Earth will be destroyed in 12 minutes...
Earth will be destroyed in 12 minutes...
This is accurate gameplay from the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy text adventure that INFOCOM made with the help of Douglas Adams in 1984.
I thought people would find it interesting to see the way a game would creatively do a demo in print in the 1980s since doing it other ways was either too expensive or not very useful from a marketing perspective.
More info on the game- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hitchhiker's_Guide_to_the_Galaxy_(video_game)
It was very challenging. I never got all the way through it. Amazingly, it only covers a small portion of the first book despite taking hours and hours to play.
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This was an exceptionally difficult game from the very first scene. You were particularly hard pressed to even make it off earth if you hadn't read the book.
After that, it didn't necessarily coincide with the book, so you had to put yourself into a Douglas Adams mindset for the duration, and that was no easy task.
I think I may have gotten through roughly a third of it before moving on to other games.
Zork was the other game I never did particularly well with. I think I got a little further in it than hitchhikers though.
I got so frustrated getting killed over and over that I typed:
Fuck Fordinto the prompt. The game responded with:
This is a family entertainment game, not a video nasty.Which is how I found out that was British slang for
porn.graphic horror films, apparently.Video nasty was slang for graphic horror movies, not porn. Not heard anyone say it since the 80s though.
Ahh, TIL. Thanks!
British slang for porn.
I'm not sure if I'm missing something here...but what did you think "fuck" meant? Lol
more likely he thought 'video nasty' was slang for porn (unless of course it was a joke)
Lmao yes, you're absolutely right. That's what I missed.
I still like my misinterpretation though, ahaha
but what did you think “fuck” meant?
The only English word that can be used as an infix...
It's truly beauti-fucking-ful!
It's absobloodylutely not the only one
Unbe-cunting-lievable.
Can't bebloodylieve I forgot bloody.
Wait, yes I can, I'm Canadian and we don't use that.
Thanks for the correction!
the only harder text based adventure game of that era was Steven Kings' The Mist. That game was fucked! I cannot tell you how many times my friend and I tried to survive the god dam grocery store!
Interesting. I had never heard about that game! I'm going to have to check it out now.
say no more friend!
https://archive.org/details/msdos_Stephen_Kings_-_The_Mist_1985
Thanks!
Permanently Deleted
There were at least five Zork games I can think of that were purely text (graphical ones came later): Zork, Zork II, Zork III, Beyond Zork and Zork Zero.
I had one two and three but don't recall playing the latter two. By then I'd moved on to the greatest game released in the mid-eighties - Autoduel.
Then it was on to the original Bard's Tale.
I played both of those to completion then figured out how to cheat on both by finding character stats with a sector editor.
I didn't even get out the house
There was another Adams game called something like Starship Titanic. That one went beyond challenging into absurd. It as my first rage quit game.
Close- Adams made two games for Infocom. This one and a ridiculously hard to the point of impossibility game called Bureaucracy.
Then he made Starship Titanic some years later for The Digital Village.