Magnetic scrolls

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Magnetic scrolls
legal form Private
founding 1984
resolution 1992
Seat London (Great Britain)
management Anita Sinclair, Ken Gordon
Branch Software development

Magnetic Scrolls was a British computer game company that gained worldwide fame from 1984 through its text adventures . The most popular games include The Pawn (1985), The Guild of Thieves (1987) and Wonderland (1990), based on Lewis Carroll's tales of Alice in Wonderland .

history

Anita Sinclair and Ken Gordon founded Magnetic Scrolls in 1984 in London . The company developed text adventures which achieved high recognition in the industry and represented a European counterweight to Infocom , the then dominant US developer of text adventures. The success between 1985 and 1990 was based on the one hand on the literary quality and the British humor of the texts, on the other hand on the good quality of the graphics on 8-bit computers such as the Commodore 64 and finally on the parser developed by Magnetic Scrolls . This was at least equal to the reference parser from Infocom both in the recognition of grammatical structures and in the vocabulary, in some respects even superior: For example, it 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 (something like: "use the trowel to plant the marijuana plant in the flower pot"), in which the same word ("plant") appears in three different meanings.

By adding static graphics to selected game scenes from 1986 onwards, unlike Infocom at that time, Magnetic Scrolls set itself apart from the text-only games from Infocom and other contemporary providers. The first work The Pawn became the company's most financially successful game, as the graphics exploited the technical possibilities of the newly released 16-bit home computers Amiga and Atari ST . In the game Jinxter , which appeared in the same year as Guild of Thieves , the illustrations were contributed by several graphic artists and kept in deliberately different styles.

The built-in “hint system” was also innovative. If the player got stuck with a puzzle, he could enter one of the numerous numerical codes from the question-and-answer section of the manual into the parser and received a solution hint depending on the length of the code.

Company founder Sinclair had a good relationship with Tony Rainbird, founder of the publisher Rainbird Software . From then on, Rainbird published the games from Magnetic Scrolls, which fit well with Rainbird's claim to offer high-quality software. To meet the demands, Magnetic Scrolls added still images to their debut The Pawn , which had previously appeared as a pure text adventure for the Sinclair QL , and from then on only published text adventures with graphics (with the exception of the versions for the less powerful ZX Spectrum ). Tony Rainbird left Rainbird in mid-1986, however, and Sinclair did not get along well with his successors Paula Byrne and Paul Hibbard. This had an impact on the sale of Rainbird's parent company Telecomsoft to Microprose in May 1989: Magnetic Scrolls lost its publishing contract. Since the publishing rights were with Microprose and the same stopped the publication, Magnetic Scrolls was without income. Sinclair paid for the financing of the production of the follow-up game Wonderland as well as the running costs out of pocket.

From the 1990s onwards, the company was no longer able to recoup its high production costs through the turnover it achieved. Rob Steggles, the main text author of Magnetic Scrolls in the 1980s, wrote:

“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. [...] ”

And further:

“[L] ate 1989 […], Wonderland had already started and seemed to be going the way of Jinxter in that 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 "The Magnetic Scrolls Collection Vol. 1" was published. which the old games "The Guild of Thieves", "Corruption" and "Fish!" with the technical substructure of Wonderland, the Magnetic Windows Engine. Another part with the rest of the games was announced, but was never released due to the collapsed market for text adventures.

In September 1998 there was one last sign of life for the company when Ken Gordon registered the Internet domain magneticscrolls.com. However, this website has remained unchanged since its registration and is empty with the exception of the company logo. As of July 2011, the page was no longer accessible.

The Strand Games initiative went public in May 2017. Strand Games was founded by Hugh Steers, co-founder of Magnetic Scrolls and a major developer, and Stefan Meier, developer of the Magnetic Scrolls Memorial fansite. The initiative is supported by several former members of the Magnetic Scrolls team, notably Anita Sinclair, Ken Gordon, Rob Steggles and Servan Keondjian. The goal of the non-commercial initiative is to preserve the original games from Magnetic Scrolls and revise them for modern devices. With the public launch of the initiative, a first beta version of the revised classic The Pawn was released. In June 2017, the revised version of The Pawn was officially released. At the same time, it was possible to save the original source code of the games from backup copies on old digital linear tape magnetic tapes. This required a complex and sensational process, in which u. a. the magnetic tapes had to be heated in an oven for several hours at a low temperature. In December 2017, a revised version of the classic The Guild of Thieves was published, which was developed with the help of the rescued source code.

Ludography

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Winnie Forster: "Computer and video game maker" Gameplan, 2008, ISBN 9783000215841 , p. 195
  2. ↑ a b Filfre.net: A Time of Endings, Part 4: Magnetic Scrolls. Retrieved September 13, 2017 .
  3. ↑ Rob Steggles: Magnetic Scrolls Memories
  4. ↑ Strandgames.com: Strand Games. Retrieved May 10, 2017 .
  5. ↑ Magnetic Scrolls Original Games Source Code Recovered! Retrieved December 23, 2017 .
  6. ↑ The Guild of Thieves by Magnetic Scrolls Restored. Retrieved December 23, 2017 .