“The star­ship Titan­ic was a mon­strous­ly pret­ty sight as it lay beached like a sil­ver Arc­turan Megavoid­whale among the laser­lit trac­ery of its con­struc­tion gantries”–writes Dou­glas Adams in The Life, The Uni­verse and Every­thing, the third nov­el in the Hitchhiker’s Guide tril­o­gy–“a bril­liant cloud of pins and nee­dles of light against the deep inter­stel­lar black­ness; but when launched, it did not even man­age to com­plete its very first radio mes­sage —an SOS—before under­go­ing a sud­den and gra­tu­itous total exis­tence fail­ure.”

This para­graph is a tiny humor­ous flour­ish in a series of nov­els filled with hun­dreds of them, but for some reason—possibly its rela­tion­ship to the orig­i­nal doomed lux­u­ry liner–the Star­ship Titan­ic would go on to have an amaz­ing­ly detailed sec­ond life as a video game. And while a paper­back copy of any of Adams’ work is read­i­ly avail­able, it can take some hunt­ing to find a work­able ver­sion of the game.

Dou­glas Adams designed the game him­self, start­ing in 1996. A decade ear­li­er, he had helped design the text-based adven­ture game adap­ta­tion of Hitchhiker’s Guide, and had expressed a desire to do more work in the video game field, after play­ing Myst and its sequel Riv­en. How­ev­er, he said, “noth­ing real­ly hap­pens, and nobody is there. I thought, let’s do some­thing sim­i­lar but pop­u­late the envi­ron­ment with char­ac­ters you can inter­act with.”

Co-found­ing the mul­ti-media com­pa­ny Dig­i­tal Vil­lage, Adams wrote the game’s script, set aboard the fail­ing Titan­ic. The big dif­fer­ence, com­pared to Myst, is that the char­ac­ter can inter­act with char­ac­ters on board, many of them but­ler-like robots. And instead of typ­ing in com­mands, play­ers could speak to the char­ac­ters in real time using a nat­ur­al lan­guage pars­ing engine called Spook­italk, uti­liz­ing over 10,000 lines/16 hours of dia­log. Like its puz­zle-game influ­ences, it was mad­den­ing to play.

But also fun, as Mon­ty Python’s Ter­ry Jones and John Cleese both turn up among the voice actors, the for­mer as a par­rot, the lat­ter as a dooms­day bomb.

An arti­cle in Kotaku from 2015 men­tions a tie-in nov­el that Adams was to write him­self, after first assign­ing co-writ­ers Neil Richards, Deb­bie Barham, and Michael Bywa­ter to the task. But then:

Liv­ing up to his rep­u­ta­tion for seem­ing­ly infi­nite tar­di­ness, Adams admit­ted just three weeks before the book’s dead­line that he hadn’t writ­ten a thing, and in the end the nov­el Dou­glas Adams’s Star­ship Titan­ic was writ­ten in a furi­ous cas­cade of words by none oth­er than Ter­ry Jones (who claimed that he wrote the whole thing in the nude).

Even more inter­est­ing, Yoz Gra­hame, Dig­i­tal Village’s web devel­op­er had been put in charge of cre­at­ing the game’s pro­mo­tion­al web pres­ence. Buried deep down in a page was a mock forum sup­pos­ed­ly being writ­ten by the low­er-lev­el crew of the Titan­ic. Gra­hame kept the forum open for fans of the upcom­ing game, only to find lat­er that Adams fans had tak­en this com­ic east­er egg to heart. Six months lat­er there were ten-thou­sand posts in the mock forum. Users had con­tin­ued on the sto­ry in the spir­it of Adams.

“It was like ignor­ing the veg­etable draw­er of your fridge for a year, then open­ing it to find a bunch of very grate­ful sen­tient toma­toes busi­ly work­ing on their third opera,” Gra­hame told Kotaku. This forum went on for six years, with lay­ers and lay­ers of run­ning jokes.

At the time of the Kotaku piece, the game, orig­i­nal­ly released on CD-ROM was func­tion­al­ly unplayable on mod­ern video game sys­tems.

Not so now. Six bucks will buy you a mod­ern­ized copy of the game on Steam or GOG. If you’re curi­ous like me, but have no time to devote the many, many hours to fin­ish­ing the game, you can watch a 13-part walk­thru video. (Note: Adams him­self turns up at the very end in an unin­ten­tion­al­ly poignant cameo.)

via Metafil­ter

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Play The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Video Game Free Online, Designed by Dou­glas Adams in 1984

Hyper­land: The “Fan­ta­sy Doc­u­men­tary” in Which Dou­glas Adams and Doc­tor Who‘s Tom Bak­er Imag­ine the World Wide Web (1990)

Ital­ian Astro­naut Reads The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy on the Inter­na­tion­al Space Sta­tion

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the Notes from the Shed pod­cast and is the pro­duc­er of KCR­W’s Curi­ous Coast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, and/or watch his films here.

