April 26, 2005

The BBC's illustrated web remake of the classic text adventure game based on Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy recently won a Bafta award in the online entertainment category. The remake now comes in two editions featuring artwork submitted to a competition. It's a beautiful remake, and a well made web site with plenty of introduction for people new to text adventures.

Also: The Quandary (4th) phase of new episodes of the radio series will begin on May 3rd. Despite their generous webcasting, I neglected to listen to the Tertiary phase, and there are no (legit) online archives. Thankfully, it's already out on CD.

comments...

Charles, April 26, 2005 10:26 PM:

I take full credit for the existence of the Hitchhiker's Guide adventure game.

Many years ago, Douglas Adams came into my computer store, just down the street from Universal Studios in Los Angeles. He wanted to buy one of those newfangled Kaypro CP/M machines with Wordstar. After setting up the machine, I wanted to sell him some extra stuff. I told him I'd heard his radio show via shortwave on the BBC, and I just KNEW he'd like this game I was playing a lot of: Zork. So he bought it.

And the rest is history. Douglas Adams said that Zork was a life-changing experience for him.

Dan Sanderson, April 27, 2005 8:24 AM:

Neat anecdote! What was the name of your store? Is it still around?

And if you still sell Kaypros with Zork installed, I'll take one. Not sure I could give you its original price for one, though... :)

Charles, April 28, 2005 7:08 AM:

That store was Programs Unlimited, it was part of a small chain that went bankrupt long long ago. They stuck with CP/M as the rest of the world was going IBM PC and Mac. But we sold a lot of Kaypros in our day.
I remember Zork didn't come on Kaypro formatted disks, so we had to load it into a Xerox CP/M machine with 8 in disks, then zap it over to the Kaypro via a serial cable with XMODEM software. And we did this sort of thing routinely, for no extra charge. Boy has the computer business changed!