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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This is the "Files" section of "The Pawn". 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 Pawn Files".

Trivia

"The Pawn" was originally released as a "text-only" adventure called "QL Pawn" on the ill-fated Sinclair QL computer. Despite its technical superiority over its competitors the QL (which is short for Quantum Leap) didn't, to put it mildly, perform as well as the executives at Sinclair Research Ltd had hoped and in the end "QL Pawn" was the only Magnetic Scrolls game that was ever released for the computer, despite Magnetic Scrolls' initial plan to also release "The Guild of Thieves" on the QL.

When Magnetic Scrolls started porting "The Pawn" to other systems, such as the Atari ST or the Commodore Amiga, there was originally never an intention to add graphics to the game. It was only when Magnetic Scrolls signed a contract with the British Telecomsoft label "Rainbird" that pictures got involved.

The Rainbird executives' idea of turning "The Pawn" into a graphic adventure did at first not really appeal to the people from Magnetic Scrolls. The main reasons why Anita Sinclair & Co were against pictures were, that pictures in adventure games so far were very low quality and didn't add anything to the plot - they just wasted memory which was needed for the game itself. However, after having seen a picture drawn by the artist Geoff Quilley they quickly changed their minds.

Geoff Quilley did from then on pictures for almost every Magnetic Scrolls game. 



Sir Clive Sinclair, founder of Sinclair Research Ltd and 
Magnetic Scrolls' Anita Sinclair (not related)
  


QL-Pawn (scan by Chris Foreman from YOIS)

 
There are two different versions of the novella "A Tale of Kerovnia" that came with the game. The second version states "Version II" on the cover. Unfortunately I do not yet know why two different versions were released. At first glance the only difference between the two versions is a slightly different layout. I will add more information when available.
   

When it was agreed on that Geoff Quilley would do the pictures for "The Pawn" Anita Sinclair went out and bought (at the time) really advanced and expensive painting software like "Deluxe Paint" or "Degas" for Geoff to work with, spending more than £ 500 in the process.

"Then I went to Geoff and all he said was: I do not need that. I create all my pictures with... Neochrome." Anita recalls. "First, I thought: oh no, he's mad. Look at all these functions Deluxe Paint has to offer! But he took the mouse and Neochrome and within seconds he painted anything I wanted - circles, squares, soft colour fadings. He really knows about the art of painting. All these functions Deluxe Paint has to offer are all in his right hand ..."

 


"Neochrome" on the Atari ST