Magnetic Scrolls

~ the obit ~

Magnetic Scrolls sits in a part of computing i can read all the way through and remember none of. Anita Sinclair and Ken Gordon started it in London with Hugh Steers as the third founder. English Wikipedia dates that to 1984 and the memorial site kept by former players says 1983, and nobody has narrowed it since. The office ended up at Chapel Court in Southwark, and at its height the whole operation was about half a dozen programmers.

The Pawn shipped in 1985 and the illustrated version in 1986, and the pictures were what sold it. People had just bought Atari STs and Amigas and wanted something on the screen that justified the money. After that came one release a year for four years, The Guild of Thieves and Jinxter in 1987, then Corruption and Fish! in 1988, then Myth. In Britain this was the only studio anyone put next to Infocom.

The publishing came through Rainbird, a label inside British Telecom's software arm, and what happened to that label set the ending. MicroProse bought Telecomsoft in May 1989 and Magnetic Scrolls came out of the deal with nobody to publish it. Virgin signed them late that year, put out Wonderland across 1990 and 1991, then let them go.

i have no line into any of this. My first machine and my first phone line both arrived in 1998, six years after the company stopped, on a platform where nobody was typing sentences at a game. What is unusual is that the distance costs almost nothing here. Somebody built a memorial site carrying the full release history, and one of the founders came back in 2017 to get the games running again. Most dead companies leave you guessing. This one left a better record than my memory would have been.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ eltham ~

Writing a text adventure in 1985 meant writing it again for every machine you wanted to sell it on, and there were a lot of machines. Magnetic Scrolls did not do that. It built a virtual machine, named ELTHAM after the part of south London the company started in and backronymed afterward into something silly, then compiled every game down to an intermediate code the machine executed. On an Atari ST or an Amiga that code ran close to native. Everywhere else it was emulated. Either way the game was one codebase.

The result was eight games reaching something like thirteen platforms without anyone rewriting the parser. Forty years later this is how everything ships and nobody remarks on it. In 1985 it was a decision a six person company made because it had no other way to be in more than one shop at a time.

~ the cracks ~

The parser was the thing they were proudest of and it was also part of the problem. It could take apart sentences no player would ever type while missing short ones players typed constantly. By 1989 that was a fair description of the genre itself. The technical ceiling kept rising and the audience did not follow it up.

Wonderland in 1990 was the last real attempt to move. It came with an interface called Magnetic Windows that gave a text adventure auto-mapping and resizable windows for the graphics, and it was the first time anyone had put a windowed front end on this kind of game. It shipped for MS-DOS late in 1990, then for the Amiga and the Archimedes the following year. Then Virgin dropped the company and there was nothing left to sell.

~ what got buried with it ~

There is no bankruptcy date here and no announcement. The last thing with the company's name on it was a compilation in 1991, the staff went, and MicroProse picked up the rights in 1992. The Legacy: Realm of Terror came out under the Magnetic Scrolls label afterward and is the only use MicroProse ever made of the name, by which point the company that earned it had stopped existing. The rights went back to Sinclair and Gordon later on. Neither of them returned to games.

What died was not really a company. It was the idea that a paragraph of prose and a text box could be a mass market product in Britain, and Infocom had gone under a couple of years earlier for the same reason. Hugh Steers set up Strand Games in 2017 to remaster the catalog and put The Pawn out again that June, twenty six years after the last release. The audience for it now is a preservation audience, which is a different thing from a market.

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