What are your memories of Magnetic Scrolls? Have a shout here :) Thanks for watching, and a big thanks to Wireframe for sponsoring this video: wfmag.cc/kimjustice
I remember drooling over the graphics of the pawn, I think I still had a c64 when it released and the amiga graphics were stunning. it was one of the first adventures I played and back then helped me to learn english far better than school did. I only ever dabbled in the following games though weirdly enough, but I remember trying the magnetic windows versions on pc though yeah, by then we had point & clicks so I never got into those. Always will remember that music from the outro, when that started up on the amiga version I was stunned, because it was a text adventure, those don't have music ;)
@@faile73 Guild of Thieves too :) . Such amazing text and graphics adventures with a truly advanced Parser. I am enjoying the new Monkey Island Game on Series X all the same. Being able to scream around everywhere by holding down the run button was just a dream back on my old PC :) .
More stuff I've never heard of from across the Atlantic. Each and everytime I see Kim upload, I know I'm in for some fascinating stuff I've never, ever heard of.
Great video and thanks for the kind words! The opportunity to remaster the games in the Strandgames project is all you can dream of as a long term fan 😊 The remastering is not limited to rebuilding the games, we are also fixing bugs, removing dead ends and make the games more accessible. Jinxter _was_ cruel, you might want to give it a new try with the remastered version 😉 A small, but important note: Magnetic by Niclas Karlsson was definitely the first interpreter! Niclas paved the way with reverse engineering the engine! Magnetic Scripts is a Magnetic descendant as well. Looking forward to new videos in the series!
Incredible Video, Kim 👍 My Dad (Tony Rainbird) found this the other day and recommended I watched as he enjoyed it, the amount of research you must have had to do to get an informed hour long video together must have been pretty mammoth! I had no idea there was still such an interest in what is now a very obscure corner of video game history, but very happy to see it!
I used to play a lot of text and adventures in the 1980s and would never have thought it would be possible to render these worlds in 4K at 60fps a few decades later.
Games really helped me learn English. I just loved talking to them in longer sentences like "get all except the from the then "… at my young age they almost felt like AI-run worlds without defined limits. I remember Magnetic Scrolls being proud of their parser understanding input like "use the trowel to plant the pot plant in the plant pot". When you actually read the manuals you learned there was way more to decent text adventures than "KILL TROLL" and shit writing (where it least belonged). These days development kits like TADS and Inform make it fairly easy to *start out* at a post-Infocom/MS level.
Fantastic piece of work Kim! I used to love playing the Magnetic Scroll games on the Atari ST back in the day. Brought back lots of memories. Thank you.
Great work, really fantastic to hear about the history of these games. Could never get anywhere with them back in the day but still loved to play them on my Amiga.
The European gaming world is uncharted territory for me, but undoutably one filled with gold mines of games and developers with compellings stories such as this one. As always, thanks Kim for your great work. You are making an Argentinian dude a fan of Euro games, with my backlog constantly expanding with each of your videos. Cheers!
I loved this video, not least because it gave me two surprising pieces of nostalgia Firstly, the use of Twinworld music over the early sections made me smile! That's one of my favourite early games Secondly, Wonderland was a game I owned (on the acorn archimedes) and have never heard anyone else talk about before. I was young and found it rock hard
Agreed. I had 'Wonderland' for my Amiga. I thought it was absolutely brilliant - and loved the layout, windows and gadgets. But couldn't get anywhere with it and eventually gave up. I'd really like to go back and play it now, though!
I'm surprised and disappointed to hear that 'Wonderland' did not sell well. There was a lot of enthusiastic coverage of it in the magazines - and I bought it myself due to all the hype. I was not disappointed. It's a magnificent product. Luckily I had loads of memory on my Amiga so didn't have any problems with the multiple windows. I absolutely loved the interface with all the ingenious gadgets. I loved the point-and-click adventures too - I don't see why both styles of game couldn't exist side-by-side: they offered different experiences. Oh well.
My first game was The Hobbit... Nuff said, I remember seeing Infocom games on Import, big box and fealies included way before they officially came here. And I was very much into Level 9 games. I did not have an ST or Amiga until years after so missed out on the best of these.
Absolutely. I had a C64 with a tape deck. No one had a disk drive. Except of course, the people working for computer magazines - I used to salivate with envy because those magazines never stopped telling us how amazing the Infocom games were! They just kept going on and on about it!
You are sitting on the toilet with your phone on TH-cam. A new Kim Justice video pops up on your feed. What do you want to do? 》Watch video .... one hour and ten minutes pass. Your legs are now dead. Also the lights have gone out because of the cost of living crisis. You have been eaten by a grue. Would you like to play again? 》Most definitely I don't know how to "most" something
If I was still at school before I learnt basic with ",goto" Id have "to subscribe load file SUBSCRIBE " or to "wipe bottom load file BOTTOM FEAT RICK MAIL" Find my comment for relevance
Another excellent video! I feel like Magnetic Windows may have inspired the interface of Legend Entertainment's titles, but it looks like Wonderland and Spellcasting 101 came out at about the same time.
I remember the text adventure i think called " the balrog" that came on an amstrad action tape , it won a competition because it was home made with that text adventure maker. Oh I just remembered the other text adventure I had previously forgotten it was called " dodgey geezers" it was pretty adult for a text adventure.
