"What?" we hear you cry. "1982? Could people actually play games in 1982? Had plastic and wires and hands even been invented?"
You scamps. In fact, it was a tantalising time to be a gamer precisely because everything was still so new and changing so fast. If some perky programmer wanted to rewrite the DNA of the platform game or revolutionise the text adventure, they were totally free to have a crack at it.
Cue Aussie-based Beam Software and its publishing arm Melbourne House. Despite never being a big household name, Beam slipped more than one must-play title into the lexicon of the '80s gamer.
And if they thought Horace Goes Skiing was well-received, The Hobbit would attract even more attention than a hunky dwarf boy band with a fascinating mountain-themed concept album.
ZoomSoon-to-be Hobbit heavyweights Philip Mitchell and Veronika Megler were still at Melbourne University when Beam (thanks to Melbourne House's roots as a print publisher) got the Tolkien licence and offered them the chance to do it justice.
And on crazy future technology too: heavy-hitters such as the Spectrum and Commodore 64 that were just muscling onto the market with their fancy multiple colours and kilobytes of memory in the double digits.
Fireworks followed. Fireworks, smoke rings and the rich bloom of dragonfire on treasure.
The Hobbit may have been a humble text adventure, but this was an age before The Lords Of Midnight, before King's Quest or Might & Magic or even Zelda, before sword-slinging acronyms like JRPG, MMORPG and almost every MUD. In 1982, this was where you went looking for immersion in a full-blooded fantasy world.
There were compromises, of course: a cut-down cast list and huge hops from one setpiece to the next which meant that forest trolls lurked just two moves away from Bilbo's front door. But none of that made the game's arrival any less of an event.
And not just because of the licence, but the extra ingredients mixed into the formula that made The Hobbit feel way ahead of its time.
For one thing, it had a flexible language recognition system called Inglish which let you give your instructions more detail and flavour than 'go north' or 'open chest' or 'punch Elrond'.
Apple II version
And who could forget its independent characters like Thorin and Gandalf, technically there as backup for their master burglar but just as often inclined to grab stuff, make a sarky comment and run of? The sods.
The Hobbit bore a huge responsibility for introducing kids to the joy of 8-bit adventuring. Its million-selling Spectrum success paved the way not only for versions on other systems, but for many more games based on rings and Riders and reckless outings for respectable halflings.
In later life Beam Software would amass a hoard of '90s console tie-ins, from NBA to WCW, Back To The Future to Men In Black. It faded into shadows after becoming Krome Studios Melbourne in 2006, but it was a damn good run.
Though The Hobbit and its kind are long since extinct, they gave gaming evolution a good solid kick in the elven leggings.
These were ancestors of the emergent open-world games and the sprawling RPGs that absorb all our cash today: games that casually flaunt the kind of scope and tech that would have blown the minds of those jobbing students three decades ago, as they fought like maverick man-bears to fit a living, breathing chunk of Middle-earth into just 48k
