What Do You Mean It's Not A Mongoose?

Back before Halo and BattleToads and even MarioKart, there were things called text games. You would lie on the floor with your Apple IIc and type in commands as you hung out on a Saturday night with the Lighthalls and the Robinsons. The one we played a lot was called Zork and it was built in the late 70's by a bunch of guys who went on to found Infocom. You typed in commands on the screen based on the information you had at the time:

"look under rug", "open mailbox", or, our favorite, "take mongoose."

The assumption was that you would eventually run across a cobra and the mongoose would save your life. Unfortunately when that happened and you offered up the mongoose, it turned out that it was really a ferret and the cobra killed it immediately.

In 1983, Zork sold over 100,000 copies. The next year, a new text adventure came out from Infocom. Here is some history:

It therefore stands to reason that any game which combined a really good programmer with a really good writer was likely to do well. So when Steve Meretzky of Infocom got together with Douglas Adams to create a game based around the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the result was never going to be less than interesting and more than likely insane. So it proved - the Hitchhiker's Guide adventure game was one of the best-selling games of its era, selling some 350,000 copies. In 1984.

Then graphics games came along and the computer using portion of the human race forgot all about 500,000 years of language evolution and went straight back to the electronic equivalent of banging rocks together - the point and click game.

 Here is a shot of the opening screen with a possible command typed in:


 


In honor of the 30th anniversary of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - the Game, BBC Radio 4 has released on their servers an updated version of the game for you to play at work when you have some free time. Or when you get bored. Or anytime really, because, come on, the work will still be there tomorrow. This version has the ability to save your progress, which is very important because, as the game says,

A word of warning

This game will kill you frequently. It's a bit mean like that.


So have fun, and remember, there are graphics there. They're just in your head, like when you used to pick up a book to read rather than wait for the movie to come out. Try it. You'll like it.