I remember The Pawn from my Amiga days, 'tho I never actually played it much. Actually, I never played much of most text adventures, except a couple of hours with The Hobbit on C64, and HHG2G, and Bureucracy which I played for slightly more than a couple of hours. I guess I was too young to get on the genre back then. However: I find this TH-cam documentary on Magnetic Scrolls highly entertaining, and of great quality even if the subject is only halfway of nostalgic interest for me. I even fired up The Pawn on my Amiga emulator after watching this... I LOVE the video game documentaries made by Kim Justice. They're always interesting, good researched, and have great narrative. Thank you for making these Kim! (This is my second watchthrough of this, and I've might have commented something similar before, but more comments = more YT exposure, so I'm just helping you know :)
Corruption was very tough and i spent months on it on the amiga and i never completed it...There is a magnetic scrolls memorial site online if anyone is interested.
I had to throw away the front cover from Wonderland today cause my incontinent cat pooed all over it. Funny to see a video featuring this game on the same day! The PC version of Wonderland is great and it ran quite well on my 286 with high resolution, I highly recommend trying out that version.
My condolences on having that lovely artwork ruined - and I hope your cat gets better! I had 'Wonderland' on my Amiga and it was brilliant. I had loads of memory so there was no problem at all - it ran fast and smooth and was a stunning product.
Thanks for making this documentary. I enjoyed it very much. There is not much about Magnetic Scrolls on the Internet, but they deserve to be remembered.
"Wonderland" was by no means revolutionary. The first text adventures with a windowed interface were produced by ICOM, starting with "Deja Vu" in 1985 (it was ported to Amiga in 1986).
I always find your videos so relaxing. Lovely tours of video game history that are beyond the scope of my own experience having only been born in 85. It still fascinates me to see and hear how all these pioneers made their marks, and really set the groundwork for some of the developers and franchises which came in the years following, which I'm more familiar with. Anyway, thanks again for the history lessons, Kim!
I live in the USA but this video still brought back memories for me. I played the C-64 versions of The Pawn, Guild of Thieves, Jinxter and Corruption. I own them all still. I remember how awesome it was to play a text adventure with graphics after getting used to the white text on gray background of the C-64 Infocom titles I was playing at the time. But games from Sierra and Lucasfilm Games killed text adventures for me and I never really played them again.
I hear you. When the LucasArts point-and-click adventures arrived, I considered them to be very dumbed-down because they spoon-fed the verbs to you and you just had to click on them! What was the point in that?!! Of course, I went on to greatly enjoy the LucasArts games - and like yourself, I did not return to the text adventures after that...
With regards to infocom, I know they didn't get officially distributed in the UK under their own branding until the activision deal, but I distinctly recal Commodore rebadged some of the early games like Zork - they were widely available in stores that actually sold disk games and had assumed they were Commode UK stock rather than imports? If so, Infocom games hit the UK around 1983.
A company called Telarium released graphics adventures in the 80s based on books like Fahrenheit 451, Amazon, Nine Princes in Amber, etc. Each game came with a booklet that listed every verb acceptable by the parser, the parser was also as good as infocom's, so you didn't have to work out the verb, but rather what verb to use. I have all the games in my collection to this day! They were disk only, but I had a C64 1541, so I had no problem. Telarium, to this day, is practically unknown, yet the quality of these adventures were amazing! Also, interpreters are basically algorithms, so if these games had continued, AI in all games would have been greatly improved!
As a lifelong text adventure fan this is good good stuff. You don't get a lot of text adventure content on the retrotubes. Also, Fawlty Towers adventure??!
So well researched, KJ. Even as someone who lived through it all and has read a few articles on the company/games since, I learnt things. So well told, too!
Fantastic video Kim brought back so many memories - had to leave a comment when you mentioned 'tie shirt/use hoe as a lever to shift the boulder' such a challenging puzzle/solution that one stopped me in my tracks for days !! 30+ years ago! Keep up the amazing work - your research/quality is outstanding.
There's honestly something really feel good about a company shuttering without bankruptcy or scandal, just doing what they wanted for as long as it was viable and then moving on to other things once it wasn't.
At 12 years old and owning an Acorn Electron these games were a staple diet. Moving on to BBC it continued until in 1988 my dad bought a green screen Amstrad PCW and I was blown away by Magnetic Scrolls graphics on Fish... Looking back I was easily pleased!
Great piece as always Kim and although I like the idea of text adventures, my experience was pretty short and not great.... Go north - you cannot Go south - you cannot Go east - you cannot Go west - you are dead Turn off
On the micros, adventure games generally didn't take too long to get through, but as we got into the 16 bit era, having disks full of graphics and descriptive text just needed a new way to play. The Lucasarts or Monkey Island adventures would have become quite tedious with text parsers only.
I enjoyed both text adventures and the LucasArts games. Both styles of gameplay offered their own unique experience. I had no problem with this - and it's a pity they couldn't have existed side-by-side.
Big props to Kim for a great video. Also, if you have any interest in text adventures (or early microcomputing gaming history) I cannot recommend the Digital Antiquarian enough.
