About Magnetic Scrolls

• Founded: 1984 by Anita Sinclair and Ken Gordon

• Home: 1 Chapel Court, London SE1 1HH, England

• Distribution:From 1985-1989 their games were published by Rainbird, a label of British Telecomsoft. When Telecomsoft was bought by Microprose (UK) in early 1989, Magnetic Scrolls did not participate in the merger and took the distribution of the classic games in their own hands. They bought the remaining stock and distributed the games themselves through Inter-Mediates Ltd. until the stock was sold (see note, taken from Fish! box for the Archimedes). During that time they found Virgin Games as the distributor for the upcoming Wonderland and later for the Magnetic Scrolls Collection.
  
  How to identify an Inter-Mediates release?
  
  

  The Inter-Mediates boxes that Magnetic Scrolls sold after the Telecomsoft buyout differ in several aspects from the original Rainbird releases. Since the Inter-Mediates boxes do not necessarily show all these characteristics, they can not be more than indicators:
  The box has a sticker on the backside reading: Magnetic Scrolls c/o Inter-Mediates Ltd 2 South Block The Maltings Sawbridgeworth Herts. CM21 9PG
  The game disk has a white label carrying the Magnetic Scrolls logo, the name of the game, the target platform and a copyright notice which is (normally?) dated to 1989, also for the earlier released games.
  The game boxes are often relabeled. The orginal sticker with the target platform is pasted over with a new white sticker.
  The boxes contain a note explaining the change in distribution and a demand not to return defective disks to Rainbird, but Inter-Mediates instead.
  The game manuals are sometimes reproductions. These reprinted manuals have a black coloured cover instead of the original blue.
  Game feelies, especially the hard-to-reproduce ones, might be missing, e.g. the die of The Guild of Thieves or the beer mat of Jinxter.

  
  

• The Magnetic Scrolls era started with the release of QL-Pawn for the Sinclair QL in 1985. QL-Pawn was distributed by Sinclair Research.

• A very special member of Magnetic Scrolls was Murdoch who was a white English bull terrier Anita owned. Murdoch was the corporate mascot and they all loved her dearly.
  
  
• In 1988 Infocom had actually planed to release the sequel to Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. When it became clear, that the inhouse development might fail due to the lack of ressources, one option discussed among the heads of Infocom was to hand over the development to Magnetic Scrolls. Eventually Infocom agreed on an internal solution, but because of the closure in early 1989 the game was never finished.