30 years ago the great science fiction author Douglas Adams partnered with Steve Meretzky of Infocom and developed a KOOL computer game. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Game premiered in 1984. It was a text only game. It was one of the best-selling games of its era, selling some 350,000 copies alone in 1984. Below is a video from the 1984 game.
You can go to the BBC website to play the game online for free. The below information discusses the game. You can spend hours playing this game and dying. Yes, you die in the game so you better remember to say often. If you are fan of the old game or just a fan of the books, movie, plays, radio show, or the British show, then you will probably have a blast with it. But don’t forget your towel and whatever you do, DON’T PANIC!
The game is still the same wonderful piece of interactive fiction that Douglas Adams wrote and Steve Meretzky programmed, but in finding it a new home, a few changes needed to be made. The old Flash game would not work on the new servers, and in porting it to a new HTML5 incarnation, several innovations took place. We were able to build in a larger, handier interface, with additional keys and functionality, and build in the ability to tweet from the game.
Then things started to get silly. Having covered the basics, we decided to slip in an ‘Any’ key, just because we could. The $, % and ^ symbols were replaced with new ones for the Altarian Dollar, Flanian Pobble Bead and the Triganic Pu, not because they are needed in the game, but just because we felt like it. We then decided that rather than having a simple functionality where the user could tweet, we would allow the game itself to tweet, based on the actions of users in the game.
This was when the games’ personality started to shine through. This may or may not prove to have been a good idea…
Note: The game will kill you frequently. If in doubt, before you make a move please save your game by typing “Save” then enter. You can then restore your game by typing “Restore” then enter. This should make it slightly less annoying getting killed as you can go back to where you were before it happened. You’ll need to be signed in for this to work. You can sign in or register by clicking the BBCiD icon next to the BBC logo in the top navigation bar.
(Hitchhiker Guide)