Hey 👋 brilliant thanks...a real nostalgia trip for me...I remember buying a copy of " The Hobbit " for I think £6 ?...., also it came with a copy of the book itself! It took forever to load ...sometimes you'd get the dreaded " r-type loading error "....another hour of my life I can't get back...I didn't even get anywhere in the game as I would just get stuck on about the third screen ...something about "...my foul gluttony ...."....I was into dand and MERP so I was up for it...also Kim.. did you ever know about the RTTY program for the spectrum that let you connect the spectrum to a ham/ amateur radio and it would convert I think morse code or some type of teletype and show the text on screen , we had a Band W TV!!...I reckon it's pretty rare...the games were soooooo difficult too....I never completed one game. I remember frankie goes to Hollywood...Movie...ant attack...attic attack....alchemist....all utterly impossible for me. I always returned to the tabletop gaming...rune quest with lead !!! Figurines and copies of White Dwarf...keep the great videos coming 😀 👌
Oh, I remember there were so damn many of these text adventures in the 80s here in Spain. Dinamic even started a a brand under its company called AD (Aventuras Dinamic) to release more of this gaff and claptrap. I really don't know if anyone even bought them.
Thanks for broadening our experience of video games in a very professional way. You deserve a much bigger odience, I for instance follow you from France. All the best for the futur....
Wonderful stuff as always Kim. You're one of the best documentary directors on YT hands down. I'm glad Anita was able to persevere and overcome so much while working in that industry. Those "interviews" from back in the day really show the toxic sexism still rife in the industry. Kind of ironic considering Ada Lovelace was the first programmer and men only came into the industry after her. Sad that we still have so much to overcome in the industry, but documentaries like this really give me hope. She managed to create something beautiful which was enjoyed by a lot of people. Thank you Kim for your awesome work.
I see your point . I'm sure she could look after herself. Strongly independent and well raised she was more than capable of making any clumsy inappropriate remarks dead in the air. I doubt the men interviewing her would ever say such tactless sexist comments in her presence. It was only from the safety of the journalists' editorial office that any immature ("toxic" is a rather hyperbolic and contemporary word for this kind of interaction ) or lame rhetoric was used. As Kim rightly states, this was 30+ years ago and being cringe was not seen as cringe-worthy yet. "Viz" adult comic would not be funny now for example,although I never thought it was, sold well until the mid 90s. A young man would not be seen with similar material now. In public anyway.
This was an excellent Video! I was such an Adventure Fan in the 80ies. It became my favorite Genre von 1984-1989. I hope there will be other Software Houses that created such wonderful games in some of your next Videos. Level 9, Mandarin Software, Melbourne House, Adventure International, Delta 4, Interplay, Weltenschmiede and so many more had great Adventures!
This was interesting. I never got into text adventures. I played Leisure Suit Larry 1 a bit, and found its text parser too frustrating. After that, i had no desire to play anything with a text parser. What i find surprising, is that Magnetic Scrolls didnt try to make visual novel like games, before the end.
Absolutely loved this!!! Thank you so much. I almost found a game I’ve been searching for for over 20 years. I thought it was CORRUPTION but my memory has it as a text graphic adventure set in 1950s America.
The first computers I ever used were at school. I think they were the IBM 5150. Not sure. I remember playing Carnival, Moon patrol, gas can, a martial arts game where you needed to invade a mountain fortress, and this fish games where you can place as various sizes and choose to eat others or run away. I really wish I could remember what computers those were. I know they had the floppy drives outside of the machine stacked together. I don't remember them having any kind of text adventures. Ah memories.
Sierra was still doing great in 1989 despite all of their adventure games having command line interfaces, so I could easily imagine someone at that time still believing in text adventures. Hell, there was a big hit game in that year on the Apple II of all things, namely Prince of Persia, and I think the biggest game of that year was Tetris?
You completely forgot the major produucer of text adventures - Artic who produced Adventure a - g. The names will be found on the Internet. Most were written by Charles Cecil, using Artics own code except G (Ground Zero) which was written by Colin Smith using The Quill, and Eye of Bain which used an unknown system and The Golden Apple.
I always enjoy all of your vintage games publisher histories Kim, but particularly enjoyed this one - for all of TH-cam's infinite coverage of vintage games, the humble ol' text adventure is the one genre that so often gets sidelined. Much due to plain ol' text alone not being that fancy to make a TH-cam video out of I suppose, but an excellent history such as this one shows that the interesting tales that go with them are still there to be covered. I would probably debate that in the early days if people were playing a text adventure it would likely be on the Speccy - the BBC B (and by extension, Electron) was home a plethora of them, although I'm a lifelong Beeb owner/fan so I'm maybe slightly biased (and as with so many systems, for all of the really good text adventures, the was piles of right old tat, mostly of the home brew or quickly knocked up magazine cover variety). But for all of those wonderful very early games I first experienced on the BBC B my Dad (ahem) "borrowed from work" on Christmas, it was the text adventure that really caught the imagination of 6/7 year old me (in my case, a little known BBC adventure called 'Wheel of Fortune'). To be able to converse with the computer, to type something in and to eventually solve puzzles... it's a "had to be there" thing of a generation, but I shall never forget that sheer magic. On top of that, some of the imaginative ideas and humour (and "Britishness" put into them) are often a joy to behold. Would really like to see you cover some of the other classic text adventure houses and the stories and personalities what went with them. (By the by, this video has also reminded me of 'Wonderland', which I had long forgotten as being on the first 386 PC that some years later, by Dad again "borrowed from work" (spot the recurring theme!), which I enjoyed but vaguely recall being a buggy install and haven't played for YEARS... I must track that down again and give it a proper play!)
I'll love to see a graphical text adventure that accepts voice input and is smart enough to be able to parse all the different ways to say the same thing. Then I'll through that on my TV and bark command all night.
