From Text to... Text?

You've probably heard mention of it and the devious "kill you 4 hours later" puzzles. For adventure gamers, it is infamous. It is none other than the text based Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy text-based video game. Amusingly enough, it's one of the most accurate translations of a book's universe and mood to a video game ever without being a direct text read-out of the book. Since everyone's doing something new, I thought I'd post on something old (and who wants to read about ET again).

Anyway, rather than rant about my personal experience for 3 pages, I figured I'd just give the gift of letting you experience it yourselves. The following is the 20th anniversary edition of the game brought free by the BBC network. It can be hard if you haven't played a text-based adventure game (and hard even if you have), but it's a good fun read and play. You'll probably feel just as hopeless as Arthur Dent did in the books.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/hitchhikers/game_andrew.shtml

A good reason for this translating so well is the fact that Douglas Adams, along with Starship Titanic, worked directly on this and saw video games as an amazing opportunity for storytelling. Needless to say, as cruel as it is, a lot of love was put into this game.