<!--
	Title: (Inside View) Douglas Adams and Steve Meretzky
	Subtitle: Designers Behind The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy
	Author: Sharon Darling, Research Assistant
	Source: COMPUTE!'s Gazette, v3(4)
	Date: April 1985
	Transcription by Steve Derby
-->


<blockquote style="font-weight: bold; border-top: 2px solid; border-bottom: 2px solid;">
Take two minds that have created some very witty
books and computer games, put them together, and what
do you get? The zany game version of <em>The Hitchhiker's
Guide to the Galaxy</em>.
</blockquote>

The happy result of those two very different backgrounds
is a microcomputer game version of the popular *Hitchhiker's Guide to
the Galaxy*. It took six years for Adams' original idea of a story about a
guide to the universe —- similar in nature to those books on how
to travel the continent using one's thumb -— to come to fruition.
However, that idea, launched while Adams was hitchhiking through Europe,
quickly snowballed from a simple concept into a long-lasting
fad which has put such phrases as "don't panic" and "don't forget
your towel" into the vocabulary of millions of people, first
in England, and then in the United States.

The first volume quickly led to three other books: *The Restaurant at the
End of the Universe*; *Life, the Universe and Everything*; and *So Long, and
Thanks for All the Fish*.

*Imagine yourself as hapless Arthur Dent, a mild-mannered
Englishman who is quite fond of ale from the local pub. Upon
groggily waking up one morning with a terrific headache from too
much beer at that same pub, you discover that your house is
scheduled to be demolished in order to make room for a new highway.*

*Little do you realize that that is the least of your worries
today —- for earth is scheduled to be destroyed, also -— to make room for
an intergatactic bypass.*

From there you begin a journey through the universe,
accompanied by your friend Ford Prefect, a professed actor
who is really a roving researcher for the *Guide* (a sort of
computerized radio that's hooked into a encyclopedic database, very
useful for hitchhikers). In reality, he's also an alien who hails
from near the star Betelgeuse. Prefect's mission on Earth: To
come up with a more detailed description of the planet than
the two words contained in the *Guide*'s current issue: "mostly
harmless."

Since the game doesn't hinge on the action in the book,
players don't need to have read *Hitchhiker's Guide* in order to
play it, Meretzky says. "If you've read the book, it will
probably make the first part of the game a bit easier for you,
but that's about it," he adds.

<br>
<div class="article-sidebar-dark" style="border: 1px solid; font-style: italic; width: 80%; margin: auto; padding: 1em; transform: rotate(-5deg);">
<img class="float-left" src="/public/img/articles/cg-douglas-adams-and-steve-meretzky/douglas-adams.jpg" alt="Douglas Adams Headshot">
<br>

Curriculum Vitae, Douglas Adams<br>
Place of birth: England<br>
Graduate, Cambridge University<br>
Activities: Footlights Club, launching pad for many of Britain's great comics.
Work history: Collaborated with Monty Python's Graham Chapman on several
projects; writer and script editor for the TV series
<span style="font-style: normal;">Dr. Who</span>; creator of BBC radio serial,
<span style="font-style: normal;">The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy</span>,
which spawned four books, a television series, two records, a stage show, and
a soon-to-be-filmed movie.

</div>

<div class="article-sidebar-dark" style="border: 1px solid; width: 80%; margin: auto; padding: 1em; font-style: italic;">
<img class="float-right" src="/public/img/articles/cg-douglas-adams-and-steve-meretzky/steve-meretzky.jpg" alt="Steve Meretzky Headshot">
<br>

Curriculum Vitae, Steven Meretzky<br>
Place of birth: United States<br>
Graduate, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), breeding ground for
many of Infocom's computer game designers.<br>
Work history: Before realizing his calling as a computer game designer,
worked in construction project management; started playtesting games for
Infocom in his spare time. Eventually moved up to writing games.<br>
Game writing credits: <span style="font-style: normal;">Planetfall</span> and
<span style="font-style: normal;">The Sorcerer</span>.

</div>

But both Adams and Meretzky worked long and hard
to make sure the game was faithful to the book, while at the
same time turning it into a new adventure. What they did weave
into the fabric of the game were detailed explanations of events
that are mentioned only briefly in the book.

"In some ways it's easier, and in some ways, it's harder"
to write a game from a book, versus using an original concept,
says Meretzky. "It's easier because you have some constraints
on the universe you're going to be designing, and on the
characters you're going to be using . . . and you don't have to come up
with as many ideas.

"On the other hand, there's more of a challenge because you
want to take advantage of the features of an interactive game,
and you don't want it to be just a translation of the book,
because the book is necessarily linear. If it was just a
translation," he adds, "there wouldn't be any reason to do it at all.
You have to avoid getting into the trap of 'well, this is the way
it was in the book, so this is the way it has to be in the game.' "

Tackling computer games was a new experience for Adams,
even though he has Ford Prefect referring to the *Guide* as
an electronic book, a familiar computer term today, but a new
concept in 1977. "As far as I was concerned, it was completely
imaginary" Adams says. "I didn't even become computer
literate until about a year ago, whereupon it suddenly sort of
swept over me like a tidal wave."

