Magnetic Scrolls

Magnetic Scrolls was a British video game developer active between 1984 and 1990. A pioneer of audiovisually elaborate text adventure games, it was one of the two largest and most acclaimed interactive fiction developers of the 1980s.

History

Formation

Formed by Anita Sinclair, Ken Gordon and Hugh Steers in 1984, London-based Magnetic Scrolls initially dabbled with development on the Sinclair QL home computer before deciding to take advantage of the emerging Atari ST and Amiga gaming platforms. Having secured a publication deal with Rainbird, a British software label owned by Telecomsoft, they began work producing an ambitious text adventure game that would become The Pawn.

During the mid-1980s, the text adventure market was thriving, although only a very few developers exclusively specialised in the genre. The undisputed giants of the genre were Infocom, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who practically redefined the genre by ensuring the interface (or text parser) never provided a barrier between the player and the fictional elements of the game.