
The Starlight Lines Employee Forum RPG - dnetesn
http://kotaku.com/the-secret-douglas-adams-rpg-people-have-been-playing-f-1681986562
======
yoz
Hey, folks. I'm Yoz Grahame, the chap in the article who coded and (very
badly) ran the forum. Many thanks to Lewis for writing such a great piece, and
to dnetesn for posting it here!

If you're interested in learning more about Starship Titanic and the Employee
Forum, I recommend this MetaFilter post: [http://www.metafilter.com/98848/The-
Post-That-Cannot-Possibl...](http://www.metafilter.com/98848/The-Post-That-
Cannot-Possibly-Go-Wrong)

Rhaomi put together an amazing collection of links, including a guide to
getting and running the game today. I also have a big mess of a comment
halfway down the thread with some extra info and stories.

My one main addendum to Lewis's piece: I was far from the only person behind
the ST sites. The content was written by Michael Bywater, Neil Richards, and
Alison Humphrey. Design & development by Alison Humphrey, Cynthia Miall,
Claudio Calvelli and (whenever I got in before lunchtime) me.

~~~
Rhaomi
Hey, yoz! Thanks for the shout-out. That is probably my favorite post of mine
on the site (out of 100+ and counting). So wonderfully serendipitous and fun.
Everything about that game is a joy.

I was actually looking back into some of the Starlight Lines forum stuff a few
months ago when I discovered with dismay that the original URL
(starlightlines.com) was down. I was thrilled to figure out you'd managed to
resurrect it! (Did you ever see that email I sent you back in September?)

Anyway, the story of that hidden community is so great, I did my level best
alerting anyplace that had originally picked up the story for a correction on
the new URL so people could know it was still around. Apart from the fine
folks at H2G2:

[http://h2g2.com/feedback/A388334/conversation/view/F47997/T8...](http://h2g2.com/feedback/A388334/conversation/view/F47997/T8310537)

...I didn't get much success -- including no response from Kotaku UK when I
mailed them offering help for their pseudonymous writer on H2G2 who had been
asking for leads on the apparently dead forum:

[http://h2g2.com/entry/A452125/conversation/view/F55683/T8309...](http://h2g2.com/entry/A452125/conversation/view/F55683/T8309967)

It's good to see he ended up doing something with the story after all --
though it would be nice if he'd hat-tipped the MeFi thread where he apparently
lifted that "sentient tomatoes" quote from verbatim (unless of course that's
just a favorite turn-of-phrase of yours). Lately, MeFi needs all the Google
juice it can get.

Cheers, and thanks for all the great stories!

------
pavel_lishin
I administer a small vBulletin forum that I inherited from a friend who
inherited it from... well, whatever, this thing's been around for over a
decade now.

A few years ago we discovered that we had _parasites_! Apparently, that
version of vBulletin had some sort of secondary built-in way for users to
register - totally bypassing the moderation tools I used - and a whole
secondary forum which these vermin could use! It didn't show up on the main
boards, and was only discovered by accident.

Apparently they'd hitched a ride on our forum to start discussing some
pokemon-like game.

We ended up flushing them all out. In hindsight, I really regret this. It
wasn't anything as neat as the Starlight Lines forum, but it had only been
going for about a year. On the one hand, I probably should have let them
continue. On the other hand, I would have to be the benevolent admin of a
bunch of people that weren't a part of my community, who were using a server I
was personally paying for, and posting god-knows-what. Considering I'd already
had to ban several regular users for posting awful things, I didn't want to
double my workload.

edit: did a little research; the feature they used was "Social Groups", and
they still had to sign up normally, via the moderation tools. I guess they had
just signed up far enough in the past that I either had moderation disabled,
or I had forgotten about them.

~~~
weeksie
Hilarious! I have a forum that's been around for a similar amount of time and
at the beginning it was on vBulletin. At least in the old days it was possible
to have hidden forums that didn't show up on the main index, but would show if
you went to a specific URL/forum id. Those became little secret forums that
the users went to talk shit about other users.

It was hilarious and I'd forgotten about that.

Nowadays there might be twenty or thirty of us left. It's pretty slow but it's
a nice little community.

~~~
pavel_lishin
I was about to ask whether you and I were on the same forum, but then I
realized that there's maybe five people who even bother signing into mine once
a week these days :)

------
cstross
Oh, cool. (The only time I ever met Douglas Adams, I was in London and dropped
in on TDV, where a friend of mine was working as a sysadmin -- this was around
summer 1997 -- and I got the tour, which included the man himself, who just
happened to be in.) IIRC the novelization was going to be written by Robert
Sheckley (who was also there, one of the great SF satirists of the 1950s to
1970s, up there with Harry Harrison in his early period):

[http://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/sheckley_robert](http://sf-
encyclopedia.com/entry/sheckley_robert)

TDV had enormous energy back in mid-1997, but as I understand it everything
fell apart very rapidly after Douglas died; he was the main driver behind the
whole project, so rather than being an independent games house -- which it had
the potential to become -- it died with its founder. (There's a lesson in here
for startups, I think: try not to depend exclusively on a single creative
vision?)

~~~
hoers
>try not to depend exclusively on a single creative vision?

I guess if you have an unmatched creative genius like Douglas Adams in your
team, that might be the only real option. Especially since a lot of creative
geniuses seem to have problems cooperating with other creative geniuses (at
least in my experience).

But I generally agree. Just look at Apple.

~~~
ohitsdom
It must be scary having a company so dependent on one creative mind. But how
would Apple look today if they tried not to depend on Jobs so much? My guess-
much smaller, much less significant.

