The Hobbit: Nostalgia ain't what it used to be

The year was 1982. We were all singing Eye of the Tiger (well, I wasn't), Knight Rider was on TV and the first CD player was sold in Japan. Meanwhile, hidden away in a million bedrooms were computer geeks playing The Hobbit. I was one of them.


I've just taken a trip down memory lane to play The Hobbit again. No, I didn't dig out my old Spectrum (which I still have), load the tape into the cassette deck and listen to fax-noises for five minutes while it loaded. I went to ZZ Spectrum, an online java Spectrum emulator, where you can sample the delights of a number of old Spectrum goodies.


Was it as great as I remembered? Well, no. The Hobbit was a text adventure spiced up with some very basic graphics (which, despite being basic, took an age to load, at least on the cassette version). The big selling point of the game was its use of 'Inglish', a slightly more natural version of the language than the very simple inputs that were all that was allowed in previous text adventures. It was still pretty limited, and you still had to endure minutes of frustration before you came up with a command that the game actually understood. Still, it seemed pretty cool at the time.


The other frustrations were finding the right way to solve problems, and roaming around blindly as if in a maze, before arriving somewhere interesting (read: a location with a graphic and a couple of items in it). As you can imagine, my re-acquaintance with The Hobbit was somewhat brief. Now, I'm off to play something a little bit more modern...