The Pawn

The Pawn
Developer(s)	Magnetic Scrolls
Publisher(s)	Rainbird Software
Designer(s)	Rob Steggles
Platform(s)	Acorn Archimedes, Amiga, Amstrad CPC, Amstrad PCW, Apple II, Apple Macintosh, Atari 8-bit, Atari ST, Commodore 64, DOS, Sinclair QL, ZX Spectrum
Release	1986
Genre(s)	Interactive fiction
Mode(s)	Single player

The Pawn is an interactive fiction game by Magnetic Scrolls which was first published by Rainbird in 1986. It is remembered for its excellent graphics (on some versions) and the opening music available in some game versions. Also the game itself - story and parser - got mostly positive reviews. The story takes place in the fairy land of Kerovnia, from which the player must escape.

The game was written in 68000 assembler, later versions were implemented using a cut-down 68000 virtual machine even on lesser machines like the z80 based Sinclair Spectrum.

Amiga version's title music

The Commodore Amiga version is notable for using digitized instrument samples in its title music. When the game was released, the Amiga was the only home computer which had hardware support for digitized samples. However, there was probably no other Amiga game released in 1986 that utilized the capabilities of Amiga's Paula sound chip like The Pawn did. This means that The Pawn was a pioneer release in the field of digitized computer game music. The peaceful title music was composed by John Molloy and it features guitar and flute sounds among others.

External links

• Link at If-Legends.org
• Download The Pawn here
• The Pawn at Lemon 64
• Amiga version title music for The Pawn in original format (The LHA-compressed Module file can be listened to with the freely-distributed DeliPlayer program, or alternatively using the Oldsk00l[1] plugin for Winamp)
• The Pawn at SpectrumComputing.co.uk; includes cassette inlay and links to original reviews
• The Pawn at the Magnetic Scrolls Chronicles