The Guild of Thieves - Information

The Guild of Thieves was the second adventure from Magnetic Scrolls, after the success of their debut game The Pawn. As with its predecessor, Guild was an illustrated text entry adventure set in the fantasy land of Kerovnia.

The plot behind the game was fairly straight-forward - steal as many items of worth as you can from the island to satisfy the Guild that you deserve to become a fully paid up card carrying member. Of course, it wasn't actually that simple to get a full score. Points were awarded for getting and depositing valuable items. The maximum score achievable was 501, but the player could finish the game with a lower score.

Guild used the same text adventure system employed in The Pawn. Using native 68000 code (which was emulated on non-68000 machines), the text parser allowed for fairly complex commands, and the 16-bit illustrated versions gave the player access to a series of extra drop-down menus - Files, Text, Specials, Goodies. These options allowed the player to save their progress, restore, turn graphics on or off, etc. All disc versions had pictures (with the exception of the Sinclair Spectrum +3 and the Apple II) and the 16-bit graphics were of a very high standard. These were drawn bitmaps, as opposed to scans (as employed by Level 9 for Knight Orc).

Guild was published on a wide range of formats - Commodore Amiga, Atari ST, IBM PC, Commodore 64 (disk only), Amstrad CPC (disk only), Amstrad PCW, Sinclair Spectrum +3 (disk only), Apple II (disk only), Apple Macintosh, Atari XL/LE (disk only), Acorn Archimedes.

The C64 version involved a fair amount of disk swapping whenever pictures were loaded. Also, when the player revisited an illustrated location, a small reduced colour cameo of the illustration would be shown in the top right corner of the screen.

A follow up issue of What Burglar was available direct from Magnetic Scrolls. As far as I am aware, Rainbird weren't involved in sending these out to respondees.