(The earliest ARPANET connections outside
America were to Britain and Scandinavia.) ‘Lord’ took pains
to be faithful to
the text, even to including the ballads.

You are standing now in Longbottom where Tobold Hornblower
once lived, the one who first grew the true pipe-weed in his gardens,
about the year 1070 according to Shire reckoning. To the south-east
is a narrow path.

It was characteristic of Tolkien, who died in 1973,
to think the Hobbit tobacco industry as “real” as the story
of the Ring, but it has been characteristic of Tolkien's imitators and
adaptors to prefer orcs and magic: ‘Lord’, though never
completed, has a true authenticity. Even here, though, the myth of
the cave game – the underground labyrinth linking the computers
– is as strong as the myth of Middle Earth. ‘Lord’
also has a Flathead coin and a postagestamp, in clear reference to
‘Dungeon’, the 1978 mainframe distribution of the game
before and afterwards called ‘Zork’.

At one extreme of the cave game is ‘Adventureland’
(Scott Adams, 1978), the first commercial game to reach the home: a tiny
set-piece for cassette tape-based microcomputers, written under vicious
memory constraints. “I'm in a temple” is as detailed as it
gets, but Adams's games are distinguished by weirdly errant grammar,
a wide vocabulary and a talent for arranging diverse objects in a room
to portray it:

At the other extreme is ‘Acheton’ (David
Seal, Jonathan Thackray, Jonathan Partington, 1978–80), probably
the largest game in the world in 1980, with 162 objects in 403 locations.
(The title is a confection of Acheron, the underworld, and Achates,
a character from the Aeneid.) Here is the lodestone room:

You are in a large featureless room whose walls
are