Point and click adventures were no replacement for IF. But in the early eighties text adventures were good video games but by the nineties or so they stopped being video games all together. I personally like simple parser games, they are a bit of puzzle something like a crossword.
"Can you pass me the willy"......Anne sinclair Im not touching that one....however There is an ANNE SINCLAIR (Doubtful same person) that features there tune on SEGA TOURING CAR. I play it all the time at whilst driving but can't remember the name of the tune.... Is it called "don't drop me baby"? Usually played on stage 2 or 3 on sega touring car. Very catchy....like the other one by channel X. For the first racing track level on sega touring car.
For me, it's easy to see why Fish flopped. The name isn't exactly selling the game to you. And you play as a fish. People probably figured that too back then
What do you want to know? It will always be remembered as one of the most important 4WD ( hence " Quattro " ) cars of the 80s and it was a very successful crossover to the Rally sport when it was a greatly more open and dangerous sport, the crowds walked out and in front of the car until the last minute..there were some nasty accidents. Another classic car of that period was the Metro Turbo, utterly ridiculously overpowered but it was a winner..anyway, you were able to buy the Audi Quattro and drive it on the normal road, much under powered tho 🤪 I think that it also had a good set of round spot lights for the Rally look..I love 80s cars...probably my favourite is the lethal Porsche 911 Turbo with the engine in the boot, the cornering was....well it needed to be treated with respect...also BMW 312i...just the inclusion of the ( i ) on the badge meant so much 😀
Interesting stuff, thanks :) Well, as someone who grew up with text adventures (Acornsoft then Level 9, mostly) I can say the reason I never bought "Fish" was partly because of the euw cover-art, which appealed about as much as that "Super Bust A Move" art with the baby, but mostly because it sounded too silly and "out there." I figured that even text adventures set in familiar worlds, governed by familiar rules, could often be ridiculously abstract and obscure - more a case of getting in sync with the author's head than actually solving puzzles _logically_ - so a game that broke most of the rules of reality would likely be an absolute nightmare of daft and illogical "how was I ever supposed to guess that?" solutions. And I didn't buy "Wonderland" - despite being intrigued with the windows GUI - because it looked like a mess and seemed like it would be a pain in the arse to play, with windows obscuring other windows. It can be bad enough on modern systems, with much higher screen resolutions, to get multiple windows all sized and positioned the exact way you want them, so what hope in those low-res days? Still, I did buy "Jinxter" (Amiga ver.) and that seems to have been their worst game, so what do I know? :)
The Pawn was far more successful on the Atari ST. In 1986 the Amiga was very much the minority platform and would be for a couple more years. Even the A500 was twice the price of the Atari ST in 1987 and did not include a TV modulator
Great doc. I was never a text adventure fan, too much of a div for that sort of thing. I started with The Hobbit and got nowhere (the book was a nice freebie though). I did try and write my own (in basic on the Speccy (without The Quill)) called Pit of Doom but it never got past the first screen! I love these docs about the classic UK era because although I was a massive fan and player back in the Spectrum/c64 era I really knew nothing about the behind the scenes stuff.
Great video. Livre magnética scrolls games, but as a non native English speaker i would get stuck. Texto and graphics adventures were the main reason to learn English. Would love to see a legend entretainment vídeo. My fave if publisher. Can t understand why noone males a if engine like Legend ent...
What are your memories of Magnetic Scrolls? Have a shout here :) Thanks for watching, and a big thanks to Wireframe for sponsoring this video: wfmag.cc/kimjustice
I remember drooling over the graphics of the pawn, I think I still had a c64 when it released and the amiga graphics were stunning. it was one of the first adventures I played and back then helped me to learn english far better than school did. I only ever dabbled in the following games though weirdly enough, but I remember trying the magnetic windows versions on pc though yeah, by then we had point & clicks so I never got into those.
Always will remember that music from the outro, when that started up on the amiga version I was stunned, because it was a text adventure, those don't have music ;)
I have none, but I love your content so it doesn't matter :)
As a child I loved their games so much that I started writing an interpreter for them as an adult. :)
Fat.
@@faile73 Guild of Thieves too :) . Such amazing text and graphics adventures with a truly advanced Parser. I am enjoying the new Monkey Island Game on Series X all the same. Being able to scream around everywhere by holding down the run button was just a dream back on my old PC :) .
More stuff I've never heard of from across the Atlantic. Each and everytime I see Kim upload, I know I'm in for some fascinating stuff I've never, ever heard of.
Great video and thanks for the kind words! The opportunity to remaster the games in the Strandgames project is all you can dream of as a long term fan 😊 The remastering is not limited to rebuilding the games, we are also fixing bugs, removing dead ends and make the games more accessible. Jinxter _was_ cruel, you might want to give it a new try with the remastered version 😉
A small, but important note: Magnetic by Niclas Karlsson was definitely the first interpreter! Niclas paved the way with reverse engineering the engine! Magnetic Scripts is a Magnetic descendant as well.
Looking forward to new videos in the series!
Incredible Video, Kim 👍 My Dad (Tony Rainbird) found this the other day and recommended I watched as he enjoyed it, the amount of research you must have had to do to get an informed hour long video together must have been pretty mammoth! I had no idea there was still such an interest in what is now a very obscure corner of video game history, but very happy to see it!
Glad you and your father enjoyed it! Really chuffed to hear that, thank you. :)
I used to play a lot of text and adventures in the 1980s and would never have thought it would be possible to render these worlds in 4K at 60fps a few decades later.
Nice footnote Kim.
