Steve Meretzky – Working with Douglas Adams on the Hitchhiker's Guide | Hacker News Reader

Steve Meretzky – Working with Douglas Adams on the Hitchhiker's Guide

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For it's 30th anniversary, the BBC released a free to play version: https://www.bbc.co.uk/h2g2game

It is not easy; but there are hints! https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/3tmVKGc4dR463kWs0g...

Thanks (bookmarking)!

However: 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.

I wonder who at the BBC in 2024 thought a tight and (by the sound of it) exclusive integration of the-right-wing-cesspit-formerly-known-as-Twitter would be a good idea?

I think this was released in 2014, not 2024. The original was released in 1984 and those are the notes for the 30th Anniversary Edition. I now feel old.

Twitter was still 140 characters when they wrote those notes.

Ah, ok, sorry, my bad - unfortunately I can't delete the comment anymore...

Has anyone attached an AI to the game and tried to get it to solve the game? ;)

> "Al Vezza, Infocom’s CEO (and someone with no sense of humor whatsoever), was showing him around."

Albert Vezza cofounded the World Wide Web Consortium with Tim Berners-Lee, so that is big plus in my book:

"So Vezza talked Berners-Lee into coming to MIT, where the two of them cofounded the World Wide Web Consortium, or W3C, with Berners-Lee as director and Vezza as chair. Under their leadership, what started as a tentative collaboration between MIT and CERN has evolved into a group that spans hundreds of technology companies, laboratories, and research groups around the world. Over the years, W3C members have worked together to flesh out the standards of HTTP and develop others that are now as ubiquitous as they are essential." https://www.technologyreview.com/2018/10/23/139540/farewell-...

We talked with the designer behind games such as The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, A Mind Forever Voyaging and Leather Goddesses of Phobos.

American game designer Steve Meretzky startet his career at Infocom, where he created some of the great adventure classics of the eighties. For instance, it was he who got the task of making the official Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy game together with author Douglas Adams, a game that became a massive bestseller and is still remembered for its great jokes and devilish puzzles.

This was such a fun read.

The photo of Douglas Adams laying face down is just perfect.

A Mind Forever Voyaging is much overlooked IMO because it's less of a puzzle game. But it has some of the best writing of the Infocom games. Hitchhiker's is hard--maybe too much so but then I mostly struggled with Infocom games a bit absent over the phone hints from Steve :-)

The Infocom-oriented cut of @textfile 's Get Lamp documentary is worth a watch. (As is the original cut of course.)

There was a time where I played that game for days with "Jazz Impressions of New York" by Dave Brubeck (another underrated masterpiece) playing in the background. This was many many years ago, and still the feeling of that time is very present in my mind.

A Mind Forever Voyaging was way ahead of its time.

It took me like two weeks to figure out the babel fish puzzle. I almost gave up, but I could only afford one game at a time then.

FWIW, when you submit an article, you can now also immediately comment on it; that's what the text field is for. (But no need, I think, to copy & paste the first two paragraphs from the article.)

Related reading, Andy Baio's article from 2008 digging into the contents of a hard drive from Infocom:

https://waxy.org/2008/04/milliways_infocoms_unreleased_seque...

Other related reading, the excellent piece from the Digital Antiquarian :

https://www.filfre.net/2024/07/the-later-years-of-douglas-ad...

That really is an excellent (and rather long) piece.

I've often wondered how much of the original HHGTTG radio series was really John Lloyd his producer, who often had no choice but to take what Douglas had produced and bash it into shape to make a workable script.

I often wonder what could have been produced if Douglas had just had a little more focus, and whether that might have just taken the edge off his work.

Sadly, the most unrealistic thing about A Mind Forever Voyaging is that in the end, once the evil politician's master plan is revealed, he is disgraced and loses his job. Were it representative of real life, it would become a campaign platform.

The video for MC Frontalot's "It is Pitch Dark" has a cameo by Meretzky.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4nigRT2KmCE

Thanks for the trivia! I love Frontalot, and this is probably my favorite song by him.

Minor spoilers for a game released in 1984....

I played the Hitchhiker's game a couple decades ago and I remember getting stuck at the end because I had dropped something down a grate. Turns out, at least according to this walkthrough I found, that the game is programmed to randomly require an item but if you are missing one it will require whatever item you don't have...

