Magnetic Scrolls was founded in 1983 by Ken Gordon and Anita Sinclair.
They started with an office in Eltham/South London and later moved to
1 Chapel Court
London SE1 1HH
England

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). Here are some hints on identifying an Inter-Mediates release. During that time they found Virgin Games as the distributor for the upcoming Wonderland. When the company got defunct in 1992, Microprose bought up all the rights, but except for releasing the game "The Legacy" under the Magnetic Scrolls label, they never made any use of it. The rights on the games are held by Magnetic Scrolls Ltd. They reverted back to Anita Sinclair and Ken Gordon after some time without the games being published.

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

Several years ago Ken Gordon has registered the domain
http://www.magneticscrolls.com
but it intenionally carried only the Magnetic Scrolls logo and now it redirects to the Strandgames page.

A special member of the Magnetic Scrolls team was Murdoch, Anita Sinclair's bull terrier and in fact the corporate mascot.

In 1988 Infocom had actually planned 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.

From 1985 to 1991 Magnetic Scrolls released seven games. Thrilling stories, a trailblazing parser and wonderful graphics made them a true competitor to Infocom and most probably the best and most successful European adventure game company. Like almost all text oriented game developers Magnetic Scrolls did not survive the start into the multimedia age.

The following list mainly describes the original Rainbird releases of the games. The later Inter-Mediates releases were shipped in the well-known Rainbird boxes, but normally they had a small label on them showing Inter- Mediates as the distributor. The included disks did not carry the Rainbird logo anymore and were just made as a white label with the Magnetic Scrolls logo, a copyright notice and the name of the game. Some (all?) Inter-Mediate packages also contained a short note rendering clear, that Rainbird was no longer the distributor and thus defective disks had to be sent back to Inter-Mediates. Since Magnetic Scrolls had only limited supplies and game props left, these packages sometimes contained reproduced materials (like game manuals with a black cover instead of the well-known blue ones).

The Apple2 and Macintosh versions were only released in North America and thus only available as imports throughout Europe.

• The Magnetic Scrolls tool chain consisted mainly of four self-created tools: fred23jr, as68, lnk, sim.
• Starting with The Guild of Thieves, Magnetic Scrolls used their own language to describe objects, rooms, NPCs and the properties of each object (e.g. weight, movable, burnable, container,...). These data definitions were parsed and translated into a set of assembler files by the fred23jr tool. fred23jr was developed by Hugh Steers. The assembler files constituted a subset of the 68000 assembler code.
• With "as68" this assembler code was compiled into an intermediate code called ELTHAM (Extra Low Tech Highly Ambiguous Methodology or alternativly Extra Low Tech Highly Ambiguous Metacode). With "lnk" all object files were merged into one game file. It was executed "natively" on ST, Amiga, QL, Macintosh and emulated on the other systems. The virtual machine used up to 64k. On 8 bit machines they used virtual memory mechanisms. On the C64 non-active pages were held on the floppy disc. Only "read-only" pages were swapped.
• Magnetic Scrolls had their own emulation and debugging tool called "sim".
• In contrast to the Infocom games the stack is part of the 64k.
• Except for The Pawn, the game text is stored externally. It is encoded with Huffmann algorithm.
• The pictures of the 16bit ports are RLE encoded.
• Except for The Pawn the game dictionary is stored externally. With The Pawn it is stored plainly within the 64k segment.
• Due to the emulation the game itself is not aware of the environment it is using. The communication between emulation and real system is done through LINE_A commands.
• The I/O model is quite simple. It just supports streams for input and output and routines for drawing the images. The output is much more limited than for example the Infocom output. However the simple I/O model has huge adventages when porting the games to new operating systems.
• With Wonderland and the Collection the communication between emulation and real system was heavily enhanced. The 64K limit disappeared. This was used to add new features to the games, e.g. the FIND (object) command in Fish!
• The disc protection for the Atari ST (which could only be copied with ACopy 1.2p) was realized through a BBC Micro. The ST and the BBC used different floppy controllers. The copy protection relied on some special features of the BBC controller to write sector numbers > 0xF0. Those sectors could be read with the ST floppy controller, but normally it was impossible to write the format, because these sector numbers were treated as "magic". Though a BBC Micro should not have any problems with making copies of the discs.