Clever people
The authors credited on The Hobbit adventure game are Philip Mitchell and Veronika Megler.
Mitchell created the parsing system [called INGLISH] which helped make the game so groundbreaking [also I think he may have devised the novel image rendering system]. Megler was responsible for the location & character design; in effect she had to adapt the book into a game.
There is a very nice recent [2002] interview with Veronika Megler here . I don’t know if Philip Mitchell is still about, actively programming, retired, whatever, which is frustrating, but here is an article someone wrote about him and his games 10 years ago.
Although personal this-is-me style webpages are generally derided [perhaps web logs are changing this perception], I’d still really like it if everyone who had ever published or created anything kept one, just so you could look them up and see what they’d been up to lately.
Downloads
If you’re interested in playing this classic game on a PC, you can download the DOS version from Stephan’s Retrocomputing Site. Of course it’s pretty annoying having to play in full screen CGA [or EGA?] modes, but I’m just glad there’s a version I didn’t have to run in an emulator [funnily enough in order to do screen capture I did have to run it in an emulator - DOSBox, an open source DOS emulator]
