Magnetic Scrolls

Magnetic Scrolls was a British computer game company that published high quality text adventures from the mid- 1980s, reinforced the mood of the game with for that time outstanding, optional graphics. The most popular Adventures of the company were in 1985 published The Pawn, The Guild of Thieves from 1987 and Wonderland from 1990, which was based on Lewis Carroll's tales of Alice in Wonderland.

History

Anita Sinclair and Ken Gordon had founded the company in London in 1984. With a small team of programmers and graphic designers the company adventures, within three years reached cult status in discerning player circles and a European counterweight to Infocom represented, the then dominant American developer of high-quality text adventures developed. The success between 1985 and 1990 based on one hand on the literary quality and the British humor of the texts, on the other hand on the spectacular even on 8 -bit computers such as the Commodore 64 quality of the graphics and finally developed by Magnetic Scrolls parser. This was the Referenzparser by Infocom in both the recognition of grammatical structures and vocabulary at least equal, in some respects even superior: for example, he allowed the disambiguation of complex inputs such as "use the trowel to plant the pot plant into the plant pot " in the game The Pawn ( such as: " use the trowel to in the flower pot plant the marijuana plant " ), in which the same word ( "plans" ) appears in three different meanings. Imaginative and bizarre were also the stories and the original and complex puzzles that had to be solved in the Adventures of the players to have to continue the story as an actor.

By Magnetic Scrolls, unlike Infocom at this time, in 1985 under painted selected scenes with static graphics, suggested the company a bridge to the graphic adventures. In the game Jinxter, which appeared the same year as the Guild of Thieves, the illustrations were contributed by several artists and consciously held in different styles. One of the first artists was Geoff Quilley.

Innovative was also the built-in " Hint system ". Did the player a riddle, not, he could enter one of the many numerical codes from the question -and-answer section of the manual in the parser and got one, depending on the length of cryptic codes, Solution Note.

From the 1990s the company their high cost of production could no longer import by the turnover. Rob Steggles, the most important in the 1980 text the author of Magnetic Scrolls, wrote this:

" Though Jinxter was an excellent game, the cost of Producing it had been too high and, from where I was sitting, highly unprofitable. To my mind, it signaled the beginning of the end for Maggot Rolls. By contrast, Corruption Which sold Roughly the same number had been a fraction of the cost to produce as only myself and Hugh had worked on it. [ ... ] "

He continues:

" [L ] ate 1989 [ ... ], Wonderland had already started and Seemed to be going the way of Jinxter in did it had a large team on it who Seemed to spend vast Amounts of time reinventing the wheel. I SEEM to remember Ken and Doug spending months writing a complete Windows system and Paul writing a program to animate our pictures - all stuff You Could buy off the shelf for a fraction of the cost ".

In 1991 published nor " The Magnetic Scrolls Collection Vol 1" which the old games "The Guild of Thieves ", " Corruption" and " Fish! " with the technical foundation of Wonderland, the Magnetic Windows engine, contained. A further part of the remaining games was announced, but it never appeared because of the collapse in the market for text adventures.

In September 1998, there was still one of the company last sign of life, as Ken Gordon, the Internet domain magneticscrolls.com who registered. This site remained empty since its registration, however, unchanged and with the exception of company logos. From July 2011, the site was no longer accessible.

Softographie

• The Pawn (1985, Rain Bird)
• The Guild of Thieves (1987, Rain Bird)
• Jinxter (1987, Rain Bird)
• Corruption (1988, Rain Bird)
• Fish! (1988, Rain Bird)
• Myth (1989, Rain Bird)
• Wonderland (1990, Virgin Interactive )
• The Magnetic Scrolls Collection Vol 1 (1991, Virgin Interactive)
• The Legacy: Realm of Terror (1993, Microprose )