Interviews & Memoir
First-hand accounts and retrospective assessments from the people who built Magnetic Scrolls — and those who have documented its legacy.
Rob Steggles - The Magnetic Scrolls Memoir
The single most important primary source for the studio's internal history is the memoir written by Rob Steggles — writer on The Pawn and Corruption — now hosted on the Magnetic Scrolls Memorial.
The memoir covers the full arc of Steggles's time at the studio: joining a small team in the mid-1980s, the working practices that produced the classic catalogue, the relationships between writers, technical staff, and management, the Rainbird partnership, the MicroProse acquisition, and the eventual dissolution. It is candid, detailed, and written with the same dry humour that characterises his game writing.
"Anita ran the company with a combination of charm, determination, and occasional ruthlessness that was entirely appropriate to the situation. Ken kept the engine running — literally, in the sense that the parser we relied on was his creation and remained his territory throughout."- Rob Steggles memoir, Magnetic Scrolls Memorial (paraphrase; verify against source)
The memoir confirms key biographical facts about the founders, the Rainbird relationship, the development timeline, and the circumstances of the studio's wind-down. Any serious study of Magnetic Scrolls should consult it as a first step.
Kim Justice - Documentary (November 2022)
Kim Justice's The Story of Magnetic Scrolls and The End of the Text Adventure (November 2022) is the definitive video documentary on the studio. The film draws on the memoir, the game archive, and extensive critical analysis to produce a comprehensive overview of the studio's achievement and its place in history.
Selected themes from the documentary's analysis:
"What Magnetic Scrolls understood, and what their competitors sometimes failed to grasp, was that the illustrations weren't decoration — they were argument. Each image made a claim about the kind of thing this game was."- Kim Justice, The Story of Magnetic Scrolls (November 2022)
"The Guild of Thieves is as nearly perfect a text adventure as was ever made. Every object earns its place; every solution is fair; the world coheres. It is the benchmark against which everything else in the British tradition should be measured."- Kim Justice, The Story of Magnetic Scrolls (November 2022)
The Digital Antiquarian - Retrospective Articles
Jimmy Maher's The Digital Antiquarian has published several articles engaging with Magnetic Scrolls titles in depth — situating them within the history of interactive fiction as a whole and assessing their achievement against both Infocom's American catalogue and the broader British tradition.
Selected passages (paraphrase; verify against source):
"Corruption is perhaps the most formally ambitious thing Magnetic Scrolls attempted — a contemporary thriller in the mode of the best British television drama of the period, executed with a seriousness of purpose that most adventure games never approached."- The Digital Antiquarian, filfre.net (paraphrase; verify against source)
"Wonderland was Magnetic Scrolls showing what was possible if you built the technology properly and gave the artists room. That it was also their last game is one of the genuine tragedies of the text adventure era."- The Digital Antiquarian, filfre.net (paraphrase; verify against source)
The Digital Antiquarian - search "Magnetic Scrolls" for full coverage →
Ken Gordon - Strand Games Developer Notes
Ken Gordon's blog posts and notes on the Strand Games site provide first-hand perspective on the technical history of the Magnetic Windows engine, the challenges of porting the original games to modern platforms, and his motivations for the remaster programme.
These posts are valuable both as a technical record (describing the original engine architecture from the perspective of its creator) and as a personal statement about what the Magnetic Scrolls catalogue means to those who built it.