The Hobbit for the ZX Spectrum: a text adventure with interactive NPCs from 1982

After having a Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit movie marathon this weekend, I fired up a ZX Spectrum emulator and relived playing the text adventure game The Hobbit. I shared some screenshots in this thread on Twitter here:

The Hobbit was released in 1982 for the ZX Spectrum. For it’s time, it has some interesting features, like NPCs that wandered around, and language parsing of statements allowing you to interact with the NPCs, like ‘say to Elrond “read map”‘.

Given the unusual (for the time) ability to interact with the NPCs, there even exists a ZX Spectrum emulator specifically to play The Hobbit, which also shows the state of the interactive characters and objects in the game as you play. This is well worth taking a look at to get an insight into how the game works – quite an achievement for an 8 bit game in only 48k: http://members.aon.at/~ehesch1/wl/wl.htm