Glad this isn't forgotten too time itself...
So yeah- salute.
Love these long format deep dives into the games and developers from the past... keep 'em coming Kim. Great stuff!
Don’t know where Kim finds the time for the huge amount of research that must go into these documentaries! Excellent work as always! 👍
Games really helped me learn English. I just loved talking to them in longer sentences like "get all except the from the then "… at my young age they almost felt like AI-run worlds without defined limits. I remember Magnetic Scrolls being proud of their parser understanding input like "use the trowel to plant the pot plant in the plant pot". When you actually read the manuals you learned there was way more to decent text adventures than "KILL TROLL" and shit writing (where it least belonged). These days development kits like TADS and Inform make it fairly easy to *start out* at a post-Infocom/MS level.
Kim you are really doing a great job lately. Impressed massively
Fantastic piece of work Kim! I used to love playing the Magnetic Scroll games on the Atari ST back in the day. Brought back lots of memories. Thank you.
Great work, really fantastic to hear about the history of these games. Could never get anywhere with them back in the day but still loved to play them on my Amiga.
Great stuff Kim. Your British micro history documentaries are among the best on TH-cam.
Another amazing video from Kim!
The European gaming world is uncharted territory for me, but undoutably one filled with gold mines of games and developers with compellings stories such as this one. As always, thanks Kim for your great work. You are making an Argentinian dude a fan of Euro games, with my backlog constantly expanding with each of your videos. Cheers!
I loved this video, not least because it gave me two surprising pieces of nostalgia
Firstly, the use of Twinworld music over the early sections made me smile! That's one of my favourite early games
Secondly, Wonderland was a game I owned (on the acorn archimedes) and have never heard anyone else talk about before. I was young and found it rock hard
Agreed. I had 'Wonderland' for my Amiga. I thought it was absolutely brilliant - and loved the layout, windows and gadgets. But couldn't get anywhere with it and eventually gave up. I'd really like to go back and play it now, though!
I'm surprised and disappointed to hear that 'Wonderland' did not sell well. There was a lot of enthusiastic coverage of it in the magazines - and I bought it myself due to all the hype. I was not disappointed. It's a magnificent product. Luckily I had loads of memory on my Amiga so didn't have any problems with the multiple windows. I absolutely loved the interface with all the ingenious gadgets. I loved the point-and-click adventures too - I don't see why both styles of game couldn't exist side-by-side: they offered different experiences. Oh well.
My first game was The Hobbit... Nuff said, I remember seeing Infocom games on Import, big box and fealies included way before they officially came here. And I was very much into Level 9 games. I did not have an ST or Amiga until years after so missed out on the best of these.
spent the 1st 30 min thinking they made a lude game... ahhh pawwwn, geez
The thing about Infocom games was you needed a disk drive and as we all remember only the rich kids had disk drives in the early/mid 1980s.
Absolutely. I had a C64 with a tape deck. No one had a disk drive. Except of course, the people working for computer magazines - I used to salivate with envy because those magazines never stopped telling us how amazing the Infocom games were! They just kept going on and on about it!
You are sitting on the toilet with your phone on TH-cam. A new Kim Justice video pops up on your feed.
What do you want to do?
》Watch video
.... one hour and ten minutes pass.
Your legs are now dead. Also the lights have gone out because of the cost of living crisis. You have been eaten by a grue.
Would you like to play again?
》Most definitely
I don't know how to "most" something
If I was still at school before I learnt basic with ",goto"
Id have "to subscribe load file SUBSCRIBE " or to "wipe bottom load file BOTTOM FEAT RICK MAIL"
Find my comment for relevance
Eaten by a grue whilst doing a number 2 what a hullaballoo
Another great journalistic reportage on an unsung hero of the golden age of games. Huzzah!
Another excellent video! I feel like Magnetic Windows may have inspired the interface of Legend Entertainment's titles, but it looks like Wonderland and Spellcasting 101 came out at about the same time.
Guild Of Thieves. Typing lots of swear words when getting stuck. Those are my greatest memories 😇🕹👌
Great video Kim, and thanks for The Classic Adventurer shout-out and link!
This was excellent... I really enjoyed this deep dive on a genre that I'm really getting into lately. Great work Kim!
Fantastic film Kim, well done!
I remember the text adventure i think called " the balrog" that came on an amstrad action tape , it won a competition because it was home made with that text adventure maker. Oh I just remembered the other text adventure I had previously forgotten it was called " dodgey geezers" it was pretty adult for a text adventure.
The balrog and the cat, by the Late great John Wilson of Zenobi software fame. Made with the Quill, on a Zx Spectrum IIRC.
I remember The Pawn from my Amiga days, 'tho I never actually played it much. Actually, I never played much of most text adventures, except a couple of hours with The Hobbit on C64, and HHG2G, and Bureucracy which I played for slightly more than a couple of hours. I guess I was too young to get on the genre back then. However: I find this TH-cam documentary on Magnetic Scrolls highly entertaining, and of great quality even if the subject is only halfway of nostalgic interest for me. I even fired up The Pawn on my Amiga emulator after watching this... I LOVE the video game documentaries made by Kim Justice. They're always interesting, good researched, and have great narrative. Thank you for making these Kim!
(This is my second watchthrough of this, and I've might have commented something similar before, but more comments = more YT exposure, so I'm just helping you know :)
Corruption was very tough and i spent months on it on the amiga and i never completed it...There is a magnetic scrolls memorial site online if anyone is interested.
