‘I saw the possibility of what could be done – so I did it’: revolutionary video game The Hobbit turns 40

Mon, 10 Oct 2022 02:22:23 +1100

Andrew Pam <xanni [at] glasswings.com.au>

Andrew Pam
<https://www.theguardian.com/games/2022/sep/22/i-saw-the-possibility-of-what-could-be-done-so-i-did-it-revolutionary-video-game-the-hobbit-turns-40>

"As a teenager, Veronika Megler was intent on becoming a statistician. She
signed up for a computer science course at Melbourne University, reasoning it
would assist her chosen career. “I think there were four women in a class of
about 220 people, and it was pretty misogynistic,” she recalls. Megler had
already built her own PC, buying the motherboard, chips, capacitors and diodes
from an electronics shop in Melbourne. “In the store they’d say ‘tell your
boyfriend we don’t have these’,” she recalls.

Realising that statistics wasn’t for her, Megler answered a newspaper advert
for a part-time programming job at a local software company called Melbourne
House. It was 1980, and she was halfway through a course that focused on
designing operating systems and developing programming languages. “The day I
was hired, the first thing my boss said to me was, ‘write the best adventure
game ever,’” she remembers. The eventual result of this instruction was The
Hobbit
, a landmark 1982 text adventure game that’s still fondly remembered
today."

Share and enjoy,
               *** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net               Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/                 Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/            Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/               Manager, Serious Cybernetics

Comment via email

Home E-Mail Sponsors Index Search About Us