The Pawn

The Pawn is a text adventure with illustrative graphics of the British company Magnetic Scrolls. The first published version had no graphics and was founded in 1985 by Sinclair Research launched for the Sinclair QL. Starting in 1986, followed by ports to various 16- bit and 8-bit home computers that were released by Rain Bird. The first of these reactions appeared on the Atari ST and this version were added at the request of the publisher Rainbird illustrative graphics by Geoff Quilley.

The game is also contained in many other ports compelling graphics and theme song to the Commodore Amiga particularly known for this. The story and the parser of the game were considered outstanding.

The adventure is set in the world of fairy tales Kerovnia, from trying to escape the player.

Production details

For the content of Rob Steggles was responsible. He formed from the ideas of the Magnetic Scrolls employee a story designed the puzzles and wrote the screen texts.

The programmer for this item were Hugh Steers and Magnetic Scrolls co-founder Ken Gordon.

Magnetic Scrolls was the desire of the publisher Rainbird, some places in the game to add graphics, initially skeptical about. They left by graphic artist Geoff Quilley first for a test to create two graphics. From the result, they were so impressed that they could illustrate the entire adventure of Quilley. The graphics were purely illustrative and are not an exact representation of the game world. They contained no additional information or solution hints for the player. For the making of pixel graphics in 256x135 format used Quilley non-commercial program Neochrome on the Atari ST. The graphics hardware of the Atari ST relied technical limitations: The graphics had a color depth of 4 bits and use indexed colors. So could be used from a total of 512 possible colors in each graph only 16.

Theme music

The Amiga version of the game is known for its music, coming in digital sampled musical instruments used. When the game first appeared, was the Amiga the first home computer that supported the sample technique. The Pawn at that time was the first game that exploited this technical possibilities. The song was composed by John Molloy.