The Hobbit (1982 video game)

The Hobbit is an illustrated interactive fiction video game released in December 1982 for the ZX Spectrum home computer. Based on the 1937 book The Hobbit, by J. R. R. Tolkien, it was developed at Beam Software by Philip Mitchell and Veronika Megler and published by Melbourne House. It was converted to the Commodore 64, BBC Micro, Oric, and other home computers. By arrangement with the book publishers, a copy of the book was included with each game sold.

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 the player 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.