Uncle Ripperbile always said I had a brilliant sense of smell. Boy, was he right! It's not just brilliant, it's sponditiously flabbergastingly fabulous, excellent beyond belief. I'd only been sniffing ten minutes (bit distracting, those whiffs of doner kebab) when I found them. Just south of the river between London Bridge and Borough station lie the offices of Magnetic Scrolls. Lollop down a grimy side alley (hmmm, dig those slimy smells), pass by a hearty-looking London pub (very tasty regulars), travel up in a rickety, rattling lift and you're there. Pretty low profile for a company that has won practically every adventure accolade going include the Game of the Year awards for both Fish! and The Guild of Thieves! So how did this small but everso successful company actually start? I hung Ken Gordon and Anita Sinclair out of the window until they spoke.

'When the QL came out, that looked like an opportunity for writing new, interesting games. When the ST came along with its added graphics the move was easy because they're both 16,000 machines. There was a gap in the market (no, please don't hit me again, Chuck); nobody had got into 16-bit machines so we took the chance.'

What they came up with was The Pawn. Set in the mythical land of Kerovnia, it was bunged in a classy blue box by Rainbird and converted to run on a wide range of 16 and 8-bit formats - from PC to Amstrad CPC. Contrary to common belief, this programming lark isn't just swanning around in white Ferraris and wearing designer shirts. Nope, it's a lot of hard slog and sweat. For a start, each game takes about a year to develop. All primary work is carried out on a huge microvax linked to a series of terminals, A couple of programmers work from home (too scared to meet me, eh?) on comparatively fast Apricot Zens - but the microvax system provides more than enough opportunity to experiment. About 80% of a game is written by two people - one specialising in the text and the other in coding - but as their work overlaps neither is a complete specialist. About two months before a game is due to be released, work starts on the individual versions. A specific format is assigned to each programmer. Meanwhile, a small army of play-testers and bug-spotters (gi's a job, Anita) is called into action. Over the years they've been clever enough to develop a whole range of In-house adventure utilities. What do they think of some of the finished systems available on the market now?

'A lot of really good ideas get strangled because a system isn't capable of expressing them. One of the most complex utilities available at the moment lets you have up to 500 flags and 500 counters - you couldn't express one of our games in those terms. Without that extra flexibility, I could see it being very difficult to write a half-reasonable game using one of the adventure- writing systems. The ones I've seen, even by people I've expected to do quite well, have been marginal. Why are you looking at me like that Chuck...you haven't written any have you ... ?'

Lucky for him that I haven't. Otherwise we wouldn't be moving quite so swiftly into the graphics v text debate.

'Graphics take a long time to do and they involve a lot of people so they really have to add something to a game to be worthwhile. Originally, we considered Iine drawings but we then decided to go for bit pictures. There's fewer of them, but generally they're of a higher quality. 'The trouble is that when a game is being developed we don't work with the pictures; the design is largely coordinated by artists told about the story. They're given descriptions of the rooms so that they make sense, but the illustrations can never be completely accurate. There may be a standard lamp in the picture that isn't In the description. Try and look at it of do something with it and you draw a blank. Our graphics are illustrations really: they're broadly correct but they aren't too literal.'

What do they think about the future of sound in adventures?

'On the Amiga versions of our games you can opt for spoken descriptions and enjoy a bit of music. Unfortunately, sound is really heavy on memory. Certainly with the Amiga's stereo capabilities you could have binaural creeping footsteps. It would be a bit unsubtle, though, having to tell the user that he has to wear his headphones because he may be in for a surprise!' It was nice to see that the team was almost always in complete agreement with me. I'm all in favour of violence, and Magnetic Scrolls insist that they don't support a particularly pacifist stance. The fact that you can't die in Jinxter was introduced primarily as a gimmick. 'You can die in Corruption and Fish! but our games do tend to suggest that force doesn't get you anywhere very fast. Attack the old man in The Guild of Thieves or the guru in The Pawn and you're dead. Blood and guts don't usually have that much to add to a game. It may be justified in a film setting where you're making an artistic point, but I don't think you're making that kind of point in a computer game. More often than not blood and gore is introduced as a marketing ploy. If you really want to shock people then there are other ways of doing it.'

I reckon Magnetic Scrolls are more in the business of shocking by contrast. Corruption was a pretty drastic departure from the fantasy world of Kerovnia and Fish! is an even more drastic departure from that. We won't know for some time what next year holds in store-for the moment, plans are firmly under wraps. As for what could possibly follow Fish! - cod knows.