done PhDs in linguistics because they found the parser so fascinating.”
