The text adventure is surely the greatest flowering of the programmer’s art. That being so, it is with great joy that I have discovered that the BBC has released Infocom’s great ‘Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy’ game in an online playable version!
Based on Douglas Adams’s comedy science-fiction radio series (which later spawned books, TV shows and a film), The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy was developed by Infocom programmer Steve Meretzky in cahoots with Douglas Adams. The game lets you navigate around a universe as strange as the one in the original radio series, filled with Vogons and towels, space ships and Babelfish. Released in the early ‘80s, the game was a huge success. In the BBC’s 30th anniversary edition, the original sparse text-based interface has been spruced up with a metallic virtual keypad and some graphics. You can play it here.
It was the old Infocom games (notably classics such as the Zork trilogy and the outer space adventure, Starcross) that first inspired me to learn to program. The first program I wrote said “Hello world”. The second program, I wrote was an interactive adventure game with a ‘natural language’ interface, multiple characters, a huge interconnected map of locations, treasures to be collected and complicated puzzles to be solved. Yes, yes, I know that it was far too big a project for a novice programmer to undertake – but I didn’t know that at the time and so I spent every spare moment for a year writing the darn’ thing. Just in case you are interested, you can download it here.
Meanwhile, if you want to write your own adventure games (and really, why wouldn’t you?), you might like to follow along with my introductory guide to programming adventure games on YouTube. This is the first video, to get you started…
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