"You are in a comfortable tunnel-like hall," said the on-screen text, rather ungrammatically. Above this text was a simple line drawing of said hall, with a chest plonked on the floor just before a round, green door.

If the above confronted you 17 years ago this week then you were a Spectrum owner who had just rushed and spent a whacking (for the time) £14.95 on The Hobbit from Melbourne House. It was a text adventure, like many others, but it had several unique attributes that set it apart from its peers. The most immediate difference was that it had graphics. They may have been simple, they may have been repeated at several points and they may not have accompanied every location, but they were in colour and part of the game's appeal was finding new areas which revealed never-seen-before images in a slow, line by line, on-screen creation process.

Another unique aspect of The Hobbit was that the other characters had a certain amount of artificial intelligence, and would carry on about their business even if the player wasn't present. Actually, the other characters displayed more of a sense of artificial stupidity. Thorin, for instance, spent most of his time in the spotlight either telling the player to 'hurry up' or sitting down and singing about gold. We never got to hear the actual song though - the Speccy's sound capabilities would have been taxed recreating a burp. Attempting to converse with the characters was soon abandoned.

The artificial intelligence was used to much better effect in what was referred to as the 'parser' - a catch-all term for the number of words an adventure game could understand. Until The Hobbit, adventure players had been limited to two-word instructions: Go North. Get Key. Shag Woman (what? Well, some games understood it...). The Hobbit allowed the player to almost string a sentence together: Take the large key AND go north AND unlock door AND open door. Hey, it might not sound much now but we're talking ancient history here. This was on a par with the Egyptians building the pyramids. Sort of.