I had to throw away the front cover from Wonderland today cause my incontinent cat pooed all over it. Funny to see a video featuring this game on the same day!
The PC version of Wonderland is great and it ran quite well on my 286 with high resolution, I highly recommend trying out that version.
Aww mate. Ouch.
My condolences on having that lovely artwork ruined - and I hope your cat gets better! I had 'Wonderland' on my Amiga and it was brilliant. I had loads of memory so there was no problem at all - it ran fast and smooth and was a stunning product.
Thanks for making this documentary. I enjoyed it very much. There is not much about Magnetic Scrolls on the Internet, but they deserve to be remembered.
"Wonderland" was by no means revolutionary. The first text adventures with a windowed interface were produced by ICOM, starting with "Deja Vu" in 1985 (it was ported to Amiga in 1986).
YOU ARE AMAZING ; thanks for doin real work
Been absolutely loving this series
I always find your videos so relaxing. Lovely tours of video game history that are beyond the scope of my own experience having only been born in 85. It still fascinates me to see and hear how all these pioneers made their marks, and really set the groundwork for some of the developers and franchises which came in the years following, which I'm more familiar with. Anyway, thanks again for the history lessons, Kim!
I live in the USA but this video still brought back memories for me. I played the C-64 versions of The Pawn, Guild of Thieves, Jinxter and Corruption. I own them all still. I remember how awesome it was to play a text adventure with graphics after getting used to the white text on gray background of the C-64 Infocom titles I was playing at the time.
But games from Sierra and Lucasfilm Games killed text adventures for me and I never really played them again.
I hear you. When the LucasArts point-and-click adventures arrived, I considered them to be very dumbed-down because they spoon-fed the verbs to you and you just had to click on them! What was the point in that?!!
Of course, I went on to greatly enjoy the LucasArts games - and like yourself, I did not return to the text adventures after that...
With regards to infocom, I know they didn't get officially distributed in the UK under their own branding until the activision deal, but I distinctly recal Commodore rebadged some of the early games like Zork - they were widely available in stores that actually sold disk games and had assumed they were Commode UK stock rather than imports? If so, Infocom games hit the UK around 1983.
A company called Telarium released graphics adventures in the 80s based on books like Fahrenheit 451, Amazon, Nine Princes in Amber, etc. Each game came with a booklet that listed every verb acceptable by the parser, the parser was also as good as infocom's, so you didn't have to work out the verb, but rather what verb to use. I have all the games in my collection to this day! They were disk only, but I had a C64 1541, so I had no problem. Telarium, to this day, is practically unknown, yet the quality of these adventures were amazing! Also, interpreters are basically algorithms, so if these games had continued, AI in all games would have been greatly improved!
Also released on the PC, and the company was also known as Trillium.
As a lifelong text adventure fan this is good good stuff. You don't get a lot of text adventure content on the retrotubes. Also, Fawlty Towers adventure??!
I'd love to watch a Kim's documentary about another british adventure house: St Bride's School. Its story is ... um... fascinating
Is that the cult?
@@medes5597 among other things ;)
I don't know how you do it, but I'm glad you do. Many nights late to bed watching your videos, and I love it. Thanks!!
So well researched, KJ. Even as someone who lived through it all and has read a few articles on the company/games since, I learnt things. So well told, too!
Brilliant work Kim.
Fantastic video Kim brought back so many memories - had to leave a comment when you mentioned 'tie shirt/use hoe as a lever to shift the boulder' such a challenging puzzle/solution that one stopped me in my tracks for days !! 30+ years ago! Keep up the amazing work - your research/quality is outstanding.
proper good vid, cheeeeeyarz Kim!👍
My first encounter .. The Pawn on Atari ST .. sometime in mid to late 80s.
I enjoy text adventures almost as much as I enjoy graphical adventures. Thank you for making this episode.
There's honestly something really feel good about a company shuttering without bankruptcy or scandal, just doing what they wanted for as long as it was viable and then moving on to other things once it wasn't.
Music from Twinworld, thanks for those memories.
At 12 years old and owning an Acorn Electron these games were a staple diet. Moving on to BBC it continued until in 1988 my dad bought a green screen Amstrad PCW and I was blown away by Magnetic Scrolls graphics on Fish... Looking back I was easily pleased!
Great piece as always Kim and although I like the idea of text adventures, my experience was pretty short and not great....
Go north - you cannot
Go south - you cannot
Go east - you cannot
Go west - you are dead
Turn off
Get ye flask
On the micros, adventure games generally didn't take too long to get through, but as we got into the 16 bit era, having disks full of graphics and descriptive text just needed a new way to play. The Lucasarts or Monkey Island adventures would have become quite tedious with text parsers only.
I enjoyed both text adventures and the LucasArts games. Both styles of gameplay offered their own unique experience. I had no problem with this - and it's a pity they couldn't have existed side-by-side.
Big props to Kim for a great video. Also, if you have any interest in text adventures (or early microcomputing gaming history) I cannot recommend the Digital Antiquarian enough.
Thanks for the tip!
