The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxywas an adaptation from an already much
loved radio series and book. How did you go about adapting a piece of linear fic-
tion into interactive form?
It was actually quite ideal for adaptation, because it was a fairly episodic story line, and
because it was an environment filled with all sorts of great characters, locations, tech-
nologies, et cetera, while the story line wasn’t all that important. It was challenging, but
good challenging, not bad challenging.
How was it working with Douglas Adams?
On the plus side, Douglas was already an Infocom fan and had played several of our
games, so he understood what an adventure game was and he understood the abilities
and limits of our system. On the other hand, he had never written non-linearly before,
and that’s always a difficult process to get a handle on. Also, I was somewhat awed to be
working with him, and didn’t assert myself enough at the start of the process. So I think
you’ll see that the beginning of the game is quite linear, including the destruction of
Arthur’s house and the scene on board the Vogon ship. Later, when Douglas became
more comfortable with interactive design and when I got over my sheepishness, the
game became one of the most ruthlessly non-linear designs we ever did.
It was quite wonderful to collaborate with Douglas, who passed away in 2001 at the
too-young age of 49. He was a very intelligent and creative person, and humorous as
well. He’s not a laugh a minute, as you might expect from his writing, but more wry
with lots of great anecdotes. He was constantly coming up with ways to stretch the
medium in zany ways that I never would have thought of on my own: having the game
lie to you, having an inventory object like “no tea,” having the words from a parser fail-
ure be the words that fell through a wormhole to start the interstellar war, et cetera.
How evenly was the work divided between you two?
The original goal was that we’d do the design together, Douglas would write the most
important text passages and I’d fill in around them, and I’d do the implementation,
meaning the high-level programming using Infocom’s development system.
Douglas came to Cambridge for a week when we got started. Then we exchanged
e-mails daily, and this was in ’84, when non-LAN e-mail was still pretty rare. We also
exchanged phone calls approximately weekly.
However, Douglas’ single overriding characteristic was that he was the world’s
greatest procrastinator. He was slipping further and further behind on his schedule, and
at the same time, his fourthHitchhiker’sbook,So Long and Thanks for All the Fish, was
about a year late and he hadn’t written a word.
So his agent sent him away from the distractions of London and forced him to hole
up in a country inn out in the western fringes of England. So I went over there to stay at
this inn, which was an old baronial estate called Huntsham Court which had been con-
verted into a delightful inn, and spent a week there completing the design. Then I
returned to the U.S. and implemented the entire game in about three intense weeks,
just in time for an abbreviated summer of testing. Douglas came back over in Septem-
ber for some final rewriting of key text portions, and it was done in time for a late
Chapter 10: Interview: Steve Meretzky 175