The Hobbit was also the first adventure game to come with an official licence from the owners of the source material. A paperback of Tolkien's novel was included in the package too, another first.

Amazingly, there was a backlash. Purists, as they no doubt described themselves, began flooding magazines with letters complaining that graphics actually limited a game's appeal. Far better, these luddites claimed, to have a well-written, atmospheric text where the player's imagination could create the scene, as in a novel. Look at Infocom, they cried, their games don't need graphics.

The argument was settled by market forces, as the government of the day would have wanted it. People bought graphic adventures. They stopped buying text adventures, even Infocom ones. Post-Hobbit, a two-word parser text adventure was no longer enough. Consumers demanded pictures with their words. Within months the text adventure started clearing its desk and scanning the Situations Vacant columns.

The Hobbit gave Melbourne House promotion to the Premier League of software publishers and they released a succession of innovative titles over the next few years. Sherlock was the first adventure to feature crime-solving, and had a much improved implementation of The Hobbit's 'conversing with other characters' feature. Then there was the social climbing adventure, Hampstead. Even the tool used to create The Hobbit's graphics was eventually offered as a retail product, Melbourne Draw, one of the Spectrum's more successful art packages. Despite this rich heritage of brain games, the publishers probably had their biggest commercial success on the Commodore 64 in 1985 with the astonishing (for the time) Way of the Exploding Fist. Look Tekken, this is a picture of your grandfather.

So successful were Melbourne House that they later attracted the attention of a far bigger fish that was eager to acquire market share in the burgeoning world of software: Virgin. They bought the company but, apart from putting the MH 'brand' on arcade conversions like Double Dragon, did very little else of note with it. Ah well, such is the way of the world.