Magnetic Scrolls
Industry | Software video game developer |
---|---|
Founded | 1984 |
Founder | Anita Sinclair Ken Gordon Hugh Steers |
Defunct | 1992 |
Headquarters | London |
Magnetic Scrolls was a British
Magnetic Scrolls was one of the first game developers to use graphics and animation in its text adventure games, which set it apart from other companies in the genre. The company's games were known for their complex puzzles, intricate storylines, and immersive gameplay. Games developed by Magnetic Scrolls include The Pawn, The Guild of Thieves, and Jinxter.[2]
History
Formation
Formed by Anita Sinclair, Ken Gordon and Hugh Steers in 1984,
During the mid-1980s, the text adventure market was thriving, although only a very few developers exclusively specialised in the genre. The undisputed giants of the genre were Infocom, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who practically redefined the genre by ensuring the interface (or text parser) never provided a barrier between the player and the fictional elements of the game.
Infocom's dominance of the text adventure market ensured they had very few rivals in the United States. Adventure International, owned by Scott and Lexis Adams, had been an early competitor of Infocom, but they went out of business long before Infocom had hit their stride. Their only other serious competitor was Sierra On-Line, owned by Ken and Roberta Williams, who specialised in graphical adventure games.
During the early to mid-1980s Level 9 Computing dominated the UK text adventure market. Delta 4 and CRL also produced a number of text adventures that were critical and commercial hits but were never a serious rival to Level 9. Until they were acquired by Activision in 1985, Infocom's titles were something of a rarity in the UK, only usually available as expensive imports. Magnetic Scrolls immediately took advantage of this considerable gap in the UK market with their first release, The Pawn.
Early releases
The Pawn, written by Rob Steggles, was released in 1985, on a wide range of 8-bit and 16-bit platforms, to considerable acclaim. One of the game's biggest selling points, besides the advanced text parser, engrossing story and exquisite packaging, were the high resolution illustrations that accompanied many of the game's locations. Although decidedly antiquated by today's standards, at the time they were considered state-of-the-art. The ZX Spectrum version of the game did not include graphics.
In 1987, Magnetic Scrolls released two new games. Steggles returned to write The Guild of Thieves, a traditional treasure hunt, while Georgina Sinclair and Michael Bywater wrote the contemporary fantasy of Jinxter. Both games met with similar critical acclaim as The Pawn.
For their next release,
Released towards the end of 1988 was Fish!, a more light-hearted, surreal adventure game, where the player assumed the role of a dimension-jumping goldfish. Written by John Molloy, Pete Kemp, Phil South and edited by Rob Steggles, Fish! would prove to be the last of Magnetic Scrolls' traditional commercial releases.
Myth was released in 1989 through Official Secrets, an adventure gaming club set up by Tony Rainbird after he (and Magnetic Scrolls) parted ways with Telecomsoft. Now based in Hertfordshire, Magnetic Scrolls produced this mini-adventure as a freebie that would be given away to those who signed up to join Official Secrets. The gaming club didn't last long, however, and was quickly assimilated into Tony Rainbird's new Special Reserve company, specialising in mail order computer hardware and software.
Later years and demise
Wonderland had been in development at Magnetic Scrolls for some time and was finally released by
In 1988, Magnetic Scrolls began to collaborate with Infocom, Douglas Adams and Michael Bywater on a sequel to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. This project was never finished. A playable draft of an early part of the game, along with the personal and commercial circumstances behind its ill-fated development, came briefly to public attention twenty years later.[4]
In 1991, Virgin Interactive released The Magnetic Scrolls Collection Vol 1, containing new versions of The Guild of Thieves, Corruption and Fish! that took advantage of the Magnetic Windows engine.[5] A second collection, containing their remaining games, was planned but never completed.
As a consequence of the dying text adventure market, Magnetic Scrolls ceased publishing in 1992.[3] They were acquired by MicroProse later that year. A number of Magnetic Scrolls' staff went on to help develop a 3D role-playing video game entitled The Legacy: Realm of Terror, which was released on the PC to lukewarm reviews, but MicroProse did not capitalise on the Magnetic Scrolls name beyond that. In the late 1990s, Ken Gordon registered the magneticscrolls.com domain, which now redirects to the Strand Games website.