Hey 👋 brilliant thanks...a real nostalgia trip for me...I remember buying a copy of " The Hobbit " for I think £6 ?...., also it came with a copy of the book itself! It took forever to load ...sometimes you'd get the dreaded " r-type loading error "....another hour of my life I can't get back...I didn't even get anywhere in the game as I would just get stuck on about the third screen ...something about "...my foul gluttony ...."....I was into dand and MERP so I was up for it...also Kim.. did you ever know about the RTTY program for the spectrum that let you connect the spectrum to a ham/ amateur radio and it would convert I think morse code or some type of teletype and show the text on screen , we had a Band W TV!!...I reckon it's pretty rare...the games were soooooo difficult too....I never completed one game. I remember frankie goes to Hollywood...Movie...ant attack...attic attack....alchemist....all utterly impossible for me. I always returned to the tabletop gaming...rune quest with lead !!! Figurines and copies of White Dwarf...keep the great videos coming 😀 👌
Oh, I remember there were so damn many of these text adventures in the 80s here in Spain. Dinamic even started a a brand under its company called AD (Aventuras Dinamic) to release more of this gaff and claptrap. I really don't know if anyone even bought them.
Adventuras AD's last game, _Chichén Itzá,_ was released in 1992, so someone in Spain must have been buying them!
Thanks for broadening our experience of video games in a very professional way.
You deserve a much bigger odience, I for instance follow you from France.
All the best for the futur....
Great work Kim. Thanks for all the great videos!
Wonderful stuff as always Kim. You're one of the best documentary directors on YT hands down. I'm glad Anita was able to persevere and overcome so much while working in that industry. Those "interviews" from back in the day really show the toxic sexism still rife in the industry. Kind of ironic considering Ada Lovelace was the first programmer and men only came into the industry after her. Sad that we still have so much to overcome in the industry, but documentaries like this really give me hope. She managed to create something beautiful which was enjoyed by a lot of people. Thank you Kim for your awesome work.
I see your point . I'm sure she could look after herself. Strongly independent and well raised she was more than capable of making any clumsy inappropriate remarks dead in the air. I doubt the men interviewing her would ever say such tactless sexist comments in her presence. It was only from the safety of the journalists' editorial office that any immature ("toxic" is a rather hyperbolic and contemporary word for this kind of interaction ) or lame rhetoric was used. As Kim rightly states, this was 30+ years ago and being cringe was not seen as cringe-worthy yet. "Viz" adult comic would not be funny now for example,although I never thought it was, sold well until the mid 90s. A young man would not be seen with similar material now. In public anyway.
This was an excellent Video! I was such an Adventure Fan in the 80ies. It became my favorite Genre von 1984-1989. I hope there will be other Software Houses that created such wonderful games in some of your next Videos. Level 9, Mandarin Software, Melbourne House, Adventure International, Delta 4, Interplay, Weltenschmiede and so many more had great Adventures!
Thank you, Kim. Amazing work
Really interesting stuff Kim - I love these in depth histories!
Amazing stuff Kim! Thanks!
This was interesting. I never got into text adventures. I played Leisure Suit Larry 1 a bit, and found its text parser too frustrating. After that, i had no desire to play anything with a text parser. What i find surprising, is that Magnetic Scrolls didnt try to make visual novel like games, before the end.
Absolutely loved this!!! Thank you so much. I almost found a game I’ve been searching for for over 20 years. I thought it was CORRUPTION but my memory has it as a text graphic adventure set in 1950s America.
I used to love The Pawn on Amiga. It had that cool acustic guitar song at the title screen.
This video proofes it. The Internet is for PAWN.
What a great illustration at 1:05:00 Looks very reminiscent of Darkest Dungeon.
The first computers I ever used were at school. I think they were the IBM 5150. Not sure. I remember playing Carnival, Moon patrol, gas can, a martial arts game where you needed to invade a mountain fortress, and this fish games where you can place as various sizes and choose to eat others or run away. I really wish I could remember what computers those were. I know they had the floppy drives outside of the machine stacked together. I don't remember them having any kind of text adventures. Ah memories.
I do have to say, a documentary about MUD's would be a nice followup. Games like Aardwolf are still alive and kicking
48:08 Is it just me, or does the Mad Hatter on the box of Wonderland look like Michael Heseltine...?
Quill was just a little bit light on documentation, but GAC and STAC were incredible...
Sierra was still doing great in 1989 despite all of their adventure games having command line interfaces, so I could easily imagine someone at that time still believing in text adventures. Hell, there was a big hit game in that year on the Apple II of all things, namely Prince of Persia, and I think the biggest game of that year was Tetris?
Was hoping for a Kim Justice documentary about text adventures...Thank you! 😎✌️❤️
Great stuff! I'll tell 'ya, watching your docs, you are getting your money's worth out of that commercial with Clive jumping over the computers!
You completely forgot the major produucer of text adventures - Artic who produced Adventure a - g. The names will be found on the Internet. Most were written by Charles Cecil, using Artics own code except G (Ground Zero) which was written by Colin Smith using The Quill, and Eye of Bain which used an unknown system and The Golden Apple.
Green and black on the CPC...still loved it, but my dad had to kick me off all the time for work...
Great video. I have the boxed version of Fish! for the ST and loved it. Where is the music that plays over the end credits taken from?
I always enjoy all of your vintage games publisher histories Kim, but particularly enjoyed this one - for all of TH-cam's infinite coverage of vintage games, the humble ol' text adventure is the one genre that so often gets sidelined. Much due to plain ol' text alone not being that fancy to make a TH-cam video out of I suppose, but an excellent history such as this one shows that the interesting tales that go with them are still there to be covered.
