The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy was an adaptation from an already much loved radio series and book. How did you go about adapting a piece of linear fiction into interactive form?
It was actually quite ideal for adaptation, because it was a fairly episodic storyline, and because it was an environment filled with all sorts of great characters, locations, technologies, et cetera, while the storyline 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 nonlinearly 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. He’s 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 failure be the words that fell through a wormhole to start the inter-stellar 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 Cam bridge 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 over riding characteristic is that he is the world’s greatest procrastinator. He was slipping further and further behind on his schedule, and at the same time, his fourth Hitch hiker’s book, 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 Eng land. So I went over there to stay at this inn, which was an old baronial estate called Huntsham Court which had been converted 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 September for some final rewriting of key text portions, and it was done in time for a late October release. The game quickly shot to number one on the best-seller lists, and stayed there for months.
Steve Meretzky, wywiad w Game Design: Theory & Practice Richard Rouse III 2001