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[AndrewJFisher]

Our teacher bought The Hobbit for us to play on the class C64 in 1990. Though there was a disk case full of games of all types, we were encouraged to play text adventures. Some of the text games were ok, but whenever someone played The Hobbit, we'd see the same four screens in the same order and get no further than the screen showing the path to the trolls' cave.

I played the DOS version in '08 from floppy on a fairly old computer. Was pretty hopeless without help from the internet, I don't think I could escape the Goblins' prison, but I knew the game was held as quite important in the history of graphical text adventures and was still reading Tolkien around that time, so was intent on finishing it. Even with a complete walkthrough it took forever to finally get it right. If I remember correctly, you can make mistakes that can ruin the game and you can't complete it. I remember seeing the happy ending screen when you finally get the treasure back home and thought "Oh how nice, now to never play this again!".