~3 minute read'Hitchhiker's Guide' Has Grown Astronomically
"THE HITCHHIKER'S Guide to the Galaxy" began as a radio program in England in the late '70s and evolved into three books, a British television series, two records and a stage show.
In the last eight years, "Hitchhiker's" small science-fiction cult following has grown into an audience of millions. Seven million copies of the original "Hitchhiker," "The Restaurant at the End of the Universe" and "Life, the Universe and Everything" have been sold world-wide. And now, says author Douglas Adams, "So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish" (published by Harmony Books, it is No. 9 on Publishers Weekly's hardcover best-seller list), the fourth book in the "Hitchhiker's" trilogy -â yes, he says, it remains a trilogy -â has hit the bookstores.
The latest form in which you'll find "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" is a home computer game.
This is not a shoot-down-the-Vogons computer game. This is interactive fiction, entertainment software in which a short novel is programmed onto a computer disk.
It's difficult to describe how much fun interactive fiction can be, especially when the phrase, "interactive fiction," like most computer terms, sounds so boring. It's more than a crossword puzzle (it is a puzzle you can work out by yourself), but less than a scavenger hunt.
YOU GET CLUES to the next move, but you don't move around, except when you jump up with joy at having figured out the next move, or beat your computer with frustration, because you can't.
You become a story's main character.
For those who haven't tried interactive fiction, this is how it works. The first lines of "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" that appear on a computer are:
"You wake up. The room is spinning very gently round your head. Or at least it would be if you could see it, which you can't. It is pitch black."
You get going with the story by typing English-language commands â- "Turn on the Light," for example â- to which the program responds: "Good start to the day. Pity it's going to be the worst one of your life. The light is now on."
Your computer continues by telling you â- in Adams' subtle wit and jaunty style â- that you are Arthur Dent, shortly to become one of the last two surviving Earthlings. You wake up one morning in your home in England to find that your house, as well as the planet, is scheduled for destruction. If you play correctly, using the clues the computer game gives you to make your next move, you end up on a Vogon Constructor spaceship with your friend Ford Prefect. If you don't, you wind up dead. You also get a low score to give you impetus to try again, so you can take a trip through space with Prefect, a wanderer of the universe who's gathering information for the Hitchhiker's Guide to the galaxy, a thin, portable computer. The guide has more information about the universe than any other guide, although it is not always accurate.
"YES, AND NO," answered Adams when asked if the computer game closely follows the story line of the book. "Probably more no than yes. It was important that it was going to be equally difficult and equally accessible for people who haven't read the book, as well as those who have." It differs from the book as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern differ from Hamlet, he said; the computer game allows diversions into subplots and minor characters.
Adams propelled Hitchhiker into its metamorphosis as a computer game after meeting Christopher Cerf, co-author of "The Experts Speak." Cerf brought Adams together with the principals of Infocom, a 5-year-old Cambridge, Mass., company that markets interactive fiction.
He began a 7-month collaboration with Steven Meretzky, one of Infocom's computer programmer-writers and author of "Planetfall," an Infocom game. Hitchhiker was released about a month ago and is on the best-seller list of computer games.
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