The Hobbit (1982 video game)

Book, publisher and license

Beam Software developed the game, and Melbourne House published it. According to the game's page on the Internet Archive, the lead designers were Veronika Megler and Philip Mitchell. According to filfre.net, Beam Software was a wholly owned subsidiary of Melbourne House, its in-house development arm, so in practice the two were one organization. The game came out in the UK in December 1982, and its first platform was the ZX Spectrum. According to Wikipedia, Beam Software had bought the computer rights to the book as early as 1980. According to filfre.net (the history blog The Digital Antiquarian), the company approached the Tolkien estate when it was already about six months into development, with demonstrations ready, and the estate was "very receptive". In 1985 Addison-Wesley published an American version, and its box included a copy of the book itself, by arrangement with the book's publishers, according to Wikipedia.

Inglish: a parser that understands more than a verb and a noun

Philip Mitchell wrote a full-sentence parser and called it Inglish. According to filfre.net, the engine and the parser were squeezed into about 17 kilobytes, to leave the rest of the memory for Megler's database. Most parsers of the period understood only two words. Inglish, by contrast, understood pronouns, adverbs, prepositions and punctuation, so it accepted a command like "viciously attack the mean goblin" (although according to filfre.net, the game may simply have ignored many adverbs). A 1989 Macworld review, cited on Wikipedia, said its parser was "handicapped by a 400-word input vocabulary". That is fewer than the 800 words in two later Beam games. The first versions were frustrating at certain points. According to filfre.net, you could "climb into the boat", but not "enter" it. This shows that even an advanced parser like Inglish still relied on a closed list of verbs, not on flexible understanding.

Characters that act without waiting for a command

According to filfre.net, the main characters acted according to a "character profile" of their own, with attack strength, defense and health, and not only in response to the player's command. Gandalf wanders the game world and snatches random items from the player ("What's this?"). After just one turn of "attention" he throws them on the ground and leaves. Thorin may sit down and sing about gold even in the middle of an attack. Bard may refuse a command and answer "No", even when the player screams at him to kill the dragon that is about to burn them both. The animals also act on their own turns, and sometimes kill each other before the player arrives. To be clear: this is still not learning AI. These are predefined behavior rules for each character, an early and much simpler kind of what is now called game AI. filfre.net also describes one unusual moment: a warg got into the wood elves' compound and was "prancing" atop the corpse of the guard who was supposed to capture the player. The designers did not plan this directly. It came from the combination of the characters' separate behavior rules.

Bugs, versions and computers

Version 1.1 had a bug that made it impossible to win the game, so Melbourne House released version 1.2. But not all the bugs were fixed: according to filfre.net, swords break on spider webs, and Gandalf and Thorin can walk through walls. The game came out for most of the major home computers of the time: ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64, Amstrad CPC, BBC Micro, MSX and Oric. It also came out for Dragon computers, but sources disagree on the exact model. The game's page on the Internet Archive lists the Dragon 32, while the Wikipedia infobox lists the Dragon 64. (Both computers are described in the Hebrew entry on the Dragon 32.)

Commercial success

According to Wikipedia, the game was a bestseller in the UK on the ZX Spectrum in 1983, and also sold well on the Commodore 64 and BBC Micro by the end of that year. Also according to Wikipedia, it sold more than 100,000 copies in its first two years, at a price of £14.95. According to the history published by Beam itself, and according to an article by Fred Milgrom in The Age from 1997, more than 500,000 units were sold in Europe. These are the company's own figures, not an independent check.

An ancestor of today's game AI

Beam Software built separate behavior rules for each character, instead of one central script. This approach is a much simpler ancestor of what today's video games call game AI, and of tools such as behavior trees, which manage far more complex characters. The key difference: in 1982 every rule was written explicitly by a human programmer, not learned from data, just like the parser itself. This shift, from hand-written rules to characters that learned from data, is one of the main stories that the "AI and Games" category follows.