… but it has been thirty years since the original Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy game was released. I remember playing it.
A 30th anniversary online version of the game is now available over at the BBC:
A word of warning
This game will kill you frequently. It’s a bit mean like that.
But don’t panic; you can “save” before trying something that ends up killing you.
Thirty years! I swear it was sometime last week… Oh, well–time is an illusion. Lunchtime, doubly so.
I remember playing a beta version about a year ago with a friend of mine. We were chatting over Skype, documenting our progress. Neither of us could get beyond the garden gate without being killed. It took us an hour to survive the journey to the bedroom door.
I remember playing that one. At one point there was a line something like “Nine out of ten sentient beings would have figured this out by now.”
Ya gotta love a user-hostile interface.
Okay, now I feel like I’m having one of those false memory moments. I see that the DNA website says the original game was copyright 1984 but I distinctly remember playing while I was earning my computer science degree in 1982. The game was on a 5.25 floppy which I ran on a Billings 8088 in the Engineering college at Univ. Of South Florida.. Either my memory is completely shot or we had an early copy. I managed to get out of the bedroom and onto a spaceship but always ended up floating in space and dying. I remember something about a coin, a vending machine and a Babelfish but not much else. Now I have to go check out the new version.
I have my “Don’t Panic” button from a C64 version displayed on one of the “museum” shelves in my garage. I shall have to check out the BBC link but not on this ancient computer.
Oh wait — it was a text based game. Maybe I could run it….
My Infocom “Don’t Panic” button graced the sun visor of my ’83 Tercel until first the red faded and then the yellow lettering. Because the button was useless, I got rid of the car in ’94.