Back in the days when interactive fiction (or text adventures as they were known as in those days of yore) sold in vast quantities and it was actually possible to make a living out of writing them, The Hobbit was king. It was a very detailed game packed with puzzles (some incredibly hard and quite a few incredibly unfair) and featured several of the characters – Gandalf and Thorin in particular – from the book. It regularly made an appearance in text adventure fans lists of their top ten games and was light years ahead of its competition in terms of complexity. In fact, it’d be a difficult game to produce in ADRIFT today, some 20+ years after it first came out.

So what *is* so good about it?

On the face of things, The Hobbit seems dated. Several locations come with graphics that were considered reasonable at the time yet these days are the sort of thing that a pre-teenager with a Paint application on his computer could improve on in the space of five minutes. It lacks several things that have become standard in interactive fiction these days: no repeatable commands by pressing the Up arrow key; examine cannot be abbreviated as “x”; no way of scrolling back up the screen to see what you typed a while ago; very little in the way of descriptive text (the game originally came out on the ZX Spectrum and had to fit inside its limited memory of 48KB so descriptive text had to be sacrificed in order to get the full game inside the size restraints – a common problem with games from that era). Multiple commands on a single line are possible though, something few text adventures at the time could manage.

But bad points aside, what about the good points?

For one of the first times in a text adventure, the NPCs have a mind of their own. Thorin and Gandalf will wander back and forth, often completely independent of the player’s actions. They will pick items up, wander off with them, open and close doors, etc. Thorin will even pick fights with goblins he encounters as well as occasionally sitting down and singing about gold (as every good dwarf does).

It’s possible to order the NPCs around as well, although they don’t always do what you want. Thorin, in particular, will often ignore what you say unless you have the persistence to keep repeating yourself. I was in two minds about this as a feature. On one hand it’s a nice touch as there's no reason to assume free-thinking NPCs will obey your every utterance. On the other hand, it’s a pain typing in the same command three or four times. The NPCs can be ordered to do pretty any task the PC himself can do (open and close doors, pick up and drop items, fight enemies, etc) but as they often ignore you, it’s generally easier to just do them yourself.

Intelligent NPCs are one of the best things in The Hobbit, although they can also be aggravating. I once had to open the main door of my house four times because Thorin, for reasons best known to him, kept closing it. At another time, Gandalf took the map I was trying to get Elrond to examine and dropped it somewhere. Where? I don’t know. I never did find it and this rendered the game unfinishable. There is only one place in the game – the goblins’ dungeon – where the aid of another NPC is vital. In this case it’s Thorin but Thorin, due to his habit of wandering off from time to time, may not with you when you reach the dungeon and you might need to wait for an age for him to show up. Worse still, he might never show up. As said before, Thorin will start fights with goblins when he encounters them and it’s perfectly possible for him to take on too many and get himself killed. If this happens before you’ve escaped from the dungeon… well, you're finished.

The game also boasts a combat system, although one that is often awkward and confusing to use. Encounters with the same enemies can lead to the PC dying whereas at other times he will breeze through them without a scratch. Combat generally includes all the NPCs in the current area, so pick a fight with one goblin and all the others will join in. It’s also possible for combats to last several turns and for other combatants to show up in the meantime, meaning that fighting a single goblin could actually lead to a fight with half a dozen of them.

Bugs? Whether there are bugs in The Hobbit depends pretty much on your definition of just what a bug is. For certain, there are more than a few instances that seem like bugs but which could equally be the game designers deciding to throw comedy elements into the mix. For example: hunger plays a large part in the game. Go for too long without eating and you die. Logical, but a pain when you find yourself a long way from food and without the time to get back. There is also the added problem that there are only a limited amount of food items in the game, so take too long and you will exhaust what food there is and starve. The only exception to this is the elf Elrond who will give you food if you wait with him for long enough. Of course, the problem which arises is that Elrond is in a set location near the start of the game and it’s quite an inconvenience to come close to the end and then have to return to the start to pick up some more food. Which is where one of the bugs creeps in. The game allows you to carry around other characters and Elrond is one you can carry, thus exploiting the game system into allowing him to give you food every few moves. Food problem solved. Is this a bug or just something the game designers included to see if anyone would stumble across is?

The carrying option can also be used to allow you to haul around more items than you would normally be able to carry (yes, The Hobbit is one of those games with a limit on carryable items). But here you can load up an NPC with items till he reaches his limit and then carry him. The NPC himself counts as a single item so no matter how many items he’s carrying, it only counts as a single item for encumberance purposes. If you fancy doing things another way, load yourself up with items and then have one of the NPCs carry *you* around.

There are several other notable ‘may be/may not be’ bugs: Smaug the dragon can be carried in pretty much the same way that Elrond can (a dragon carried by a hobbit?!??!!) and you can order him to kill your enemies. Which he does. I once carried him around the entire game and got him to kill every single enemy I faced. He even killed a few allies that I decided to set him on.

The only definite bug I've found is a strange one where I am told I cannot the building because it is too full. This happens on a mountain path without a building in sight!

The Hobbit isn’t a game that is likely to appeal to many of the IF writers and players of today. It has its failings which are all too obvious when compared to the games written nowadays, although I'm sure that a major rewrite of it – bringing it into the modern age so to speak – would be a great idea. However, as far as 80’s nostalgia goes The Hobbit still reigns supreme.

Rating: 9 out of 10