#0035 The Hobbit

I have a feeling I might upset some people with this review... Well, here we go anyway. Today I played The Hobbit, a 1982 illustrated text adventure developed by Beam Software for most home computers of the time. It was based on the 1937 book of the same name by J.R.R. Tolkien.

 

If you know the story of the Hobbit, then you know the story of the game. A Hobbit, a wizard and a dwarf set out on a journey to kill a dragon named Smaug, get gold and all that jazz. Honestly, I'm not super familiar with the book, and since the game actually comes with the book, I guess they never thought to explain said story ingame. You're just thrown into the game and told “here you go! Have fun.” so most of the details of the story still remain a mystery to me.

What this game is truly famous for though is it's innovations to the test adventure genre. For one, the parser was extremely innovative and advanced, especially for it's time. It used a subset of English called Inglish. See, most text adventures at the time relied solely on simple verb-noun parsers allowing for phrases like “get ye flask”, Inglish, on the other hand allows you to type advanced sentences like “ask Gandalf about the curious map then take sword and kill troll with it”. The parser was complex allowing for pronouns, adverbs, punctuation and prepositions allowing you to interact with the game in ways that simply were not possible in games such as Zork.

The game was also one of the first to feature illustrated graphics to accompany the text. A simple innovation, but it makes a pretty big difference when you're trying to decipher where you are, and where you've been. Something that could get confusing in previous text adventure games.

But that's not all, the game apparently actually has a physics system. All objects, including characters had a calculated size, and weight. Using Inglish, you could place objects inside of other objects, you can place characters inside of objects and then throw the object through a wall. Fun stuff.

Unlike other text adventures at the time, the game was played in real time. If you walk away from the key board, events continued without you by automatically entering the wait command. It got me killed once. Wasn't fun, but there's a pause command, so it's okay.

This game also has a cast of NPCs that are completely independent of the player. They all go about their lives all off screen, they have loyalties, strengths and personalities. Gandalf, for example, roamed freely around the game world, picking up objects, getting into fights and getting captured. This actually leads to some problems though. See, while it's cool that all the characters interact independently, this means that they could also get themselves into trouble without you even knowing it. Apparently it's very easy for crucial characters to die off screen and render the entire game unbeatable. Most of the bugs that cause this were fixed, but for the time, this 584 byte game was massive apparently, and was very hard to patch entirely (patches being entirely new games).

This game was hailed as one of the greatest text adventures of all time, challenged only by Zork for it's use of images, the flexibility of Inglish and the independence of the NPCs. So with a game so innovative, how does it stand up today?

Okay, I have to admit something here. I do not care for The Lord of the Rings. At all. I've only seen the movies and from what I've seen, it's three movies of walking, walking and more walking. Yeah, I know the books are huge and J.R.R. Tolkien basically transformed the fantasy genre into what it is today and that nearly every work of fantasy from the last forty or so years has taken a page from Tolkien's book. He is one of the most influential authors in modern history. But I'm sorry, LotR just doesn't do it for me. That includes the Hobbit. Which this game is based off, and I found it very boring. Extremely hard to get into and the whole time I was very aware that I was playing a game.

The story of The Hobbit is not explained at all, you're thrown into the setting and just expected to know what to do. The screen above is the actual first screen of the game.  If this were a simple adventure game like Zork, this would be fine, but the Hobbit is an epic fantasy with a very intricate and important story, so to not be informed of said story is a HUGE flaw in my book as people like me, who have never read the book are not going to know what is going on at all. I honestly had no idea what I was supposed to be doing, or where I was going. Also, if Thorin complains one more time I'm going to cut his little dwarf kneecaps off with my sword.

Overall, I didn't like it. It was confusing, and I felt like that one guy who doesn't get the inside joke. Just confused and left out. The mechanics of game are amazing, Inglish is a huge step forward for text adventures, and the inclusion of things like physics and realtime are mechanics that are long overdue, I just wish they weren't implemented into a game like The Hobbit where I can't fully appreciate. If you're a fan of The Lord of the Rings, then you might just get a kick out of this, but if you barely know anything about the books like me, you're probably best steering clear.

Next up: Choplifter