Category Archives: The Hitchhiker Legacy

Having spent a good many years working with my friend and late fellow primate, Douglas Adams, I maintain a small and irregular archive of stuff related – occasionally tenuously – to Douglas’ life and work. This is it, and any relationship to objective reality is purely coincidental and probably unintentional.

The Archaeology of the Hitchhiker’s Guide

<img src="files/dna/infopic.jpg” alt=”HHGG Game Cover” />

Author’s February 2005 Note:

Back in 1998, I turned my wider interest in archaeology to something more specific to my profession: software archaeology. A long session of clambering and excavation in my attic revealed my 1985 copy (on floppy disk, yet) of one of the most compelling and insane frustrating computer games of the time, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Under laboratory conditions, I then callously performed a dataectomy on it – extracting the game content from the enveloping application. The next step was to source Java interpreters that could run the extracted game data online, and on a variety of portable devices. The result is what first appeared on the TDV web site. I also ported it to the Palm and Newton, installing a copy on Douglas’s own Newton when he wasn’t looking – I’m not entirely sure if the subsequent exclamation was one of pleased surprise or historical pain.

I then, with permission from Activision, who’d taken over the code (but not script) rights when Infocom folded, used the game, in Java form, as part of the 1999 Comic Relief web site. Plans to release it formally as feeware on a variety of mobile platforms were put temporarily on hold when TDV was sold off, and things then lay quiet for several years. That was until 2004, when my erstwhile colleagues, Sean Sollé and Shimon Young, took the data file and, working with Rod Lord – the artist who created the graphics for the original BBC TV series – created a complete client-server implementation of the game, with a C++ application on the server and a very nice Flash-based browser interface. This has been released on the BBC’s web site, where it has been a huge success, resulting in an Interactive BAFTA award and the latest version, the Twentieth Anniversary Edition.

So if you want to play the game, I’d very strongly recommend you do so on the BBC’s web site, where you can make “Ooh” and “Aah” noises at the graphics and, usefully, save the game as well, something the original Java implementation couldn’t do. That I’ve included here, for historical reasons, along with the 1999-2001 introduction and help information I wrote (itself now being used by the BBC).

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The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: Infocom Interactive Fiction

For your interest and amusement, click on the “Continue Reading” button to play my original Java port of the Infocom Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy game. The game is Copyright © the estate of Douglas Adams . ZPLet Java Z interpreter courtesy of Matthew Russotto. Software archaeology by myself, Richard Harris at <a href="” title=”Home page”>Two Worlds Research.

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HHGG Game Help

The Basics :

To help you with the basics of playing the game, here’s a few basic commands to get you started.

Commands are entered at the > prompt at the bottom of the screen. These are only a small part of what the game understands – try whatever English commands seem appropriate at any given point. Note that the game only recognises the first six characters of each word.

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The Sunday Times: A Response

From: Richard Harris <**@two–worlds.com>
Date: Mon, 18 Jun 2001 19:07:14 +0100
To: <nicholas.hellen@sunday–times.co.uk>
Subject: Your ST article on Douglas Adams

Nicholas

Your article in Sunday’s ST on Douglas Adams was as striking an example of sloppy, ill–informed and assumptive journalism as I have come across, painting as it does an entirely erroneous picture through a combination of inaccurate, partial and unattributed information and unfounded speculation.

Your avoidance of verifiable source through the use of terms such as ‘a close friend’ and ‘sources close to’ is indicative of very poor or undiscriminating journalism – any genuine friend of his would be more than happy to go on record with anything they had to say about him.

As a friend and colleague of Douglas and a co–founder of The Digital Village/h2g2, please allow me to correct, with facts and direct information, a few of your more basic errors and misassumptions. I am happy to have these comments attributed to me. Rather than an impassioned rant (however justified), let’s try this point by point – please bear with me:

“FRIENDS of Douglas Adams have revealed how the author of The Hitch–Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy was blighted before his premature death by a malign “Midas touch”. The pressure of justifying a £2m advance for his final novel preyed on his mind until he became incapable of writing, even when he had flashes of his old inspiration.”

Blighted? – I can think of few people to whom the term is less applicable – you make a cheerful and gentle man sound like some tortured latter–day Vanderdecken, forever attempting to round the Cape of his writers block. Douglas’s inspiration rarely deserted him – part of his problem was not merely being interested in too many things, but actually being capable of driving people’s perception of what the future could be. In recent years, he’s been at least as much respected for his ability to articulate a shared vision of the future of society, technology and the environment as for his original fiction. It’s in this area and the inspiration he’s provided through his work with scientists, engineers and philosophers that may in fact prove to be his most important legacy – many of the world’s greatest thinkers and innovators will cheerfully acknowledge the inspiration and challenge that a discussion with Douglas could provide.

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Douglas Adams: 1952 – 2001

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