Magnetic Scrolls Memories - written by Rob Steggles
[...] Ken and Hugh and I were all in the same class together at school
together in Woolwich. Ken and Hugh were the computer whizz-kids and I used to
tag along and do Dungeons&Dragons scenarios which they and several others
would play. We all played Zork too and some of the Scott Adams adventures and
loved them. As I remember it, Hugh started designing his first parser on an old
TRS-80 and Ken was heavily into the Apple side of things where (I believe) he
met Anita Sinclair. As she had money and contacts, they decided to start writing
games for the Sinclair QL and employed Hugh for his programming skills and
knowledge of parsers.
They were in an office in Eltham, South East
London in the summer of 1983 when they called me up and asked me to write a
scenario to run on the system before I went off to University in the autumn.
The scenario was The Pawn. What we did with The Pawn was get together as a
group and talk for hours until we came up with a whole bunch of disparate,
bizarre ideas. We wrote them all on several A1 sheets, put them on the wall and
looked at them for a while. Then I sat down and wrote a story around them.
Most of the ideas became modified over time and some were left out (I can't
remember, but I think the ones that were left out of the adventure proper were
put in the very last room...) but characters like the Horse with No Legs were as
they were from day one.
There were a few things that we had decided to
do which became a sort of house style over the years:
1. A lot of
adventures were FULL of cliches. We tried to take those cliches and turn them
upside-down. Hence you get the handsome prince who doesn't really know much at
all, the princess who's a bit fat and ratty with everyone, the dotted red line
across the bottom edge of the map saying you can't go any further and so on. Of
course, some of these have now become cliches too....
2. We got fed up of adventures that constantly said 'YOU CAN'T
EXAMINE THAT' meaning that no-one had bothered to write any text for it so we
tried to describe everything that was referenced in the room descriptions and
elsewhere. This is why you end up with a description of a pocket as a 'Loose
bag inserted into your trousers...' and the carrott described as 'A conical
orange vegetable, don't you know anything?' (this one was Ken's favourite)
3. We wanted to have several 'correct' ways of completing the adventure so that,
if you got stuck on one puzzle you could go elsewhere and explore. Not being
terribly clever ourselves, we were always being frustrated by adventures that
you couldn't get any further with because there was one puzzle you couldn't
solve. We felt it was important that if someone had paid good money for a game
they should at least be able to solve some things and explore a wide area to get
a feel for the situation.
4. As best we could, we wanted to have Characters that spoke and
acted on their own, rather than just objects. This makes for a nightmare in
programming terms and a lot of the character responses have to be stock answers
(cop-outs) but I think for the time, we did a good job.
Anyway, having
written the scenario, I went off to University and thought nothing more about it
until I came back home at Christmas and Easter and found that Ken, Hugh and
Anita had added a load of pictures drawn by Geoff Quilley which took the game
onto the ST and onto a different level. Rather than just a dull text adventure
we now had colour and pictures - these were what really caught the public's eye
and made a big success of the game. The pictures were perfect for the setting
and the timing couldn't have been better with the ST being launched.
By
the way, the name 'The Pawn' was dreamed up by one of Ken's friends from the
Apple user group called Tony Lambert (aka Betty Normal) as he felt the player in
the game was constantly in a totally bewildered state and being manipulated by
events all around him. We all agreed.
In the summer break of 1984, I
went back round to the office, and asked if I could earn some cash writing
another scenario. Ken & Anita said sure, do another scenario, but this time
we want a straight, fantasy adventure with loads of puzzles, less people (too
complicated) and absolutely no room descriptions that start with 'You find
yourself in...' or 'You are in...'. I was a bit annoyed with this as I wanted
to do something different from fantasy, but I told them I'd come back tomorrow
with an idea. I then went down to the pub with a friend of mine and told him
what had happened and that I was getting fed up doing fantasy and I didn't want
to do sci-fi either (I was going through my frustrated artist phase). Anyway,
that afternoon I sat down and wrote the whole of the Guild of Thieves scenario
with all the puzzles and the sequence of events on four sides of A4 and it
pretty much stayed as it was until released.
I didn't have a great
deal to with Maggot Rolls then apart from working on Guild of Thieves during
holidays until I left university in the summer of 1987. I phoned them up for a
reference for a job I had applied for and Anita asked me if I wanted to come and
work full time in the new office in London Bridge. Guild of Thieves was selling
really well and getting rave reviews so I accepted and Hugh and I started work
on Corruption. With Corruption, I wanted to do a 'thriller' and hit on the idea
of setting it in the City. By the time it was complete, Wall Street had been
released, Ivan Boesky had done his bit and City scandals were all the rage in
the British press, so quite by accident it turned out to be topical. I was
extremely proud when Corruption won the PCW award for Game of the Year. At the
time we started Corruption, Jinxter was nearing completion. Jinxter was
supposed to be our answer to Infocom's Enchanter. I believe the original text
was written by Anita's sister (I think her name was Georgina) but they had a
falling out and it was eventually re-worked by an extremely talented bloke
called Michael Bywater who was a friend of Douglas Adams and, at the time,
Assistant Editor of Punch magazine.
Though Jinxter was an excellent
game, the cost of producing it had been too high and, from where I was sitting,
highly unprofitable. To my mind, it signalled the beginning of the end for
Maggot Rolls. By contrast, Corruption which sold roughly the same number had
been a fraction of the cost to produce as only myself and Hugh had worked on it.
At this point in time (late 1987 - 1988) Tony Rainbird who had been the
accountant/business adviser left to form Official Secrets, the mail order games
company and commissioned Myth as a mini-adventure. Myth was written by Paul
Findlay who had joined as a programmer for, I think, the C64 versions of the
earlier games. As far as I'm aware there never was any artwork done for Myth as
it was only sold through Official Secrets.
Once Corruption was
finished, another game was nearing completion - Fish! - which had originally
been brought to Mag Scrolls by John Molloy (another Apple-buddy of Ken's),
Richard Huddy and Bob Coles. I spent some time helping with the text of this
adventure, basically acting as a sub-editor to bring the writing into house
style.
By this time (late 1989), Wonderland had already started and seemed
to be going the way of Jinxter in that it had a large team on it who seemed to
spend vast amounts of time reinventing the wheel. I seem to remember Ken and
Doug spending months writing a complete Windows system and Paul writing a
program to animate our pictures - all stuff you could buy off the shelf for a
fraction of the cost. David Bishop did the plot lines and text and it looked
like it was going to be a great game if it ever got released. With Corruption
and Fish finished, and virtually everyone else working on Wonderland, I started
to lose interest a bit and couldn't generate a great deal of enthusiasm in house
for my next project which was not a straight text adventure at all. At this
point I asked for a raise and had a storming row with Anita and Ken one morning
in December '88 and walked out. It was all very unprofessional on all our
parts. And that's really where my involvement ended. I think it was another
year or two before Wonderland was ever released during which time I saw Hugh,
Doug, Paul, Richard Huddy, Bob and John Molloy a few times but I haven't seen
Ken or Anita since.
I don't know for sure but I think Wonderland
basically bankrupted the company. The last I heard of Ken he was still calling
himself Magnetic Scrolls but working at Virgin (I think), programming games.
Hugh and Doug went to Logica a few months after I left and Paul Findlay joined
them too. I'm pretty sure they left Logica but I can't remember who they went
to. Richard Huddy went to work for IBM I think. John Molloy was working as a
record producer in Stoke when I last saw him a few years ago. I don't know what
happened to Anita. For my part, I went to work on a computer help desk in the
healthcare market and am now Deputy Customer Services Director for Reuters
Health Information. [...]
Rob Steggles
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