He was somehow never an author to me, but gosh I was so excited to speak to him. ![]() Adams was peripheral to so much of the most important comedy of the '60s and '70s, before he even started on his masterpiece. And I believe he wrote some Doctor Who too. And of course there was that text adventure based on H2G2. (I have the cassette of the interview, still, but thank goodness no means to play it.) He wrote for The Burkiss Way, which later was endlessly mean to him, featuring a regular character called "Mister Different Adams", who only ever said, "I see comedy as a kind of." with an irrelevant word finishing it, before being rudely cut off. I owned a book which featured a picture of the two of them sharing a bath, although grimly I cannot remember what it was. He'd written for Monty Python's Flying Circus and was a good friend of the Pythons, most especially Terry Jones. Because it was! That's what it was created to be! Fight me!īut Adams was also a comedy writer for other things I cared passionately about. But to me, who'd been played the original broadcasts by my dad as a boy, it was and always will be a radio programme. Which to so many must seem like sacrilege. I had then, and ridiculously still today, never read the books. To me at that time, Douglas Adams was the writer of my favourite ever radio series. He was so astonishingly kind, warm, and most of all, generous, giving answers to questions he must have been asked ten thousand times with verve and wit and no hint of weariness at this 19 year old's green, green approach. I got to talk to Douglas Adams, for what felt like ages, and it was utterly wonderful. Yes, it's a massive namedrop, but you would too, wouldn't you? It was a telephone interview, for my university newspaper, for which I was the "comedy editor". Primarily because, by some exceptional fortune, I had the opportunity to interview Adams about the game before its release. Adams wouldn't have approved of a miracle. Starship Titanic was never going to work. In fact, almost entirely because of ambition. This masterful creator, the man who brought us The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy in all its forms, spent what would turn out to be his last few years working on a fundamentally broken videogame. It was Douglas Adams's last work of fiction, and it was a truly terrible one. I find Starship Titanic such a sad thing. ![]() Related works: A Tie – Douglas Adams' Starship Titanic ( 1997), by Terry Jones – was published based on the game, with a rather more developed plot.Past Perfect is a retrospective column in which we look back into gaming history to see whether old favourites are still worth playing today. While Starship Titanic has many excellent parts – including impressive art deco visuals and numerous moments of genuine hilarity – the whole is, perhaps, less than their sum. ![]() The plot, however, is remarkably predictable, many of the puzzles seem arbitrary, and technical limitations mean that the frequent conversations are often frustrating. Such flourishes bring to mind Adams's written work, and the game contains many isolated sequences which are as amusing as anything in his novels. As soon as this has been done, the eponymous Starship crashes into their house, and the player is shanghaied by the ship's Robot crew to perform emergency repairs on their sabotaged artificial intelligences (see AI). The game begins with a markedly metafictional moment the player finds themselves in their suburban home, where they must locate a copy of Starship Titanic and load it into their computer. Starship Titanic, however, also draws heavily on the tradition of text Adventure design exemplified by such works as Planetfall ( 1982) and Adams' own The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy ( 1984), both in its tone of sometimes painful obscurity and in its use of a text parser (see Adventures) to enable conversation between the player and computer controlled characters. As in those games, the player must move from one predefined node in space to another, and their ability to interact with the physical environment is strictly limited. Starship Titanic is a graphical Adventure which uses a first person view similar to that of Obsidian ( 1996) or The Journeyman Project ( 1993). Designed by Douglas Adams, Adam Shaikh, Emma Westecott.
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