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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       Collection Vol. One
    - The Legacy - Realm
       Of Terror
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This is the "Files" section of "The Legacy". Here you will find all the hard facts about the game, like general information, a plot synopsis and trivia - in other words, these are "The Legacy Files".

Trivia

"The Legacy", whose working title was "Haunted House", was designed by Jim Bambra who went on to found "Pivotal Games". The company released such titles as "The Great Escape" (based on the John Sturges movie of the same name, starring Steve McQueen, James Garner, Charles Bronson and Donald Pleasance) and the "Conflict" series of games (Conflict: Desert Storm 1 and 2, Conflict: Vietnam, Conflict: Global Storm and Conflict: Denied Ops).

Originally "The Legacy" featured bitmap graphics of the monsters and the environment the player could explore in the game, but these didn't look gruesome enough, so it was decided to go for more detailed 3D-models to achieve the desired effect the monsters should have on the player.

"The Legacy" featured a unique "scare-system" (see picture to the right) that would render the player character paralyzed with fear on the sight of a new or particularly gruesome-looking monster. The main problem with this system was to balance it in a way to not make the player character's actions too foreseeable, while at the same time trying to avoid the player losing control of the action for longer periods of time. This was achieved by the character not being able to perform certain actions for short periods of time, thus forcing him or her to retreat until the character had "calmed down".

Plans for the game to feature a whole group of characters instead of just one main character were discussed, but the idea was dropped during game development, as a whole party (a common feature in many RPG's) would have compromised the feeling of isolation needed for a game based on a horror scenario.

 


Pretty scary stuff, eh?
 


The Radioshack Collector's edition of "The Legacy"
(box scan taken from Moby Games)

An AGA Amiga version of "The Legacy" was in development for some time, but unfortunately it was never finished.

A collector's edition of the game was exclusively sold through Radioshack in the United States. The collector's edition came in a plain, black box, with only "The Legacy: Realm of Terror" written in red letters on it. The manual and the disks were covered in fake spider webs and the box would "moan" and make other spooky noises when opened. The box scan on the left shows the collector's edition of the game and was taken from the Moby Games website.

While the US-version of the game was called "The Legacy - Realm of Terror", had a slightly different cover and a different text on the back of the box, the European versions were simply called "The Legacy". 



"The Legacy" US-cover
 


"The Legacy" European cover