At the beginning of April 2016 Peter Verdi's Magnetic Scrolls Chronicles website went offline. So far all my attempts to contact Peter failed. His site carried some invaluable interviews with former Magnetic Scrolls people. To preserve the work I temporarily uploaded a dump of his site taken in summer of 2015. All you can see below is 100% Peter's work! Hopefully his site will reappear soon! Peter, if you read this, can you contact me?
Remember how it's like to ride on a cloud? How it feels to be squashed by a bus, or how to get that damned gold disc from Micky? Well, here's your chance to relive all these situations.

Have a chat with the devil in THE PAWN, ransack an entire island in THE GUILD OF THIEVES, restore luck itself to a whole country in JINXTER, uncover a conspiracy in CORRUPTION, become an inter-dimensional secret agent in FISH!, an ancient god in MYTH, walk in the footsteps of Alice in WONDERLAND and inherit a haunted mansion in THE LEGACY. Become a part of the fantasy of Magnetic Scrolls - you certainly won't regret it . . .

 

 
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A brief history of Magnetic Scrolls and Acorn - Page Two 
Article written by Andrew Weston
based on the article that appeared in Issue 284 of Qercus Magazine (© Acorn Publisher) - used with kind permission

Releases

Of the seven different games released, only six made their way to Acorn computers excluding Myth which in fact was released to a select adventure club membership. Most were distributed by Rainbird but later titles by Virgin Mastertronic (which confusingly also owned the UK publishing division of erstwhile adventure games publisher Melbourne House during this period). Slightly different packaging accompanied the UK and US versions but for each game a preamble to the game on the box provided an amusing or, at least, intriguing insight into the game you were considering buying. In order of original release the games were as follows.

The Pawn: a quest to escape from the fantasy world of Kerovnia which you have been transported to featuring characters and objects with complex properties. This adventure was highly commended in reviews for its atmosphere and descriptions which were greatly enhanced by the detailed artwork in those versions with graphics. Bursting onto the text adventure scene with a 3500 word parser was not to go unnoticed either.

Guild of Thieves: again set in Kerovnia where the player becomes a member of the Guild and is tasked with a mission of theft. Both The Pawn and Guild of Thieves won quite prestigious awards.

 


The Pawn: 16 and 32-bit version graphics
Jinxter: a humorous, magic-laden adventure with the unique feature of the player being rescued and lifted out of a situation where in other games they would "die". At this point, producing quality games that would appeal to the expectation for more sophistication and depth of the game-buying and reviewing public was becoming ever more difficult and for the 16-bit machines even moreso. Consequently the number of programmers at Magnetic Scrolls and other contributors brought in for each game began to swell. This was also the last Magnetic Scrolls release for the Apple II and Atari 8-bit computers.		 


The Magnetic Scrolls office through a fish-bowl?

 

Corruption: a game set in the City of London where word-of-mouth information is key to developing story. The Amiga version won Game of the Year at the Personal Computer awards but it seemed that the amount of atmosphere being crammed into the games at this point was proving too much for the 8-bit machines with the Amstrad version reportedly having to make very frequent access to the disc. Interestingly, the game was provided with audio tapes which the game prompted the player to listen to in order to extract information at certain stages.

Fish!: a bizarre title involving an anthropomorphic fish and a marine society. At this stage, Magnetic Scrolls parted from Telecomsoft (with a deficit of more titles under their contract, judging from what can be gleaned from interviews). The last release by the company for the Macintosh and Spectrum.

Myth: described as a "mini-adventure", this was set in Ancient Greece with mythological and religious overtones. Myth was only available to members an adventure club, Official Secrets, set up by Tony Rainbird after he left Telecomsoft (having been taken aboard by the company to market their "Firefly" software label which - no doubt by no coincidence - was transformed into three brands - Firebird, Silverbird and Rainbird). This title was commissioned by Tony Rainbird and is the only Magnetic Scrolls game that wasn't released for the Archimedes. It was also set to be the last outing on 8-bit machines by the company.

Wonderland (incorporating Magnetic Windows): this was the company's biggest and most lavish product and this is reflected by the relative size of the production team that worked upon it. As the computers becoming available to home users on a large scale started to implement in their operating systems the mouse, icons and windows interface, the company devised their own in-game mouse-driven environment. This reportedly consumed most of the company's energy whereas previously they had been able to divide work between more than one game. Based on 



IBM-PC version of Myth

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