Starship Titanic

by Douglas Adams

French language

Published July 17, 2001

ISBN:: 978-2-290-05365-2

Starship Titanic is an adventure game developed by The Digital Village and published by Simon & Schuster Interactive. It was released in April 1998 for Microsoft Windows and in March 1999 for Apple Macintosh. The game takes place on the eponymous starship, which the player is tasked with repairing by locating the missing parts of its control system. The gameplay involves solving puzzles and speaking with the bots inside the ship. The game features a text parser similar to those of text adventure games with which the player can talk with characters. Written and designed by The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy creator Douglas Adams, Starship Titanic began development in 1996 and took two years to develop. In order to achieve Adams's goal of being able to converse with characters in the game, his company developed a language processor to interpret player's input and give an appropriate response and recorded over 16 hours of character dialogue. Oscar Chichoni and Isabel Molina, artists on the film Restoration (1995), served as the game's production designers and designed the ship's Art Deco visuals. The game's voice cast includes Monty Python members Terry Jones and John Cleese. A tie-in novel titled Douglas Adams's Starship Titanic: A Novel was written by Jones and released in October 1997. Starship Titanic was released to mixed reviews and was a financial disappointment, although it was nominated for three industry awards and won a Codie award in 1999. It was re-released for modern PCs in September 2015 by GOG.com.

1 edition

Stanman reviewed Starship Titanic by Douglas Adams

Slightly disappointing

3 stars

In the foreword Douglas Adams explains how this book came into being. Without recounting the whole thing, the upshot is that he created the plot and Terry Jones wrote (most of?) the book. It does track with how I experienced the book. The plot and storyline are typical Adams. The execution not so much. The text seems to miss Adams' signature cleverness with language and also his ability to make you think about human behaviour. That is not to say this is a bad book or that it is not funny. It is a good and funny book. Terry Jones is obviously multi talented and can turn a neat phrase. So, I recommend it. Just do not expect a Douglas Adams book.