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