Easy then to figure that all of that should thoroughly qualify me to write about this, the decades-longed-for movie. How wrong I was. I'm sitting here, several days post-Premiere. I've almost recovered from the subsequent evening of Pan-Galactic Gargleblasters and am at something of a loss about what to write. In fact, I've now come to the conclusion that prior experience thoroughly disqualifies me from actually reviewing it. So here it isn't.

If you've arrived here from the BBC site, there's a potted history of the Infocom game here, which includes never before seen scans of some of Douglas Adams and Steve Meretzky's original notes and designs, photos taken during development of the game, the original ZIL code from the game development (of historical interest only unless you happen have a spare 1980s vintage DEC-10 computer lying around, but may contain some game spoilers) and extracts from various interviews that Steve has given about life, the game and working with Douglas.

In 1984, Steve Meretzky of Infocom collaborated with Douglas Adams to co-author one of the most successful and notoriously difficult computer games of all time – the interactive fiction of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. In 1985, the game sold nearly half-a-million copies, making it a phenomenal success for the time, given the number of personal computers then in the world. This wasn't long before graphic computer games took over, at which point companies like Infocom and Level 9, both of whom specialised in intelligent games of the imagination, went to the wall. It wasn't really until we released Starship Titanic in 2000 that the art of the conversation engine as a user interface was significantly advanced over Infocom's parser, itself derived from the original work by Crowther and Woods at MIT in the 1970s. I still fervently believe that a natural language interface is the future of interaction and that universal communication by e-mail and text messaging and the blogosphere represents a re-evolution of the word as a means of interaction. Returning hastily from that small contextual digression, here's a compendium of Steve Meretzky's thoughts on the original game, working with Douglas and the fate of the interactive fiction industry. Thanks to Steve for providing this and giving permission to publish it here.

What about Douglas Adams? Working with him was a good experience?

Working with Douglas was great. He had such a different perspective on things, and came up with puzzles and scenes that I'd never have thought of in a million years on my own - having the game lie to you, or using a parser failure as the words which fell through a wormhole in the universe and started an interstellar war, or having an object like "no tea". On the other hand, the man is the world's worst procrastinator! I had to practically camp out on his doorstep in England to get him to finish his stuff for the game.

How did you come to work with Douglas Adams?

What was he like? Douglas was an Infocom player and fan, and so when he and his agent and his publisher began discussing the subject of a computer game adaptation of Hitchhiker's Guide, he was pretty adamant that it be with Infocom. Marc Blank suggested that I collaborate on the game with Douglas, partly due to fortunate timing (I had just completed Sorcerer), partly because many people had found Planetfall to be reminiscent of the humor of Hitchhiker's Guide, and partly because I was the only implementor who was as tall as Douglas. The best way to describe Douglas is that he's the ideal dinner companion. He can speak intelligently and with wit about almost any topic under the sun. Unfortunately, as a collaborator, he suffered from the fact that he was the world's worst procrastinator! I had to practically camp out on his doorstep in England to get him to finish his stuff for the game. Otherwise, working with him was great. He had such a different perspective on things, and came up with puzzles and scenes that I'd never have thought of in a million years on my own - having the game lie to you, or using a parser failure as the words which fell through a wormhole in the universe and started an interstellar war, or having an object like "no tea".

Author's February 2005 Note:

Back in 1998, I turned my wider interest in archaeology to something more specific to my profession: software archaeology. A long session of clambering and excavation in my attic revealed my 1985 copy (on floppy disk, yet) of one of the most compelling and insane frustrating computer games of the time, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Under laboratory conditions, I then callously performed a dataectomy on it – extracting the game content from the enveloping application. The next step was to source Java interpreters that could run the extracted game data online, and on a variety of portable devices. The result is what first appeared on the TDV web site. I also ported it to the Palm and Newton, installing a copy on Douglas's own Newton when he wasn't looking – I'm not entirely sure if the subsequent exclamation was one of pleased surprise or historical pain.

I then, with permission from Activision, who'd taken over the code (but not script) rights when Infocom folded, used the game, in Java form, as part of the 1999 Comic Relief web site. Plans to release it formally as feeware on a variety of mobile platforms were put temporarily on hold when TDV was sold off, and things then lay quiet for several years. That was until 2004, when my erstwhile colleagues, Sean Sollé and Shimon Young, took the data file and, working with Rod Lord – the artist who created the graphics for the original BBC TV series – created a complete client-server implementation of the game, with a C++ application on the server and a very nice Flash-based browser interface. This has been released on the BBC's web site, where it has been a huge success, resulting in an Interactive BAFTA award and the latest version, the Twentieth Anniversary Edition.

So if you want to play the game, I'd very strongly recommend you do so on the BBC's web site, where you can make "Ooh" and "Aah" noises at the graphics and, usefully, save the game as well, something the original Java implementation couldn't do. That I've included here, for historical reasons, along with the 1999-2001 introduction and help information I wrote (itself now being used by the BBC).

Nicholas

Your article in Sunday's ST on Douglas Adams was as striking an example of sloppy, ill–informed and assumptive journalism as I have come across, painting as it does an entirely erroneous picture through a combination of inaccurate, partial and unattributed information and unfounded speculation.

Your avoidance of verifiable source through the use of terms such as 'a close friend' and 'sources close to' is indicative of very poor or undiscriminating journalism – any genuine friend of his would be more than happy to go on record with anything they had to say about him.

As a friend and colleague of Douglas and a co–founder of The Digital Village/h2g2, please allow me to correct, with facts and direct information, a few of your more basic errors and misassumptions. I am happy to have these comments attributed to me. Rather than an impassioned rant (however justified), let's try this point by point – please bear with me:

"FRIENDS of Douglas Adams have revealed how the author of The Hitch–Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy was blighted before his premature death by a malign "Midas touch". The pressure of justifying a £2m advance for his final novel preyed on his mind until he became incapable of writing, even when he had flashes of his old inspiration."

Blighted? – I can think of few people to whom the term is less applicable – you make a cheerful and gentle man sound like some tortured latter–day Vanderdecken, forever attempting to round the Cape of his writers block. Douglas's inspiration rarely deserted him – part of his problem was not merely being interested in too many things, but actually being capable of driving people's perception of what the future could be. In recent years, he's been at least as much respected for his ability to articulate a shared vision of the future of society, technology and the environment as for his original fiction. It's in this area and the inspiration he's provided through his work with scientists, engineers and philosophers that may in fact prove to be his most important legacy – many of the world's greatest thinkers and innovators will cheerfully acknowledge the inspiration and challenge that a discussion with Douglas could provide.