GAME TESTING
THE PAWN In our journey about re-discovering textual adventures, whose episodes in RetroMagazine are randomly placed in time, it’s the moment to talk about Magnetic Scrolls and their fantastic games. In this article we will briefly tell the history of this excellent software house and review The Pawn, the adventure game that announced the whole world the existence of a worthy rival of Infocom.
like most of the software houses involved in the production of text adventure games, the guys at Magnetic Scrolls chose the path of creating an interpreter (or virtual machine if you like, since that’s what it was) allowing the execution of games on multiple hardware platforms without the need for a total rewrite of the game. That would prevent, or at least minimize, the burden of porting the whole code on different platforms, which would Magnetic Scrolls: the software have been too expensive and timehouse consuming. The entire gaming system In the middle of the 80s, more precisely (today we would say game engine) in 1984, Anita Sinclair, Ken Gordon was created by Steers and Gordon and Hugh Steers decided that the and it had one of the best parsers time had come to challenge Infocom ever seen, pretty comparable to the (born in 1979) creating, in London, one developed by Infocom. In addition a software house for the production to that, graphics and sounds could of text adventures that could compete be included to the stories, although with those of the American company these additional features were not both in story-telling, by developing available for all platforms. In early new stories with twisted and engaging versions, programmers compiled the plots, and technically, thanks to an game source files with the help of a extremely advanced parser and a normal text editor, but later there was design set to give the player as much a graphical tool available, produced freedom as possible, thus expanding thanks to the joint work of the Sinclair/ the user experience beyond the mere Gordon/Steers trio, to speed up the goal of the game. The company started production process and allow with a team of eight permanent developers to focus more on game employees and a variable number of design than writing code. During its freelance collaborators, with Sinclair period of business activity, Magnetic as general manager, Gordon as Scrolls developed 8 games (see box). technical director and Steers, who All these adventure games featured had the greatest programming skills, a level of difficulty higher than average, as chief programmer. The plan was an excellent parser with a very wide to produce games mainly for the vocabulary and very high quality Sinclair QL, a microcomputer owned graphic illustrations. The brilliant by Anita, but the release of the Atari career of Magnetic Scrolls ended when ST and the Commodore Amiga, with the public interest shifted to other their hardware and OS superiority, genres of games, graphic adventures convinced the three founding partners in the first place. The production of to expand their initial objectives and text adventures stopped generating increase development efforts to profits for the survival of the company support these two platforms as soon and so the brilliant partners were as possible. The result of their work forced to shut down the business. was The Pawn, the first game produced The games created by Magnetic Scrolls by Magnetic Scrolls, developed by during their time of production are, the 18-year-old Rob Steggles, who however, still appreciated and played later became the author of the four today. Moreover they are considered most appreciated adventures of the among the best ever. company. Like Infocom and in general RETROMAGAZINE ENGLISH YEAR 1 - ISSUE 0
Publisher: Ranbird Developer: Magnetic Scrolls Year: 1985 Platform: All platforms Genre: Adventure
Magnetic Scrolls' games The Pawn, 1985, published by Rainbird for Amiga, Amstrad CPC, Amstrad PCW, Apple II, Acorn Archimedes, Atari ST, Atari 8-bit, Commodore 64, MS-DOS, Macin‐ tosh, Sinclair QL and ZX Spectrum The Guild of Thieves, 1987, pub‐ lished by Rainbird for Amiga, Am‐ strad CPC, Amstrad PCW, Apple II, Acorn Archimedes, Atari ST, Atari 8-bit, Commodore 64, MSDOS, Macintosh and ZX Spectrum Jinxter, 1987, published by Rain‐ bird for Acorn Archimedes, Amiga, Amstrad CPC, Amstrad PCW, Ap‐ ple II, Macintosh, Atari 8-bit, Atari ST, Commodore 64, MS-DOS, ZX Spectrum Corruption, 1988, published by Rainbird for Amiga, Amstrad CPC, Amstrad PCW, Apple II, Acorn Archimedes, Atari ST, Commodore 64, Apple Macintosh, MS-DOS, ZX Spectrum Fish!, 1988, published by Rainbird for Amiga, Amstrad PCW, Apple II, Acorn Archimedes, Atari ST, Com‐ modore 64, Macintosh, MS-DOS, ZX Spectrum Myth, 1989, published by Rain‐ bird Amiga, Amstrad PCW, Atari ST, Commodore 64, MS-DOS, ZX Spectrum Wonderland, 1990, published by Virgin Interactive for MS-DOS, Acorn Archimedes, Amiga, Atari ST The Legacy: Realm of Terror, 1993, published by MicroProse for MS-DOS systems only. There was also a version for Amiga that was never completed. Page 37 of 40
