Megler created an innovative system that allowed the player to experiment with different commands and objects. And probably a little too ambitious.” By the time Melbourne House secured the Hobbit licence, Megler had already designed much of the game’s engine. “I went through it and identified key locations, characters, puzzles and events,” she says. Melbourne House boss Fred Milgrom loved the idea, and Megler began adapting the book. The sprawling and epic The Lord of the Rings stories were the most famous the programmers suggested that the less complex and tighter plot of The Hobbit would be a better fit. However, as fans of Tolkien’s work, Megler and Mitchell suggested using one of his works as a base for the game. The story was originally a generic fantasy adventure. Megler enlisted fellow student Phillip Mitchell to assist with the game’s parser – the code that helps the game and the player to understand each other, turning words into commands and vice versa. So I thought about what it was that made that game stop being interesting, and designed a game that didn’t have any of those issues.” Then it instantly became boring, and I never played it again. “I had found Colossal Cave Adventure addictive until the point where I had mapped out the game and solved it. Though the 20-year-old didn’t have a lot of experience with video games, she’d enjoyed one in particular. ‘The best adventure game ever’ … The Hobbit. The eventual result of this instruction was The Hobbit, a landmark 1982 text adventure game that’s still fondly remembered today. “The day I was hired, the first thing my boss said to me was, ‘write the best adventure game ever,’” she remembers. It was 1980, and she was halfway through a course that focused on designing operating systems and developing programming languages. Realising that statistics wasn’t for her, Megler answered a newspaper advert for a part-time programming job at a local software company called Melbourne House. “In the store they’d say ‘tell your boyfriend we don’t have these’,” she recalls. Megler had already built her own PC, buying the motherboard, chips, capacitors and diodes from an electronics shop in Melbourne. “I think there were four women in a class of about 220 people, and it was pretty misogynistic,” she recalls. She signed up for a computer science course at Melbourne University, reasoning it would assist her chosen career. As a teenager, Veronika Megler was intent on becoming a statistician.
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