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To conserve memory, in the tape-based versions of the game, scene graphics were not stored as bitmaps, but redrawn every time using a stored series of commands. The slow CPU speed and lack of a graphics chip meant that it would take up to several seconds for each scene to draw. The disk-based versions used prerendered and higher-quality images.
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At one point in the game, it was possible to drink wine, getting the player (temporarily) drunk. The game would then substitute "sh" for "s" in its responses (e.g. "You drink shome wine"). This caused extra amusement if the player entered the command "sit".
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Some players enjoyed telling Thorin to climb into the fast black river, at which point the game would respond, "The Thorin is dead". Despite this, on completing the game, Thorin would reappear.
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Entering "DO" into the parser caused it to generate odd (nonsense) messages. Trying to open unopenable objects or characters, followed repeatedly by the command "BREAK DO" allowed you to break or kill them.
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A phrase from the game which has entered popular culture is "Thorin sits down and starts singing about gold."
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The game was followed up with 1986's "The Fellowship of the Ring", 1987's "The Shadows of Mordor" and 1990's "The Crack of Doom".
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To help people play the game, a book called "A guide to playing The Hobbit" was also published.
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The Hobbit was a huge commercial success. By the late 1980s it had sold over a million copies. There was general agreement that the major causes of its success were the popularity of Tolkien's work and the innovative Inglish parser created by Stuart Richie.
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The game had a cast of non-player characters that were entirely independent of the player and bound to precisely the same game rules. They had loyalties, strengths and personalities that affected their behavior and could not always be predicted. The character of Gandalf, for example, roamed freely around the game world (some fifty locations), picking up objects, getting into fights and being captured. The volatility of the characters, coupled with the rich physics and impossible to predict fighting system, meant that the game could be played in many different ways. There were numerous possible solutions and with hindsight the game might be regarded as one of the first examples of "emergent gaming".
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Unusually for a text adventure, the game was in real time - if you left the keyboard for too long events continued without you by automatically entering the "WAIT" command with the response "You wait - time passes". If you had to leave the keyboard for a short time, there was a "PAUSE" command which would stop all events until a key was pressed.
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The game had an innovative text-based physics system. Objects, including the characters in the game, had a calculated size, weight and solidity. Objects could be placed inside other objects, attached together with rope and damaged or broken. If the main character was sitting in a barrel which was then picked up and thrown through a trapdoor, the player went too.
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Each location was illustrated by an image, based on originals designed by Kent Rees. Each image was stored in only 3,000-4,000 bytes by storing outline information and then 'flood-filling' the enclosed areas on the screen.
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The parser was very advanced for the time and used a subset of English called Inglish. When it was released, most adventure games used simple verb-noun parsers (allowing for simple phrases like 'get lamp'), but Inglish allowed you to type advanced sentences such as "ask Gandalf about the curious map then take sword and kill troll with it". The parser was complex and intuitive, introducing pronouns, adverbs ("viciously attack the goblin"), punctuation and prepositions and allowing the player to interact with the game world in ways not previously possible.
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The original releases of The Hobbit also included Tolkien's full novel as an added bonus.
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There is a very famous bug, that you can put yourself inside the chest, close the lid and still walk around in the game and look at things
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