Douglas Adams Info - Where To Find The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy Infocom Game

by , 8:00 AM EDT, May 14th, 2001

The news has swept the online world, Douglas Adams died on Friday of a heart attack. Our own Eolake Stobblehouse offered a great tribute to Mr. Adams earlier this morning, if you need more information Observer Jeff Kievlan wrote in with some information for those looking for the old Infocom Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy game. From Mr. Kievlan:

I've sure by now you've heard the news that author, Applemaster and all around hoopy frood Douglas Adams has died of a heart attack at 49. The news was announced on Saturday.

I remember meeting him at a CompUSA during the release tour for Starship Titanic. He commiserated about the game's initial PC only release--as a Mac user, he didn't even own a computer capable of playing the brand new game he co-created!

What really creeps me out is that just Friday afternoon, I picked up my battered copy of The Hitchhikers Guide for the first time in about 5 years and fell deep into it.

I thought other Observers might like to know that one of Adam's hardest-to-find works, the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Infocom game, is now available in an online Java version on his official Web site.

For the uninitiated, Infocom games were text-based adventures initially available on the Apple II and Commodore computers. The best known by far are the legendary Zork series. The Hitchhiker's Guide was arguably one of the best Infocom titles, but it is fairly high up the difficulty scale (with numerous ways to die at the very outset of the game.) Some familiarity with the books if helpful at the beginning, but the plot quickly diverges soon into the game.

The Hitchhiker's Guide originally came packaged with a sales brochure for the HHG, two "Orders for Destruction" of the Earth, black cardboard "Peril Sensitive" sunglasses, a "Don't Panic!" button, some fluff (in a plastic bag) and a "microscopic space fleet" (an empty plastic bag).

If Macheads would prefer to play the game natively on their Macs, the actual z-code file is available as well.
A Macintosh z-code interpreter is required, but a free one is available at http://eblong.com/zarf/maxzip.html.

If you want to play on your Palm, a Palm interpreter can be found at http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Way/2367/download.htm
Users will need access to a PC to convert the z-code to a .pdb file, or they can poke around on the net for a pre-converted copy.

So find your towels and start playing.

-Jeff Kievlan

Thanks for the info Jeff! We have a discussion in the Forums about Mr. Adams, and we would like to invite you to share your memories of the man and his work.

Douglas Adams' Web Site