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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Message In A Microchip
Article taken from "Crash" magazine, Issue 55 (August 1988)

Graphically Speaking

'Graphics take a long time to do and they involve a lot of people, so they really have to add something to a game to be worthwhile. Originally we considered line drawings but we then decided to go for bit pictures. There's fewer of them, but generally they're of a higher quality. Corruption, for example is set in the cut-throat environment of the City - it's a dark and sleazy tale and the graphics help to convey this atmosphere. It's one instance where the graphics actually help.

'The trouble is that when a game is being developed we don't work with the pictures; the design is largely coordinated by artists told about the story. They're given descriptions of the rooms so that they make sense, but the illustrations can never be completely accurate. There may be a standard lamp in the picture that isn't in the description. Try and look at it or do something with it and you draw a blank. Our graphics are illustrations really; they're broadly correct but they aren't too literal.

'Having said all that, I don't mind playing games without graphics. If the graphics are really detrimental to the rest of the game then I'll switch them off. In some cases this even speeds up a game which is all for the better.'

Even without these beautiful Amiga pictures . . .

The Spectrum version of Jinxter is incredibly playable

The comparatively poor graphics capabilities of the Spectrum weigh the balance in favour of text-only +3 versions.

'We couldn't use an ST picture on any Spectrum. A lot of our pictures can be reused. ST pictures can be converted to run on the Amiga or the PCW 8256 and the graphics capabilities of the Commodore 64 are similar enough to the CPC for us to get away with it. If we did graphics on the Spectrum, to get them up to the quality of our other games, we would have to redraw them and we can't afford to do that on the basis of sales that we expect. In any case, if the Spectrum did have graphics there'd be less memory to devote to the game and you'd have to go to disk more. Inevitably, that would slow the game down.

What do they think of the future of sound in adventures?

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