ON THE WEB: PLAY THE HITCHHIKER’S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY TEXT GAME
by Hazed
Yes, it’s back. The best single-player text adventure game ever is now available again online.
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams started as a radio series, became a series of books, was released on vinyl, then a TV series was made. More recently, there was a Hollywood movie. You can see its influence in Fed DataSpace – Magrathea, the space station west of Sol’s interstellar link, that contains the showrooms for stock planets, is based on the planet building world in Hitchhiker’s Guide.
But many fans don’t realise that it was also a computer game. A text adventure – yes, like Fed – released by one of the leading companies in the field, Infocom. It was a hugely successful game.
It was this game that got me involved in Fed, in a roundabout way. I bought my very first computer, a Commodore 64, specifically so I could play the text adventure game of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. At that time it was the only machine you could buy the software for. I then joined Compunet which was a computer network just for the C64, and that was where Fed started, I began to play, and so on…
If I had bought a different kind of computer I would probably never have discovered Fed at all!
Anyway, all of this is a preamble to the exciting news that the text adventure game of Hitchhiker’s Guide is now available again on the BBC website, and you can play it for free here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/1g84m0sXpnNCv84GpN2PLZG/the-hitchhikers-guide-to-the-galaxy-game-30th-anniversary-edition
Now where did I put that thing that my aunt gave me which I don’t know what it is...?