I would probably debate that in the early days if people were playing a text adventure it would likely be on the Speccy - the BBC B (and by extension, Electron) was home a plethora of them, although I'm a lifelong Beeb owner/fan so I'm maybe slightly biased (and as with so many systems, for all of the really good text adventures, the was piles of right old tat, mostly of the home brew or quickly knocked up magazine cover variety).
But for all of those wonderful very early games I first experienced on the BBC B my Dad (ahem) "borrowed from work" on Christmas, it was the text adventure that really caught the imagination of 6/7 year old me (in my case, a little known BBC adventure called 'Wheel of Fortune'). To be able to converse with the computer, to type something in and to eventually solve puzzles... it's a "had to be there" thing of a generation, but I shall never forget that sheer magic. On top of that, some of the imaginative ideas and humour (and "Britishness" put into them) are often a joy to behold.
Would really like to see you cover some of the other classic text adventure houses and the stories and personalities what went with them.
(By the by, this video has also reminded me of 'Wonderland', which I had long forgotten as being on the first 386 PC that some years later, by Dad again "borrowed from work" (spot the recurring theme!), which I enjoyed but vaguely recall being a buggy install and haven't played for YEARS... I must track that down again and give it a proper play!)
Another awesome video.
Thanks
That was really interesting and really good!
I'll love to see a graphical text adventure that accepts voice input and is smart enough to be able to parse all the different ways to say the same thing. Then I'll through that on my TV and bark command all night.
Point and click adventures were no replacement for IF. But in the early eighties text adventures were good video games but by the nineties or so they stopped being video games all together. I personally like simple parser games, they are a bit of puzzle something like a crossword.
"Can you pass me the willy"......Anne sinclair
Im not touching that one....however
There is an ANNE SINCLAIR (Doubtful same person) that features there tune on SEGA TOURING CAR.
I play it all the time at whilst driving but can't remember the name of the tune....
Is it called "don't drop me baby"?
Usually played on stage 2 or 3 on sega touring car.
Very catchy....like the other one by channel X. For the first racing track level on sega touring car.
I used to love the Keith Campbell adventure section in C&VG
Excellent, as ever.
No interest in text adventures but for reasons unknown I think this is the best thing you have done
YES. Can't explain why but I loved this story. (and I've seen almost every other KJ video)
For me, it's easy to see why Fish flopped. The name isn't exactly selling the game to you. And you play as a fish. People probably figured that too back then
Exactly. I didn't buy it for that very reason. I wanted fantasy and mystery from my text adventures. I did not want a fish.
I want to know more about the Audio Quatro...what a car XD
What do you want to know? It will always be remembered as one of the most important 4WD ( hence " Quattro " ) cars of the 80s and it was a very successful crossover to the Rally sport when it was a greatly more open and dangerous sport, the crowds walked out and in front of the car until the last minute..there were some nasty accidents. Another classic car of that period was the Metro Turbo, utterly ridiculously overpowered but it was a winner..anyway, you were able to buy the Audi Quattro and drive it on the normal road, much under powered tho 🤪 I think that it also had a good set of round spot lights for the Rally look..I love 80s cars...probably my favourite is the lethal Porsche 911 Turbo with the engine in the boot, the cornering was....well it needed to be treated with respect...also BMW 312i...just the inclusion of the ( i ) on the badge meant so much 😀
Interesting stuff, thanks :) Well, as someone who grew up with text adventures (Acornsoft then Level 9, mostly) I can say the reason I never bought "Fish" was partly because of the euw cover-art, which appealed about as much as that "Super Bust A Move" art with the baby, but mostly because it sounded too silly and "out there."
I figured that even text adventures set in familiar worlds, governed by familiar rules, could often be ridiculously abstract and obscure - more a case of getting in sync with the author's head than actually solving puzzles _logically_ - so a game that broke most of the rules of reality would likely be an absolute nightmare of daft and illogical "how was I ever supposed to guess that?" solutions.
And I didn't buy "Wonderland" - despite being intrigued with the windows GUI - because it looked like a mess and seemed like it would be a pain in the arse to play, with windows obscuring other windows. It can be bad enough on modern systems, with much higher screen resolutions, to get multiple windows all sized and positioned the exact way you want them, so what hope in those low-res days?
Still, I did buy "Jinxter" (Amiga ver.) and that seems to have been their worst game, so what do I know? :)
The Pawn was far more successful on the Atari ST. In 1986 the Amiga was very much the minority platform and would be for a couple more years. Even the A500 was twice the price of the Atari ST in 1987 and did not include a TV modulator
In Australia the ST was $100 more but often was bundled with some sort of music keyboard program.
Absolutely love this video
It's weird to think that there were commercially released text adventures around the time to Sega Genesis came out
Great doc. I was never a text adventure fan, too much of a div for that sort of thing. I started with The Hobbit and got nowhere (the book was a nice freebie though). I did try and write my own (in basic on the Speccy (without The Quill)) called Pit of Doom but it never got past the first screen! I love these docs about the classic UK era because although I was a massive fan and player back in the Spectrum/c64 era I really knew nothing about the behind the scenes stuff.
Did anyone else get that Usbourne book on creating text adventures? It had the code listing for a haunted house game in it.
Your insights are unparalleled.
Great video. Livre magnética scrolls games, but as a non native English speaker i would get stuck. Texto and graphics adventures were the main reason to learn English. Would love to see a legend entretainment vídeo. My fave if publisher. Can t understand why noone males a if engine like Legend ent...
I had a hard time staying focused in the beginning because of the Twinworld music haha
What is the music at the end credits of the video?