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The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Text Adventure

One of the greatest inventions in the history of time and space has, and always will be the text adventure game. I love them. I think that they allow the player to have such a wonderful and imaginative role in the enjoyment of their entertainment. True, they are not that flashy, but it's like reading a choose-your-own adventure that can really keep up and react to you. My first experience with one was related to the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, a book that I loved, and still do to this day (Yep, it's in my kindle right now, so yes... to a certain extent I have a real Hitchhiker's guide now. All I have to do is put the words Don't Panic on the cover in large friendly letters, and I can start hitching like a pro.)

I have Infocom to thank for this wonderful game, a game that I enjoyed to the last joke, even if I did eventually need to get the hint book to understand the massively strange and complicated story that it told. I'd love to write one of these one day, and maybe I will. Inform is a pretty good product.

Infocom had such a wonderful idea. To package props and key game elements as physical objects with their games made them that much more engaging even without graphics. You might have creepy letters and a guide book for a castle complete with murder mystery (Moonmist) to a glow-in-the-dark rock for Wishbringer, to complicated coding wheels in A mind Forever Voyaging. Many of them were fantastic methods of copy protection as well in a time when all their games could fit on a single floppy disc.

Although I think Adventure was the initial ground breaker here, Zork will always be the #1 for me. The one that started it all.

It is dark. You are about to be eaten by a Grue.

• http://www.douglasadams.com/creations/infocomjava.html
• http://www.douglasadams.com/creations/infocom.php
• http://infocom.elsewhere.org/gallery/hhgttg/hhgttg.html