Tolkien Musing - The Hobbit Game Guide

The Hobbit by Melbourne House was a hugely popular computer game from the 1980s.

David Elkan wrote a guide to playing it, called Playing The Hobbit.

It was first published in an unauthorised version on a minor scale by Templesoft in 1983.

          

There was an advert for it in Home Computing Weekly magazine No 43 from January 1984.

     

It was considered to be so good that in 1984 an authorised version, updated to include images from the game, was published by the game publishers themselves Melbourne House. The title was changed slightly to A Guide to Playing the Hobbit.

     

There was a review for it published in Crash magazine No 4 from May 1984.

     

And also in Micro Adventurer June 1984

    

There was a promotion for it in Crash magazine No 5 from June 1984, where it could be won as a prize in a competition.

     

The guide was reprinted with endorsements added to the front and back covers.

     

A complete copy of the guide can be found here:

https://www.mocagh.org/tolkien/hobbit-hintbook.pdf

and here:

https://archive.org/details/vgmuseum_tolkien_hobbit-hintbook/mode/2up

These websites have some details about the Guide:

http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/13455/Guide-to-Playing-the-Hobbit/

The Hobbit Game

The Hobbit game itself was published in 1982 by Melbourne House (UK) \ Addison-Wesley (US).

It was available  for the VIC 20, ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64, BBC B, MSX, Oric, Apple.

Here are some examples of the packaging.

                    

          

Details of the game can be found here:

https://www.gwern.net/docs/fiction/2017-stuckey.pdf

https://wikivisually.com/wiki/The_Hobbit_(1982_video_game)

http://www.ourdigitalheritage.org/archive/playitagain/games/the-hobbit-2/

http://www.springbringer.com/web/fantasya/games_tolkien.html