Monop­oly is noto­ri­ous­ly time-con­sum­ing. On the child­hood Christ­mas I received my first copy of that Park­er Broth­ers clas­sic, my dad and I start­ed a game that end­ed up spread­ing over two or three days. That may have had to do with my appre­ci­a­tion for Monopoly’s aes­thet­ic far exceed­ing my grasp of its aim, and I’ve since real­ized that it can be played in about an hour. That’s still a good deal longer than, say, a game of check­ers, but it falls some­what short of the league occu­pied by The Cam­paign for North Africa — which is, in fact, a league of its own. Since its pub­li­ca­tion in 1979, it’s been known as the longest board game in exis­tence, requir­ing 1,500 hours (or 62 days) to com­plete.

We are, of course, talk­ing about a war game, and that genre has its own stan­dards of com­plex­i­ty — stan­dards The Cam­paign for North Africa leaves in the dust. “The game itself cov­ers the famous WWII oper­a­tions in Libya and Egypt between 1940 and 1943,” writes Kotaku’s Luke Win­kle. “You’ll need to recruit 10 total play­ers, (five Allied, five Axis,) who will each lord over a spe­cial­ized divi­sion. The Front-line and Air Com­man­ders will issue orders to the troops in bat­tle, the Rear and Logis­tics Com­man­ders will fer­ry sup­plies to the com­bat areas, and last­ly, a Com­man­der-in-Chief will be respon­si­ble for all macro strate­gic deci­sions over the course of the con­flict. If you and your group meets for three hours at a time, twice a month, you’d wrap up the cam­paign in about 20 years.”

You can get an idea of what you’d be deal­ing with over those two decades in the video below from Youtu­ber Phas­ing Play­er, an overview that itself takes about an hour and a half. “Hon­est­ly, if I’m being straight-up here, this game does sound, broad­ly speak­ing, like a fun time,” he says, half an hour deep into the expla­na­tion. “Imag­ine set­ting up a giant map of Africa,” get­ting your friends togeth­er, “Sarah’s in charge of the air force and Jim is in charge of logis­tics. You have all these peo­ple in charge of dif­fer­ent things, and you’re com­mu­ni­cat­ing strate­gies, and the com­man­der-in-chief is for­mu­lat­ing plans and doing all this stuff. That sounds like a real hoot, right?” Alas, “the big aster­isk comes in when that good time has to last lit­er­al­ly a thou­sand hours,” involv­ing what anoth­er play­er quot­ed by Win­kle calls “doing tedious cal­cu­la­tions all the time.”

Those cal­cu­la­tions neces­si­tate pay­ing close atten­tion, on every sin­gle turn, to not just quan­ti­ties like fuel reserves but the his­tor­i­cal­ly accu­rate size of the bar­rels con­tain­ing those reserves. Note also that, as Win­kle adds, “the Ital­ian troops in World War II were out­fit­ted with noo­dle rations, and in the name of his­tor­i­cal dog­ma, the play­er respon­si­ble for the Ital­ians is required to dis­trib­ute an extra water ration to their forces, so that their pas­ta may be boiled.” The Cam­paign for North Africa’s design­er, the late Richard Berg, claimed that the so-called “pas­ta rule” was a joke, and that the game’s fiendish over­all com­plex­i­ty was in keep­ing with the style of the times, a “gold­en age” of war gam­ing with high sales and ever-esca­lat­ing ambi­tions. As with so many oth­er seem­ing­ly inex­plic­a­ble arti­facts of cul­tur­al his­to­ry, one falls back on a famil­iar expla­na­tion: hey, it was the 70s.

via Kotaku

Relat­ed con­tent:

Watch a Playthrough of the Old­est Board Game in the World, the Sumer­ian Roy­al Game of Ur, Cir­ca 2500 BC

Learn to Play Senet, the 5,000-Year Old Ancient Egypt­ian Game Beloved by Queens & Pharaohs

The Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas Board Game, Inspired by Hunter S. Thompson’s Rol­lick­ing Nov­el

Monop­oly: How the Orig­i­nal Game Was Made to Con­demn Monop­o­lies & the Abus­es of Cap­i­tal­ism

Down­load & Play the Shin­ing Board Game

Board Game Ide­ol­o­gy — Pret­ty Much Pop: A Cul­ture Pod­cast #108

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.