February 11, 2007
The Fifth Douglas Adams Memorial Lecture
Categories: Douglas Adams Events News News
"Wildlife Management in East Africa – Is There a Future?" by Dr Richard Leakey
Date: Thursday 15 March 2007, 7:30pm
Venue: The Royal Geographic Society, 1 Kensington Gore, London SW7 2AR
Price: £12.00 - You'll find more information and ticket information here.
Richard Leakey is a paleontologist, archaeologist, conservationist an author of several books including the acclaimed wildlife management book Wildlife Wars: My Battle to Save Kenya's Elephants. In this talk Dr Leakey will draw on his own experiences in Kenya as founder and Director of the Kenya Wildlife Service and as the Head of Kenya's Civil Service to reflect on the successes, current problems and future challenges facing wildlife management in East Africa.
Douglas Adams, author of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, was a Founder Patron of Save the Rhino International, actively involved in conservation and interested in exploration, science, comedy and music. Douglas developed his deep-seated interest in wildlife conservation during a 1985 visit to Madagascar, which eventually resulted in a book (Last Chance to See) about the plight of species facing extinction. Douglas Adams died unexpectedly in 2001 at the age of 49. These Memorial Lectures continue to explore the themes in which Douglas was so interested.
The proceeds of the evening will be split between Save the Rhino International and the Environmental Investigation Agency, two charities supported by Douglas Adams.
February 17, 2006
The Fourth Douglas Adams Memorial Lecture
Categories: Douglas Adams Events News News
"Is the Human an Endangered Species?" by Professor Robert Winston
Date: Thursday 23 March 2006, 7:30pm
Venue: The Royal Geographic Society, 1 Kensington Gore, London SW7 2AR
Price: £10.00 - Purchase tickets here.
Save the Rhino International and the Environmental Investigation Agency are co-hosting the Fourth Douglas Adams Memorial Lecture with a talk by Professor Robert Winston, on Thursday 23 March at the Royal Geographic Society in London SW7. In this talk, he will combine some of the apparently threatening aspects of technology and the trust, or lack of it, in science.
April 24, 2005
Not the Movie Review
Categories: Hitchhiker's Guide The Movie
This was to have been my considered, thoughtful and detailed review of the new movie of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. “Easy”, thought I – I've been a fan of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy since its original 1978 broadcast on steam radio, followed it through its incarnations as an increasingly misnamed trilogy of books
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.
Continue reading "Not the Movie Review"March 03, 2005
Now Ain't That Something…
Categories: Events News News The Game
Last night, and a mere twenty years after its original release, the Twentieth Anniversary edition of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy took the impressively heavy 2005 BAFTA Interactive award for Online Entertainment. For a computer game – a genre reknowned for having a shelf life of weeks rather than years, this is a unique achievement. It's also a tribute to the principle that intelligent and engaging entertainment is timeless, no matter what the medium, and to the imagination, wit and humour of its authors. So congratulations are very much in order to the memory of Douglas Adams, to Steve Meretzky and to the BBC, Sean Sollé, Shimon Young and Rod Lord, who between them created the Twentieth Anniversary edition. The award itself is lovingly photographed here in the exotic surroundings of a Holborn Pizza restaurant, whose staff created an impromptu homage to the occasion by taking 7.5 million years to serve dinner.
March 01, 2005
Last Chance to See… …Just a bit more
Categories: Douglas Adams Events News News
Date: Thursday 10 March 2005
For information including how to buy tickets please see www.savetherhino.org.
Lecture synopsis: Zoologist Mark Carwardine (co-author of Last Chance to See with Douglas Adams) spends more than half the year travelling the world in search of wildlife and exploring wild places.
In this highly entertaining lecture Mark describes some of his experiences and encounters with wild animals and even wilder people around the world - including some hilarious behind-the-scenes stories from Last Chance to See. And, inevitably, he has a thing or two to say about the state of the world.
The lecture will be followed by a fundraising auction, lots will include signed film memorabilia, VIP tickets to the film premier and signed copies of the Quintessential Phase: Mostly Harmless radio script.
The Third Douglas Adams Memorial Lecture, in celebration of the life and universe of Douglas Adams.
Venue: The Royal Institution, Albemarle Street, London W1
Time: Lecture begins at 7.30pm
Speaker: Mark Carwardine
Price: £20 for main auditorium with a drink beforehand £12 for gallery seating without a drink
BAFTA Interactive Awards 2005
Categories: Hitchhiker's Guide Industry News News The Game
The 2nd March 2005 sees the BAFTA Interactive Awards ceremony, in which the BBC's Twentieth Anniversary presentation of the original Infocom Interactive Fiction game of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is nominated in the Online Entertainment section. Having been responsible for the simple original online presentation of the game and been a past BAFTA juror, I'm keeping various bits of anatomy crossed for its success. Here's hoping…
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.
Meretzky on Adams
Categories: Hitchhiker's Guide The Game
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".
Continue reading "Meretzky on Adams"February 23, 2005
The Archaeology of the Hitchhiker's Guide
Categories: Hitchhiker's Guide The Game
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).
Continue reading "The Archaeology of the Hitchhiker's Guide"The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Infocom Interactive Fiction
Categories: Hitchhiker's Guide The Game
For your interest and amusement, click on the "Continue Reading" button to play my original Java port of the Infocom Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy game. The game is Copyright © the estate of Douglas Adams . ZPLet Java Z interpreter courtesy of Matthew Russotto. Software archaeology by myself, Richard Harris at Two Worlds Research.
Continue reading "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Infocom Interactive Fiction"HHGG Game Help
Categories: The Game
The Basics :
To help you with the basics of playing the game, here's a few basic commands to get you started.
Commands are entered at the > prompt at the bottom of the screen. These are only a small part of what the game understands - try whatever English commands seem appropriate at any given point. Note that the game only recognises the first six characters of each word.
Continue reading "HHGG Game Help"June 18, 2001
The Sunday Times: A Response
Categories: Douglas Adams Hitchhiker's Guide
From: Richard Harris <**@two–worlds.com>
Date: Mon, 18 Jun 2001 19:07:14 +0100
To: <nicholas.hellen@sunday–times.co.uk>
Subject: Your ST article on Douglas Adams
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.
Continue reading "The Sunday Times: A Response"May 18, 2001
Douglas Adams: 1952 – 2001
Categories: Douglas Adams Hitchhiker's Guide