~~~
jessaustin
Apple seem to be doing just fine without Jobs:

[http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2015/01/27Apple-Reports-
Reco...](http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2015/01/27Apple-Reports-Record-First-
Quarter-Results.html)

~~~
Agustus
Now it is, but look back at Apple's share prices in 2000 and what Apple was
when Steve Jobs came in. It was a struggling company trying to figure out whom
to please, their offering of computers is what HP is now: a multitude of
options that does could do anything for everyone.

Steve Jobs' personality and drive created Apple and then saved it by having
the executive power to focus the brand away from the various iterations of
computers to get to one idea: Beautiful products that people want.

------
72deluxe
I am not sure why this game was labelled a secret. I remember it coming out! I
also remember it being praised for the AI but don't recall any of the reviews
saying why it was so good.

I suspect we'll soon have an article about the secret Lucasarts game called
Grim Fandango....

Douglas Adams wrote some interesting books (I fondly remember the 5 book
series of Hitchhiker's Guide and listened to the radio show from my dad's
cassettes) and thought Dirk Gently's first book was funny but lost interest in
the second. I was surprised that this game was labelled as Douglas Adam's
creation though - did he write any code? :-)

~~~
peterkelly
The actual game the article talks about is so secret that even when presented
with a detailed explanation of how it works, you managed to miss it.

~~~
72deluxe
Haha valid point I did skim read the article thanks to the abundantly rubbish
Internet connection I am stuck with where half of the images never load.

I deserve the stick I'll get for making that comment. I'll reread the article;
thanks.

------
diyorgasms
I remember playing this game when I was younger, and being impressed by the
interactivity of the AI. Though honestly, I mostly just swore at them
creatively.

I have to wonder, though, if the game did actually have especially good AI, or
if I just wasn't familiar with text-based adventure games enough to recognize
Starship Titanic as essentially being one.

~~~
visakanv
I relate to the dilemma. When I was playing Half Life as a kid, I remember
being blown away by the "smart enemy AI."

These days I find it odd when enemy AI does NOT react in a dynamic, networked
way. Interesting how my expectation has changed over the years. I wonder if
the same applies for video game graphics, too?

~~~
coldtea
> _Interesting how my expectation has changed over the years. I wonder if the
> same applies for video game graphics, too?_

How can you wonder? Isn't it obvious?

Graphics that would leave us impressed in 1985 or 1995 or 2000 are considered
nothing to write home about a few years later...

~~~
diyorgasms
While this is true, I find the distinction between graphical fidelity and art
style to be important in these matters.

While the graphics of Super Metroid might not be anything spectacular, the
pixel art is phenomenal, and replaying it recently I gained a whole new
appreciation for how future-proof the art direction in that game is. I think
there are many more examples of this out there, too. For instance, people
often bemoan early 3d games (Nintendo 64 games especially) for aging horribly.
On the whole, that is true. But there are certainly exceptions, such as
Majora's Mask, where (again) the art direction saved the game's graphics from
the awkward low-polygon limitations of the system.

~~~
danielweber
Each mode has a time when it gets "good enough," and everything on top of that
is gravy.

IMHO, for 2D, that was achieved with the NES generation. And for 3D, with the
GameCube generation. (My son fired up Metroid Prime yesterday on the Wii, and
it took me a while to realize it was a GC game, not a Wii game.)

But, yeah, Super Metroid is amazing. I only played it recently (~6 years ago),
never the original, and I still enjoyed it thoroughly.

~~~
kibwen
In this particular case note that the Wii hardware is, to a large degree, a
straight repackaging of the GCN hardware with a bit more RAM and a higher
clock speed. That the Wii is not an extreme graphical advance over its
predecessor is to be expected. :)

I do agree with you in general, though. Which isn't to say that graphical
advances aren't still perceptible (compare SNES-era sprites to any of the
positively _gorgeous_ sprites from Odin Sphere or Rayman Legends), but at some
point you cross a threshold where graphics cease being cringe-worthy and start
being merely dated. FFVII is a cringe-worthy example, whereas The Elder
Scrolls: Oblivion remains breathtaking to behold (as long as you don't look
anyone in the face, that is).

------
DennisP
The book may be out of print but it's available for Kindle:
[http://www.amazon.com/Douglas-Adamss-Starship-Titanic-
Terry-...](http://www.amazon.com/Douglas-Adamss-Starship-Titanic-Terry-
ebook/dp/B0012D1DLO)

------
josefresco
Some day, I'll come back to Hacker News with that same longing...

~~~
roneesh
Will we though? HN is for commenting on articles, which in several years will
have their links broken. We don't develop characters, carry on stories or
create a memes. Is a community based around commenting on things as durable as
one that has to create their own content?

~~~
DanBC
> create a memes

"Did you win the Putnam?"

------
dang
We attempted to tone down the baity title just a little, but if anyone has a
better suggestion, we'll change it again.

~~~
hullo
the new title is actually incorrect, the "secret" RPG is not the released-to-
the-public game but actually "[The] Starlight Lines employee forum" if one is
going to be literal about it. I'd personally just keep the article's title.

~~~
dang
Thanks for the correction. I've made that the title, but if anyone has a
better suggestion we can change it again.

(The reason for not using the original is that we don't want clickbait tropes
like "The Secret Celebrity Foo That Bars Have Been Bazzing For A Bazillion
Years". A good HN title is accurate and neutral.)

------
DiabloD3
So its not really secret anymore is it?

