At the beginning of April 2016 Peter Verdi's Magnetic Scrolls Chronicles website went offline. So far all my attempts to contact Peter failed. His site carried some invaluable interviews with former Magnetic Scrolls people. To preserve the work I temporarily uploaded a dump of his site taken in summer of 2015. All you can see below is 100% Peter's work! Hopefully his site will reappear soon! Peter, if you read this, can you contact me?
Remember how it's like to ride on a cloud? How it feels to be squashed by a bus, or how to get that damned gold disc from Micky? Well, here's your chance to relive all these situations.

Have a chat with the devil in THE PAWN, ransack an entire island in THE GUILD OF THIEVES, restore luck itself to a whole country in JINXTER, uncover a conspiracy in CORRUPTION, become an inter-dimensional secret agent in FISH!, an ancient god in MYTH, walk in the footsteps of Alice in WONDERLAND and inherit a haunted mansion in THE LEGACY. Become a part of the fantasy of Magnetic Scrolls - you certainly won't regret it . . .

 

 
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Through the Goldfish Bowl - an Interview with Phil South (page 4)

 

You 'only' wrote the one game for Magnetic Scrolls. Apart from 'Fish!', did you toy around with some more story ideas?
John and I worked on 'FISH 2: Fish Harder' for a while conceiving it as an online multiplayer game... but we had neither the time nor resources to complete such a task. I'd still like to redo 'Fish!' as 'Monkey Island', but we'd seriously need some funding to do that. And the rights to it, which I assume are still in Anita and Ken's hands. I would love to work with John and Pete again on a new project.

We also helped out on other titles in development at the time, like Jinxter. John was around for earlier titles as a tester and code monkey.

 

What do you think are the differences when you compare the Magnetic Scrolls games to, for example, the Infocom games? What sets the two companies and their approach to writing games apart?
Writing style and approach. Infocom were very American, we were very British. Weird that Douglas Adams went to Infocom and not to Magnetic Scrolls, but hey... maybe we couldn't afford him. It's a cultural thing. I LOVED the Infocom stuff, because the writing was so good. That is something we had in common, but then I would say that. I think the differences were Transatlantic.

 

What happened in your life in the post-Magnetic-Scrolls-era?
My writing career crashed and burned about 6 years later, when I went into HTML and web development, specialising in Flash animations. I worked for Microsoft Developer Network and then Disney Channel UK. When all the web work dried up around 2003 I got a job teaching film-making at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School in Bristol, South West England. Been there ever since. I am a writer, film maker, teacher, comic-book artist and podcaster.

 

Do you still play interactive fiction games or computer- and video-games today?
Having spent about 15 years being a writer for game magazines and playing computer games for a living I stopped playing around about the time I had kids. I've just started again in the last few years, I'm a big fan of 'Tomb Raider' in general and the 'Batman Begins' game is perfection. Also going back and playing LOTS and LOTS of retro games, I have emulators for everything on my Mac.

 

Phil, thank you so much for taking the time to answer all of these questions. It was an honour and a pleasure talking to you. Good luck with all your future plans!
Hey, no problem - it was fun.

 

This article © Peter Verdi and may not be used in full or in parts without the written permission from the author. Photos used with kind permission from Phil South.

 

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