Commodore Power/Play
April/May 1985
The Hitchhiker's Guide to Douglas Adams
Sixty-four floors above New York City's Rockefeller Center,
Englishman Douglas Adams is holding court.
"I want you to know that I really enjoyed working on this game, and
IÕm not just saying that because I'm trying to sell it. ThatÕs only
90% of the reason."
The game, of course, is Infocom's _The Hitchhiker's Guide to the
Galaxy_, which Adams co-authored with Infocom's Steve (_Planetfall_,
_Sorcerer_) Meretzky. It's a computer version of the
wildly-successful and off-the-wall science fiction book of the same
name--the first book by a "name" author to be translated into the
new interactive, all-text medium. It is available for $34.95 on disk
for the Commodore 64.
_Hitchhiker_ has reached just about every medium this planet has to
offer. It started as a 12-part British radio series in 1978 and
quickly built up a cult following. Adams made it into a book which
spawned two sequels, with a third just published (_So Long, And
Thanks For All the Fish_). Then came the British television series
("For people who need the pretty pictures," Adams says) and two
records. There has also been a stage play, and a movie is in the
works. But Infocom's computer version is the most intriguing--for
the first time in history, a person can read a best-selling book and
be a _character_ in it at the same time.
According to Douglas Adams, the idea for _Hitchhiker's_ came to him
on night in Innsbruck, Austria, as he was lying on his back,
"slightly drunk, and contemplating the universe." He was on a
semester break from college (Cambridge University) and travelling
around the Continent with the help of _The Hitchhiker's Guide to
Europe_. It was there that he invented Arthur Dent, a hapless
Earthling who wakes up one morning to find bulldozers about to
demolish his house. Dent quickly learns that there is a bigger
demolition about to occur--the demolition of the entire planet. With
the help of his friend Ford Prefect, Dent hops a ride on an
"Electronic Thumb" and hitchhikes the galaxy.
After the success of the radio series, books, TV show, record and
play, Adams spent about a year exploring ways to transform
_Hitchhiker_ into a work of interactive fiction. He also became a
big fan of Infocom games.
"I started to work on a word processor, and like most writers, I
began to discover all the other things that computers can do--which
is why you end up day after day with nothing much written. One of
the great aids I found to _not_ writing was Infocom games. As soon
as I started to play them I thought, 'Here are a set of minds
similarly afflicted.'"
Mark Blank, Infocom's vice president of product development (and
author of _Zork_ and _Deadline_), was a big fan of _The Hitchhiker's
Guide to the Galaxy_. "Imagine our surprise when Doug Adams walked
in one day and said he's been playing our games for awhile and wants
to work on one. We were totally floored," Blank remarks.
Blank teamed up Adams and Meretzky, no small task considering that
Meretzky lives in Massachusetts and Adams lives in England. The two
hooked their computers up via modem through the Dialcom computer
network and began sending electronic mail back and forth.
"Doug would write detailed chunks of material and send them by
modem," says Meretzky. "I'd transcribe the material directly onto a
disk in my computer. In the same way, I would send Doug portions of
the game as programming was completed."
In June, the two got together in England to put the finishing
touches on the game. It was then debugged on Infocom's 36-bit
DECSystem 20/60 mainframe computer and translated for every
microcomputer.
Writing interactive fiction is very different from writing
traditional fiction. Infocom's Mark Blank thinks it's harder. "It's
not just a matter of translating stories," he says. "Our recent
_Seastalker_ game was written by Jim Lawrence, who had ghosted 50 or
60 Hardy Boys and Tom Swift books. He wanted to write a story that
went from point A to B to C, and we kept saying that you have to
think in terms of a story where the characters have alot of
_different_ possibilities. We really had to train him alot."
Douglas Adams, though, finds interactive fiction to be _easier_ to
write than traditional fiction. "I found it very conducive because
my mind happens to work in that way. You need a particular bent of
mind to do it, and I _do_ mean bent."
"There are a number of things that are easier," Adams explains. "You
don't have to write a 'seamless garment' for a game like you do in a
book. When you write a book, you may know how one section goes and
how the next section goes, but actually connecting them is very
difficult. In an all text game, the _reader_ is supplying the
connections between those pieces of text."
Adams says writing interactive fiction is like writing for radio.
Both use the imagination of the reader/listener in place of
pictorial description. "There's a famous remark much quoted in
England about a little boy who is asked which he prefers--radio or
television. He says he prefers radio because the scenery is better."
Blank agrees: "Novels are not necessarily helped by graphics. You
can actually build the best pictures of the world in your mind."
All-text computer games are not new, but with the exception of
Infocom's they have been a disappointment, according to Douglas
Adams. "With most of the games, I was very much aware of the fact
that they were written by computer people who had branched out into
writing. I wanted to be one of the first to come from the _other_
side of the tracks. While I was writing the game, I frequently had
the feeling--'I don't think anybody's ever _done_ this before.' It's
very exciting working with this new medium, and I'll be pursuing it
further." In fact, Adams and Infocom are at the
"let's-talk-about-it" stage of another game that is being conceived
purely as a game to begin with.
There's no doubt that interactive fiction is, as Infocom claims, "a
new art form" in its infancy. Other big name authors will almost
certainly jump on the interactive bandwagon. Will we see the day
when conventional literature will be replaced by interactive
literature? Is print dead?
"Absolutely not," according to Douglas Adams. "When radio came out,
everyone said books will disappear. When television came out,
everyone said that radio will disappear. It was the same when movies
came out. People find new ways of enjoying themselves. There's
something about the experience of a book which nothing else will
ever replace. You can't take a computer game on the train.
Interactive fiction is different and it's great to have it aboard,
but it doesn't mean anything else has got to be thrown out."
