Chatting Bored Of The Rings and more with Fergus McNeill

Many moons ago, I spoke to the illustrious author and erstwhile adventure game creator Fergus McNeill about one of my favourite text adventure games of the Eighties, Bored Of The Rings. A spoof on - well I don’t really need to tell you do I? - I fell instantly in love with the humour and individuality of Delta 4, as well as its superior storytelling prowess. For me, text adventures often felt staid and boring, but this was… different.

Fergus says: “It’s hard to be precise about the exact moment that Delta 4 came into being. I know I was still at school, and needed a label name for the early games I was making. It was around the time of The DragonStar Trilogy, so about a year prior to Bored.

For younger readers, that’s just after all the dinosaurs died out, and just before the internet was invented.”

Using adventure creation software such as Gilsoft’s The Quill, Delta 4 quickly gained a reputation for brilliantly humorous text adventures.

I didn’t find this out until much later, but Bored Of The Rings the game is based on a book. No, not that book, an actual book called Bored Of The Rings, written by the ‘Harvard Lampoon’ and a not-very-subtle spoof on The Lor- ah, I almost gave it away there!

As with many developers of the early 80s, Delta 4 sold its games chiefly via mail order.

“Mail order was very much the e-commerce of the day, and I spent the money from my paper round on classified ads in the back of computer magazines such as Micro Adventurer. I didn’t sell many copies, but it was enormously exciting to know that people I’d never met were playing games that I’d made.”

Paper round? Yea gods of Middle Earth, just how young was this varlet?

“I would have been 15 or 16. Damn I look so young in those photos!”

So. Bored Of The Rings. Based on a book of the same name, a naughty tome that was regularly passed around the school playground along with that tattered copy of James Herbert’s The Rats.

“Yes, I had read it at school. It was so rude! I was already making spoof games, so it wasn’t long before I started thinking about a Middle Earth parody. I wrote to the author and publisher about the possibility of doing an official game, but sadly I never received any reply.”

The Eighties being the Eighties, Fergus didn’t let the prospect of legal annihilation dissuade him, and he made the game anyway.

“As you’d expect from a parody, many of the scenes in the book echo some aspects of the original. I suppose the aim was to find humour in key moments from the story and tie them together with puzzles and exploration. But I was still very much a novice games designer in those days, so I fear it was often rather disjointed.”

As a firm fan of J.R.R. Tolkien’s work and frustrated professional comedian, the spoof proved a fertile ground for Fergus, despite some reservations.

“My love of adventure games comes from Melbourne House’s wonderful adaptation of The Hobbit which was my introduction to the works of Tolkien. Looking back, I do cringe slightly at the idea of producing a parody, but I suppose that was just youthful enthusiasm. I’d certainly love to work on a Middle Earth themed project in the future, but only if it could faithfully capture the spirit of the books.”

For developing the game, Fergus used The Quill, his then-favourite adventure creation software from the masters of the genre - Gilsoft.

“As I recall, Bored took a few months, which was quite a long time. But at that point I had no publisher, therefore no deadlines to drive me along. There were several different versions but the changes were largely cosmetic - different typefaces, graphics and so on. I only started to explore the technical limits of The Quill with the following title, Robin Of Sherlock, where I used the load/save functionality to build a ‘true’ multi-part adventure. I’m not certain but I think that was the first time it had been done. The Quill was a fantastic tool, much more powerful than it first appeared.”

As Fergus says above, the process was a slow one, balanced around an - ahem - active student life.

“I’ve been hitting creative brick walls all my life. Now, as a crime novelist, I’ve learned how to sidestep those difficult sections, working on other parts of the story until I find the inspiration to solve the sticking point. Back then, I’d usually just save my work then play one of the Ultimate games instead!”

As with most creative products, there’s usually a case of ‘what if’, and Bored Of The Rings is no exception.

“When I look back at those early games, I’m always disappointed by how simplistic they are. There were severe memory constraints - text compression wasn’t in common use when I wrote Bored - and I wish I’d been able to add more puzzles and a broader range of responses. But I think the greatest improvement would have been to make the game less harsh - there were too many dead-ends and bottlenecks, too many situations where the player had to get things exactly right if they want to progress.”

After selling a handful of copies via mail order, Fergus ink quilled a deal on brown curly parchment with London publisher CRL. CRL had a publishing arrangement with Silversoft, which released the game at retail. When CRL and Silversoft subsequently parted ways, CRL itself published Bored Of The Rings. Fergus has no idea how the game did commercially.

