This is accurate gameplay from the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy text adventure that INFOCOM made with the help of Douglas Adams in 1984.
I thought people would find it interesting to see the way a game would creatively do a demo in print in the 1980s since doing it other ways was either too expensive or not very useful from a marketing perspective.
More info on the game- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hitchhiker's_Guide_to_the_Galaxy_(video_game)
It was very challenging. I never got all the way through it. Amazingly, it only covers a small portion of the first book despite taking hours and hours to play.
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I actually shelled out for the invisible-ink “strategy guide” (i.e. cheating instructions) just to finish the damn thing. I suspect the guide was written by Adams as well, because it was almost as entertaining as game itself. Halfway through the section on how to get the Babel fish—the single toughest puzzle I’ve ever encountered in a game—it tells you that “it is at this point that grown men begin weeping uncontrollably.”
I remember working that one out with my brothers. Every step you take just leads to further problems getting the fish. It was easy to figure out to put the towel over the perfectly towel-sized grate and hang your robe on the hook. Blocking the cleaning robot access panel with Ford’s satchel also seemed to make sense as well. But when we put the stack of junk mail on the satchel and it actually worked? Well holy shit, were we ecstatic. It opens up some of the best parts of the game, though I would argue not as much as figuring out how to get the spare improbability drive to work. I think one of my brothers bought that same guide book long after we retired the C64, so though he knew how to finish it, I don’t think any of us ever did. I remember getting to Magrathea and not ever being able to figure out the proper tool bit. Tried taking the proper tool, and storing another tool in the thing your aunt gave you, but never seemed to work.
This tickled a half-forgotten memory. I was into a few “ASCII” “game engines” when I was a kid, ZZT and MZX. There was definitely a Hitchhiker’s game on one of those. Doubt it was official, of course.
Wow! Spoilers much?! I can’t believe they spoiled the “Beer Ending” in the trailer…
I will say though that even though I know it will just be a text adventure, I kid of want to play it now.
This was an exceptionally difficult game from the very first scene. You were particularly hard pressed to even make it off earth if you hadn’t read the book.
After that, it didn’t necessarily coincide with the book, so you had to put yourself into a Douglas Adams mindset for the duration, and that was no easy task.
I think I may have gotten through roughly a third of it before moving on to other games.
Zork was the other game I never did particularly well with. I think I got a little further in it than hitchhikers though.
I got so frustrated getting killed over and over that I typed:
Fuck Fordinto the prompt. The game responded with:
This is a family entertainment game, not a video nasty.Which is how I found out that was British slang for
porn.graphic horror films, apparently.Video nasty was slang for graphic horror movies, not porn. Not heard anyone say it since the 80s though.
British slang for porn.
I’m not sure if I’m missing something here…but what did you think “fuck” meant? Lol
You have:
No tea.
I bought several Infocom games in their day, I think HHGTTG was the only one I ever finished.
Panic sex!
Who am I kidding…
Ginantonix please
How did these text based games work? Could you really type any action and it would give a relevant response?
Try for yourself. Long story short: The devs would anticipate a lot of stuff you might try, and given that this is Douglas Adams the game can be quite snarky, but if not then you’ll see “I don’t know the word ‘foo’” or similar.
That particular game is notoriously hard and confusing and meant to be attempted several times before you’re able to get through it without triggering some dead-end in the beginning that will only become apparent in the end. It’s from another era. You might want to try Starship Titanic, also Douglas Adams, pretty much the pinnacle of text adventures (though it’s not a pure text adventure). All in all I’m just a tad too young to really have gotten into the genre, regarding point+click adventures I can recommend anything Terry Pratchett (multiple Discworld adventures) and pretty much anything Lucasarts, though the very early stuff (Maniac Mansion, Zak McKracken) is quite rough around the edges.
Gonna head down the Winchester and wait for all this to blow over
One of my all-time favorite games from my teen years. I think of it often.
There’s an app for android for playing these games that makes it look like you’re texting back and forth
Next galaxy is farther than needed.
It took me way too long to solve the first, easy ass puzzle in this game. It’s dark. You can’t see anything. And your head hurts.
Solution? Open your freakin’ eyes.
