They made McNeill a natural to adapt Terry Pratchett to an interactive medium, given that the latter’s first couple of Discworld novels were content to plow much the same satirical territory, albeit in a more erudite and sophisticated way. Some of them reportedly sold as many as 20,000 copies, a very impressive number in the British games industry of the mid-1980s. While it would be a stretch to say that they transcended their author’s age and the technology used to create them, they were amusing in their way, and became quite popular. The first Discworld computer game came surprisingly quickly, courtesy of a teenage entrepreneur named Fergus McNeill and his little company Delta 4, who had made a name for themselves by writing slapstick fantasy parodies as Quill-based text adventures, with names like Bored of the Rings (which didn’t share anything but a name and a certain sensibility with the book of the same name) and The Boggit. In a 1986 interview, for example, he mentions being obsessed with Infocom’s interactive version of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. But computers were more than a tool to him: right from the beginning, he also played computer games enthusiastically. From the second Discworld novel on, he wrote all of his books digitally this was undoubtedly a factor in the prodigious writing and publishing pace he maintained for so many years. He soon upgraded to a Sinclair Spectrum and then to an Amstrad CPC 464, which was his first computer strong enough to run a practical word processor. In 1981, he purchased a Sinclair ZX81 in kit form and soldered it together successfully. As a man of wide-ranging curiosity, Terry Pratchett was drawn to personal computers early.

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