Two programmers from Magnetic Scrolls, Doug Rabson and Servan Keondjian later formed the company
John Molloy moved to Florida, US, working on web-based applications, and died in 2018 following an illness.[7] Phil South lives in South Wales, UK, and after many years working Disney Channel UK's web presence worked at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School for 7 years. He now works as a freelance writer and blogger and in 2022 published a novel under a pseudonym.[8]
Anita Sinclair is now one of the UK's most successful bridge players, winning a number of domestic competitions, and winning a gold medal in China.[9]
Reappearance
In May 2017 the Strand games initiative emerged. Strand Games was started by Hugh Steers — co-founder and core developer of Magnetic Scrolls — and Stefan Meier of the Magnetic Scrolls Memorial fanpage. It is supported by several members of the original Magnetic Scrolls team, including Anita Sinclair, Ken Gordon, Rob Steggles and Servan Keondjian. The non-profit initiative aims both to preserve the original works of Magnetic Scrolls and to remaster the games for modern devices. With the public appearance of the initiative a first beta version of the remastered classic The Pawn was released. The official release followed in June 2017.
In June 2017 Strand games worked on recovering the source code of their classics from tapes to remaster and re-release them.[10] After the successful recovery of the original source code in a remarkable process, which involved baking the original backup tapes at low temperature in a kitchen oven,[11] the initiative started to remaster The Guild of Thieves from the original source code. In December 2017 the remastered and enhanced game was published.[12] This was followed by a similarly revived edition of Jinxter in 2019.[13]
List of games
- The Pawn (1985, Rainbird)
- The Guild of Thieves (1987, Rainbird)
- Jinxter (1987, Rainbird)
- Corruption(1988, Rainbird)
- Fish! (1988, Rainbird)
- Myth (1989, Rainbird)
- Wonderland(1990, Virgin Interactive)
- The Magnetic Scrolls CollectionVol 1 (1991, Virgin Interactive)
- The Legacy: Realm of Terror (1992, MicroProse)
References
- ISBN 9781484249208.
- ISBN 9781501348976.
- ^ a b Montfort, N. (2006). "Natural Language Generation and Narrative Variation in Interactive Fiction" (PDF). Proceedings of the Computational Aesthetics Workshop, AAAI, Boston, MA.
- ^ Baio, Andy (17 April 2008). "Milliways: Infocom's Unreleased Sequel to Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy". waxy.org.
- ^ Ardai, Charles (November 1992). "Three Runs, Two Hits, One Error: Virgin Software's Magnetic Scrolls Collection". Computer Gaming World. Vol. 1, no. 100. pp. 64–65.
- ^ Bishop, Todd (25 July 2011). "Google engineer Steve Lacey victim of Kirkland car wreck". GeekWire.
- ^ "John Molloy's Twitter feed".
- ^ "Phil South's Twitter feed".
- ^ "Anita Sinclair".
- ^ Wawro, Alex (June 28, 2017). "Dev rescues '80s text adventure source code by baking tapes in an oven". Gamasutra.com.
- ^ "Magnetic Scrolls Original Games Source Code Recovered!". strandgames.com. Retrieved 2017-12-23.
- ^ "The Guild of Thieves by Magnetic Scrolls Restored". strandgames.com. Retrieved 2017-12-23.
- ^ "Jinxter by Magnetic Scrolls Revived". strandgames.com. Retrieved 2019-07-16.
External links
- Magnetic Scrolls at MobyGames
- Magnetic Scrolls Fact Sheet
- Magnetic Scrolls section of The Interactive Fiction Archive (walkthroughs, game information, interpreters, manuals, tools)
- The Magnetic Scrolls Chronicles
- Message in a Microchip (a Crash magazine interview with Magnetic Scrolls)
- Interview with Anita Sinclair, 1989
- Magnetic Scrolls at Curlie
- dMagnetic - A Magnetic Scrolls Interpreter An Open Source implementation of the virtual machine so that the games can be played on modern Computers.