Here's a great interview with Steve where he goes over his life story & favourite video games https://shows.acast.com/my-perfect-console/episodes/steve-me...

> Douglas, procrastinator that he was, was already a year past his deadline for delivering the manuscript for So Long And Thanks For All The Fish to his publisher … and he hadn’t yet written a word.

Jesus, I feel anxious just reading that.

My favourite quote from Douglas Adams “ I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.”

I think it's a reworked quote from someone else originally, but I like "Writing is easy - all you have to do is stare at a blank sheet of paper until your forehead bleeds..."

When you’re a professional procrastinator, you get used to the background hum of anxiety in your mind - it becomes little more relevant than a buzzing fluorescent tube over the kitchen table. An annoyance, but not something you particularly feel the need to do anything about.

Generally this arises because you’ve procrastinated on so many matters that resolving any one of them simply won’t make a difference, and you know that resolving all of them is an impossibility, particularly those where the deadline has been, gone, had children, and moved to the country in its senescence to spend more time in nature.

At some point I'll write a better response here to express my gratitude for your comment. Tomorrow, maybe. Or one of these days, anyway.

I used to work with someone (back in Palm Pilot days) who would have a list of something like 100s of overdue ToDo items. He was just terrible at starting and completing tasks.

And, yes, you can get to the point where the magnitude of curating and chipping away at your list is so great that it's easier to just put it out of mind.

He was very funny about it, but honestly I think he was probably a bit of a nightmare to work with. If he hadn't had the huge success with the Hitchhikers paperback his publishers and other collaborators would have been a lot less understanding I'm sure!

One of the books in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy trilogy (of however many books there are) ends very abruptly because the publisher was so annoyed with him missing deadlines they told him to just finish the page he was on and published whatever he had written so far.

It's difficult to put into works what the Infocom games mean to me (and likely many other 50-somethings). So many great memories curled up in a blanket spending hours mapping these games and working out the puzzles. I still play many of them to this day. Thanks for all the memories and endless hours of fun!

Is there a place to download the old Infocom games, or play them on the web somehow? HHGTTG was my favorite game, but I never played LGOP or MFV and would like to.

All of them are available to download, and many to play in a browser. A Google search will do the trick.

There's a collection of some of them on Steam.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/570580/Zork_Anthology/

Or GOG if you prefer: https://www.gog.com/en/game/the_zork_anthology

I keep hoping that now that Microsoft owns all of Infocom's legacy they'll do some more interesting packs/anthologies again.

Also, it's not the kind of "platform seller, AAA modern stuff" that Xbox Game Pass is known for, but I still like to hope that if some of these games showed up on Xbox Game Pass for PC they'd accidentally blow up on Twitch somewhat the way old PBS shows like Bob Ross and Mr. Rogers Neighborhood did. Get a bunch of people playing old classic games they'd never think to try by making them "What's New on Game Pass" notable.

How do you play Zork on Xbox? Lots of typing using the on screen keyboard? Auto fill for certain things?

That is why I suggested to focus on the "for PC" part of Xbox Game Pass. (Microsoft's sometimes confusing way of naming things strikes again.)

Though, Xbox speech-to-text isn't awful, would be a wild way to play Zork. And also, the Xbox does support connecting any USB keyboard.

Thanks! I was a little confused. There's nothing that makes using Xbox for text games to be impossible...just seems non-optimal lol.

The Internet Archive is your first port of call. For some reason I can't get any of them to load in the browser, but all of the systems are emulatable locally.

https://archive.org/search?query=infocom&and%5B%5D=mediatype...

The Z-code images are up on IFDB: https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=4h62dvooeg9ajtfa

You can click the "play online" link or download the image and play locally with an interpreter like frotz.

Wow I found transcripts for Infocom games here (ClubFloyd) ! I've been looking for this for ages, thanks!

I was chuffed to read that Steve's favorite among his many puzzles was the same as my own (Sorcerer's time-travel puzzle).

I found this last year on the Internet Archive and it gives you more insight into what went into the Infocom game than the interview.

https://archive.org/details/InfocomCabinetHitchhikersGuide

Later Adams played Myst and got interested in game development again, resulting in the rather cute Starship Titanic game.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starship_Titanic

Wonderful memories.

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