“Sales figures were often rather vague back then and asking for royalty figures always made me feel like Oliver Twist asking for more.”

The game reviewed well and secured a Crash Smash, the review mentioning Fergus sending in the game to CRL on a Microdrive.

“I don’t recall the specifics, but that does sound like the kind of wildly optimistic thing I’d attempt. Having suffered so many catastrophic failures with Microdrives, I’m amazed that anything sent through the post managed to load!”

But the review that meant the most to Fergus was a 5/5 score in Sinclair User.

“I became very fond of the team at Sinclair User. It was the first Spectrum magazine that I read regularly and, as time went on, I got to know some of the staff quite well. Staff writer Chris Bourne (AKA Gremlin) often referred to me as ‘a bit of a cult’ because, he later told me, he was hoping for a very naughty typo to happen. We responded by raiding the Emap offices in Farringdon and spraying him with cans of pink Silly String. I suppose that winning a Sinclair User Classic was a particularly special feeling because I valued the opinion of the SU editorial team so highly.”

The introduction of the original release hints at the life of its programmer, offering a mysterious dedication to ‘you know who’…

“Oh dear. I suspect that was a reference to my fellow Delta 4 conspirator, Judith. I had all the restraint and naivety you’d expect in a sixteen-year-old schoolboy but, unlike many of my school friends, I was expressing my emotions by typing lines of text into a computer rather than scrawling words onto bus shelters. Graffiti will eventually be painted over, but text adventures endure forever. There was also always a temptation to have a mischievous poke at the big name publishers, but I don’t recall any particular animosity towards any software houses.”

My spine chills at the distinct impression there’s a mighty big ‘but’ on the horizon… ahem.

“BUT I did take a dim view of one particular magazine, whose editor met me in the foyer of its lovely offices and told me he couldn’t possibly allow his staff to write a good review of my game because I was ‘just a kid’. He explained that favourable coverage from them would result in me being snowed under with orders which I’d never be able to fulfil. Now that I think about it, we should probably have sprayed him with Silly String instead of Chris Bourne!”

So there’s really no animosity to any rivals? No mention of Firebrick, Tirith Belicom or ‘Kremlins’?

“Ha. I wasn’t keen on the very brief text in some of the Adventure International titles, but many of the games had really beautiful graphics so I guess they had to trade off their word-count due to memory limitations. I recall they did a game based on The Incredible Hulk and every time there was a mention of him in the game text, it was followed by a huge ‘TM’ - the days before extended character sets. I can only imagine how frustrated they must have been by the lawyers who insisted they put that in, all the way through the game!”

Talking of graphics, Fergus designed all of the images in the original Spectrum version of Bored using Gilsoft’s companion utility, The Illustrator.

“The game appeared on other platforms, but yes, the original ZX Spectrum graphics were indeed all mine. The Illustrator was a clever solution to the incredibly tight memory restrictions that we used to contend with back in the 8-bit days.

It’s just such a pity that I couldn’t draw.”

NOBLE FANFARE: The Other Versions

“In those early days, porting work depended on which of my classmates owned which computers. So Jason Somerville helped out with the Amstrad version because he had a CPC464, while Colin Buckett and Ian Willis had BBC Model B machines, so they assisted with that.

Life became a lot easier for everyone when I was finally able to buy all my own computers and stop nagging them to re-type pages of my text!”

Fergus’ final thought, or rather thoughts.

“When I look back at my old games, I do feel some of the jokes are a little embarrassing. Those titles were very much of their time and there are places where the humour veers into areas that would be classed as rather dubious, or even offensive today. However, there was never any intended malice in my schoolboy humour and I did have a huge amount of fun writing those early adventure games; I just hope that sense of fun made it through to the people who played them. I’d like to think they did.

But I always liked the idea of a Black Rider in a Sinclair C5. Though goodness knows what I was thinking - or drinking - when I came up with that one.”

My thanks to Fergus for his time and www.spectrumcomputing.com for research purposes.

Columbo here. Just one more thing. This Sceptical business. What can you tell me about that?

“Sceptical was a homage to the wonderful Spectacle program, which came on the B-side of Design Design’s awesome shoot-’em-up Dark Star. I was taken with the idea of having another platform to reach out to the people who played my games, and I liked the pseudo-Teletext format that Spectacle used, so I sat down and wrote my own version. It gave me an opportunity to include all sorts of dreadful jokes and thinly-veiled jibes at disliked schoolteachers.

Although, in my defence, I was a schoolboy at the time!”

Lieutenant! I got ‘im!