What is The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy?

The bulldozer is coming, and so is the end of the world, hut with that hangover you hardly care. If you manage to survive the hangover, you discover that your house is about to be demolished to make way for a highway And as if that weren't enough, the earth is about to be demolished to make way for an interstellar bypass. Luckily you have a good friend, who sometimes speaks vaguely, a towel, and the incredible answer machine – the Guide,

Infocom’s newest addition to its lineup is a joint effort between Steven Meretzkv, who was responsible for Planetfall and Sorcerer, and Douglas Adams, author of the book The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy... The game begins the same way as the book but quickly diverges, so you don't have to know the book to play the game. Infocom's innovative packaging gets you right into the mood of its games; Hitchhiker's Guide is supplied with such things as a Microscopic Space Fleet, peril-sensitive sunglasses, and a Don't Panic button.

The sophisticated parser (the translator that enables an adventure game to respond to English language commands) and an involved story line take so much memory, however, that graphics are ignored entirely, resulting in the now-familiar designation of text adventure... The lack of graphics is sometimes cited as a drawback, hut when was the last time you read a novel that needed pictures?

For a taste of Infocom adventuring, become a reluctant hitchhiker at one point in the journey, when you’re faced with a simple problem: how to catch a fish that comes out of a dispensing machine. Consult the Hitchhiker's Guide, which you may be lucky enough to acquire from your friend and fellow traveler in the game, to understand why you need the fish.

When you press the button on the dispenser, a fish shoots out, sails across the room, and flies through a hole in the wall. Despite various bodily contortions, you fail to both press the button and block the fish's passage at the same time. Standing in the fish's path and hitting the button with another object also fails. Trying to stuff the dispenser slot doesn’t work, either.

Aha! Closer examination reveals a hook in the wall over the exit hole. With a sigh of self satisfaction, you hang your robe on the hook, effectively blocking the hole. You cross the room, press the dispenser button again, and watch the fish shoot across the room, smack into the robe, and slide through the sleeve to the floor, right down a heretofore unnoticed drain.

Undaunted, you cleverly knot the sleeve of the robe and press the button again. Another fish shoots out, flies across the room, and slides down the body of the robe into the floor drain.

After giving the problem more thought, you lay a towel over the floor drain. Another fish hits the robe, slides down to the floor, and lands on the towel. Before you can triumphantly retrieve the fish, a lower-half-of-the-room cleaning robot arrives, scoops it up, and disappears through a panel in the wall.

That is a taste of text adventuring, Infocom style. The possibilities for actions are seemingly endless, yet most have been anticipated in the program.

As an Infocom fan, I’m not disappointed in the Hitchhiker's Guide. As a reviewer, though, I have to point out a few shortcomings. While the packaging is amusing and appealing, you are left wondering what the point of the game is; sometimes the imaginative humor of the documentation overpowers its informative content. The Infocom program designers could use the Macintosh user interface better than they do. They might consider adding a pull-down menu for the inventory of objects you possess at any point in the game, a scrolling text window so you can check your last few moves without using the printer option, and on-line help instead of hint books that you have to order by mail.

My complaints about the game are minor compared to the compliments, however. Thanks to Infocom's writers, the retorts to your commands read somewhat like a novel. Almost every possible move has been anticipated, and while the overall complexity of the game may lead to hair pulling, you won't be frustrated by too many "I don’t understand that word" replies from the program.

Here are a few hints before you begin your hitchhiking: don't let yourself get bulldozed, don't be a teetotaler, and above all, don’t panic.

Zardetto Aker, Sharon. (May 1985). Wake Up to Adventure. Macworld. (pgs. 76-77).

Download The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy for Mac

Architecture

Motorola 68K

Compatibility notes

Emulating this? It could probably run under: Mini vMac