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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A brief history of Magnetic Scrolls and Acorn - Page One
Article written by Andrew Weston
based on the article that appeared in Issue 284 of Qercus Magazine (© Acorn Publisher) - used with kind permission

Introduction

Although the Micro User/Acorn Computing reviews - commonly by the Mad Hatter (Rob Redrup) - frequently glowed with praise and even excitement about Magnetic Scrolls games, the introduction to the the Magnetic Scrolls Memorial online says we're talking of something special:

"In the mid 80's a small British team of programmers called Magnetic Scrolls prepared to become the European answer to Infocom. After releasing only seven games Magnetic Scrolls perished in the fast growing multimedia age. Nevertheless their thrilling stories, a trailblazing parser and excellent graphics made them a milestone in adventure game history. May these pages help in having fond memories of these jewels. "

The parallels with the other famous British adventures games company Level 9 are easy and one wonders whether one was inspired by the other as their histories even overlapped: detailed, engrossing stories; eye-catching packaging; powerful parsers; quality graphics; taxing gameplay. Certainly, reviewers at the time of the original release dates compared one with the other as both companies were at the forefront of their field dominating the UK market in what had become a specialised games area. Magnetic Scrolls also drew further attention by the fact that one of the three founders was a woman, Anita Sinclair, and whilst female programmers have a long and proud heritage down the decades, few were found in the games industry at the time of the company's inception in 1983. The company's games were sold on both sides of the Atlantic by British Telecom's Telecomsoft software label Rainbird and impressed many in America where the predominant developer at the perceived vanguard of interactive fiction was Infocom.

Although only seven games were released by Magnetic Scrolls, with the advent of the Magnetic Windows WIMP-like graphical user interface accompanying their final game, Wonderland, it is debatable whether a text adventure could be taken further, made more immersive and interactive without becoming fully a "point-and-click" game.

This article takes a quick retrospective of the worlds that Magnetic Scrolls created alongside their peers Level 9 but for RISC OS computers rather than their 8-bit predecessors.

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