Author, humorist, and composer Christopher Cerf brought
Adams and Infocom together. "I'd seen Infocom's games in
detail, and one or two other adventure games briefly," Adams
says. "I'd not been interested, but Infocom's were obviously a
great deal better than the others —- they'd been written with
style, wit, and intelligence, and I just felt that here were guys on
the same wavelength."

Adams' ideas about adapting a creative work in print
form to video perhaps explains how *Hitchhiker's Guide* has
maintained its integrity and style in all its various permutations.
"Rather than just picking up a book and entering it into
the computer, you have to go all the way back to the very jumble
of ideas about what might be in it, just a sort of feeling about it.

"Then, you get interested in the medium, and explore that
medium with some of those ideas in mind, rather than doing
just straight text. The nice thing about *Hitchhikers*," he adds, "is
it's not a concrete story, it's not particularly firm in any one
medium —- it's just a set of approaches and attitudes, with a
few rough ideas about some characters."

That fluidity meant that there were several points in the
book's story line where Adams and Meretzky could let their
imaginations loose to create new situations for the game version.
One thing that remained intact, though, was the humor inherent
in the book.

<img class="float-right" src="/public/img/articles/cg-douglas-adams-and-steve-meretzky/hhgttg-screen-shot.png" alt="Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Screen Shot">

"A lot of the same humor is explicitly there, just in the text
of the game," Meretzky says. "Also, a lot of humor is created
just by using the style of the game." For example, one command
common to all Infocom games is "inventory," where
you find out everything you are carrying at any particular moment.
At the start of *Hitchhiker*, you are told that Arthur Dent's
inventory consists of a) no tea, and b) a splitting headache.

One convention carried over from the book was footnotes,
which are sprinkled throughout Adams' novel. "I
thought there must be some way to incorporate [those] into
the game," Meretzky recalls. "So what happens is, at various
points in the text of the game, you'll see a reference to a foot
note, and simply as your turn, you type in footnote 12, or
whatever, and you get the text."

While some of the footnotes are straightforward, they can be
amusing, such as one referencing a ray gun that never seems
to work properly. "It's not a very good ray gun, is it?" the
game responds to that footnote. "There's a lot of that, kind of
taking a step back from the game and laughing at it from
the outside," Meretzky says.

Putting British humor into perspective for an American
audience never posed a problem, Adams says. "I tend to feel the
difference between English and American humor is much more
apparent than real. I've never had the slightest problem in
enjoying American humor. Every one told me I was going to have
immense difficulty in getting American audiences to respond
to *Hitchhiker*, which has absolutely not been the case."

The book's humor has succeeded on both shores of the
Atlantic perhaps because Adams didn't have any particular
audience in mind, besides himself, when he wrote it in 1977.
"Targeting something toward a particular audience, that's not
something writers do, that's something that marketing or
advertising people do," Adams feels. "I'm not selling tooth
paste, I'm making ideas."

The process of translating those ideas from a novel to a
computer game took about eight months, with Meretzky and Adams
first meeting for about a week in Boston to map out the
game's general direction. Then, Adams returned to England, and
the two corresponded daily through electronic mail.

"When we had got a lot of it sitting there waiting to make
sense, and not apparently being about to do that, Steve came
over to England, and we hammered out answers to make it
look as if the way it ended was what we'd intended all along,"
Adams recalls.

During the writing process, Meretzky says he tried to
closely emulate Adams' style. Apparently, he succeeded, as
Adams commented once that he couldn't tell whether he or
Meretzky had written certain parts of the text.

*As your game's journey continues, your survival depends on a very
motley crew. Playing Arthur Dent, you've survived Earth's
destruction by hitching a ride on a passing spaceship, but you're not
sure that was really as lucky an occurrence as it first seemed. For
now, your fate rests with two-headed Zaphod Beeblebrox, president
of the Imperial Galactic Government; his girlfriend, Trillian,
whom you realize is the same girl you tried to pick up at a party
recently; Ford Prefect; and Marvin, a paranoid android. Good luck.*

Meretzky says one of the main reasons he was chosen to
work with Adams was because of his previous work with comedic
science fiction in Planctfall, an award-winning game. He was
also a *Hitchhiker* fan, as were most of the folks at Infocom.

The two started out their collaboration by following the
plot of the book closely. Then, "I guess he (Adams) got used to
the idea of writing interactively, and the more I got used to the
idea of giving him ideas and of working with him, the more the
ideas started to flow," Meretzky says. "By the end, we had way
more ideas than we were able to use."

All those extra ideas that never made it into the game are
"definitely" enough for a sequel, Meretzky adds. However,
don't necessarily look for a fifth book in the *Hitchhiker* saga,
Adams says. He claims the recently released fourth novel is the
"final, final, final one. There is definitely, definitely, definitely
not another one after this —- at least not for a while."

But don't panic. Audiences both here and abroad have not
heard the last from Adams. After filming is completed on
the movie version of *Hitchhiker's Guide*, he says his next
project will probably be a screenplay. A novel based on
that movie will be written afterward, he says.

And Meretzky also has more games up his sleeve.
While he's got some science fiction game ideas in mind, he's
also contemplating a mystery game, which would be a new
area for him.

Until then, enjoy your journey through the galaxy. And
don't forget your towel.
