Viva 1984: Two floppies and a Hitchhiker’s Guide
It’s been 25 years since I acquired my 1st generation IBM PC, with dual floppies, no hard drive + slime green monitor. Soon after, I bought my first “video game” – a text only InfoCom title based on Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. The user navigated through the game clumsily using text entry. At times, the cruse text parsing made the game frustrating, but endearing. The game was a huge success, selling 350,000 copies. But the arrival of text games was quickly squashed by the arrival of computer graphics.
Then graphics games came along and the computer using portion of the human race forgot all about 500,000 years of language evolution and went straight back to the electronic equivalent of banging rocks together – the point’n'click game. Infocom and most of its competitors went to the wall – signalling the arrival of the post-literate society.
BBC is celebrating the 30th anniversary of the original TV series. It’s offering this fantastic recreation of the original text game!
via Retro Thing
Meet the Meat at the restaurant at the end of the Universe:
ummm… sorta like having Keith Richard’s head grafted onto your shoulder! This is of course impossible!