GAME DESIGN + PROGRAMMING
Veronika Megler
Created the world, its locations and the independent behaviour of its characters.
1982 / THE PEOPLE BEHIND THE ADVENTURE
A world made by people
The programmers, artists and storytellers whose work brought Middle-earth to the Spectrum.
1982 / THE PEOPLE BEHIND THE ADVENTURE
Original game credits
A Beam Software adventure, published by Melbourne House. Meet the team who brought Middle-earth to the Spectrum.
GAME DESIGN + PROGRAMMING
Philip Mitchell
Built the INGLISH language engine, messages and picture interface; completed the Spectrum release.
LANGUAGE + SEMANTICS
Stuart Ritchie
Contributed language expertise and semantics to the original development team.
PROJECT ORIGIN + DEVELOPMENT
Alfred “Fred” Milgrom
Beam co-founder and credited collaborator. Recruited the team and secured the Tolkien licence.
ORIGINAL ILLUSTRATIONS
Kent Rees
Drew the artwork behind the game's illustrated locations.
ORIGINAL COVER ART
Con Aslanis
Illustrator and designer responsible for the original packaging's cover drawing.
THE BOOK + MIDDLE-EARTH
J. R. R. Tolkien
Author of the 1937 novel, its characters and the world that inspired this adventure.
DEVELOPER + PUBLISHER
Beam / Melbourne House
The Melbourne studio and its publisher, founded by Alfred Milgrom and Naomi Besen.
Keeping the adventure playable
This edition runs translated JavaScript routines and decoded Hobbit text, world data and artwork. It does not use a Spectrum emulator, ROM or the original executable binaries.
pobtastic / ArcadeGeek's annotated Hobbit disassembly materially informed the translation. This substantial prior reverse-engineering work was published with Richard Dymond's SkoolKit.
JSSpeccy 2 by Matt Westcott and contributors powered an earlier emulator edition and helped test the translation against the original game. The original game design, writing and artwork remain the work of their creators.