Commodore Power/Play April/May 1985 The Hitchhiker's Guide to Douglas Adams Sixty-four floors above New York City's Rockefeller Center, Englishman Douglas Adams is holding court. "I want you to know that I really enjoyed working on this game, and IÕm not just saying that because I'm trying to sell it. ThatÕs only 90% of the reason." The game, of course, is Infocom's _The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy_, which Adams co-authored with Infocom's Steve (_Planetfall_, _Sorcerer_) Meretzky. It's a computer version of the wildly-successful and off-the-wall science fiction book of the same name--the first book by a "name" author to be translated into the new interactive, all-text medium. It is available for $34.95 on disk for the Commodore 64. _Hitchhiker_ has reached just about every medium this planet has to offer. It started as a 12-part British radio series in 1978 and quickly built up a cult following. Adams made it into a book which spawned two sequels, with a third just published (_So Long, And Thanks For All the Fish_). Then came the British television series ("For people who need the pretty pictures," Adams says) and two records. There has also been a stage play, and a movie is in the works. But Infocom's computer version is the most intriguing--for the first time in history, a person can read a best-selling book and be a _character_ in it at the same time. According to Douglas Adams, the idea for _Hitchhiker's_ came to him on night in Innsbruck, Austria, as he was lying on his back, "slightly drunk, and contemplating the universe." He was on a semester break from college (Cambridge University) and travelling around the Continent with the help of _The Hitchhiker's Guide to Europe_. It was there that he invented Arthur Dent, a hapless Earthling who wakes up one morning to find bulldozers about to demolish his house. Dent quickly learns that there is a bigger demolition about to occur--the demolition of the entire planet. With the help of his friend Ford Prefect, Dent hops a ride on an "Electronic Thumb" and hitchhikes the galaxy. After the success of the radio series, books, TV show, record and play, Adams spent about a year exploring ways to transform _Hitchhiker_ into a work of interactive fiction. He also became a big fan of Infocom games. "I started to work on a word processor, and like most writers, I began to discover all the other things that computers can do--which is why you end up day after day with nothing much written. One of the great aids I found to _not_ writing was Infocom games. As soon as I started to play them I thought, 'Here are a set of minds similarly afflicted.'" Mark Blank, Infocom's vice president of product development (and author of _Zork_ and _Deadline_), was a big fan of _The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy_. "Imagine our surprise when Doug Adams walked in one day and said he's been playing our games for awhile and wants to work on one. We were totally floored," Blank remarks. Blank teamed up Adams and Meretzky, no small task considering that Meretzky lives in Massachusetts and Adams lives in England. The two hooked their computers up via modem through the Dialcom computer network and began sending electronic mail back and forth. "Doug would write detailed chunks of material and send them by modem," says Meretzky. "I'd transcribe the material directly onto a disk in my computer. In the same way, I would send Doug portions of the game as programming was completed." In June, the two got together in England to put the finishing touches on the game. It was then debugged on Infocom's 36-bit DECSystem 20/60 mainframe computer and translated for every microcomputer. Writing interactive fiction is very different from writing traditional fiction. Infocom's Mark Blank thinks it's harder. "It's not just a matter of translating stories," he says. "Our recent _Seastalker_ game was written by Jim Lawrence, who had ghosted 50 or 60 Hardy Boys and Tom Swift books. He wanted to write a story that went from point A to B to C, and we kept saying that you have to think in terms of a story where the characters have alot of _different_ possibilities. We really had to train him alot." Douglas Adams, though, finds interactive fiction to be _easier_ to write than traditional fiction. "I found it very conducive because my mind happens to work in that way. You need a particular bent of mind to do it, and I _do_ mean bent." "There are a number of things that are easier," Adams explains. "You don't have to write a 'seamless garment' for a game like you do in a book. When you write a book, you may know how one section goes and how the next section goes, but actually connecting them is very difficult. In an all text game, the _reader_ is supplying the connections between those pieces of text." Adams says writing interactive fiction is like writing for radio. Both use the imagination of the reader/listener in place of pictorial description. "There's a famous remark much quoted in England about a little boy who is asked which he prefers--radio or television. He says he prefers radio because the scenery is better." Blank agrees: "Novels are not necessarily helped by graphics. You can actually build the best pictures of the world in your mind." All-text computer games are not new, but with the exception of Infocom's they have been a disappointment, according to Douglas Adams. "With most of the games, I was very much aware of the fact that they were written by computer people who had branched out into writing. I wanted to be one of the first to come from the _other_ side of the tracks. While I was writing the game, I frequently had the feeling--'I don't think anybody's ever _done_ this before.' It's very exciting working with this new medium, and I'll be pursuing it further." In fact, Adams and Infocom are at the "let's-talk-about-it" stage of another game that is being conceived purely as a game to begin with. There's no doubt that interactive fiction is, as Infocom claims, "a new art form" in its infancy. Other big name authors will almost certainly jump on the interactive bandwagon. Will we see the day when conventional literature will be replaced by interactive literature? Is print dead? "Absolutely not," according to Douglas Adams. "When radio came out, everyone said books will disappear. When television came out, everyone said that radio will disappear. It was the same when movies came out. People find new ways of enjoying themselves. There's something about the experience of a book which nothing else will ever replace. You can't take a computer game on the train. Interactive fiction is different and it's great to have it aboard, but it doesn't mean anything else has got to be thrown out."