The Lord of the Rings: Game One

The Lord of the Rings: Game One from 1985 built on the success of The Hobbit and brought the first part of Tolkien's trilogy to the ZX Spectrum as an extensive text adventure supplemented with static graphics. The player leads a group of hobbits from the Shire towards Rivendell and beyond, with the characters controllable individually or left to act on their own judgment thanks to an advanced artificial intelligence system that built on the technology from the studio's previous game and expanded it with the ability to control multiple characters at once, each with its own personality and degree of courage or caution.

The game's map was exceptionally large and open; the player could theoretically set off on their own path across Middle-earth without a fixed order of tasks, which was unusually ambitious for an eight-bit machine of the mid-1980s. The parser understood relatively complex sentences, and interaction with the party and enemy characters gave the game a sense of a living world where events unfolded even outside the player's immediate attention. Graphical illustrations accompanied key locations and, together with the text, built the atmosphere of a long and demanding journey full of danger and moments of respite.

The game was praised in contemporary press for its scope and ambition, although its difficulty and openness also discouraged many players, since without maps and hints it was easy to get lost or lose the group of hobbits to an unfortunate accident. The planned second installment covering the rest of the story never appeared in its originally intended form, which remains one of the unfinished chapters of the Tolkien-inspired text adventure genre. Today, Game One is interesting mainly as a demonstration of how far the ambition of text adventures went even before the arrival of the new generation of graphical engines, although its scope and difficulty, without period maps and magazine hints, will more likely put off today's player.

Why play it: Fans of Tolkien-inspired text adventures will appreciate the game for its ambitious scope, even though without period maps and hints the openness and difficulty can be more off-putting than appealing.