This game is based on the best selling radio series (and book) by Douglas Adams.
It was released in 1987 and developed and published by Infocom. Funnily enough, it actually mentions infocom if you open the junk mail in the game!
Arthur Dent is the main character. This tea loving human who wakes up to find that his house is about to be knocked down. A bit further on and he finds himself on a Vogon ship sailing away from the remains of the Earth.
Then, as the story ends up getting even more bizarre, he finds out that the meaning of life is 42??!!
It is fairly simple to start with (if you know the story) but gets quite a bit harder later on. There are some rather hard puzzles to crack, the Babel fish being one of the hardest of these. (If it gets too tough there is always a HINTS section. The fun in this game, I find, is working out what to type and if you type in something really random e.g. SMILE, it will reply with THAT’S NICE. For moving in different directions N = North, S = South, E = East and W = West.
You start off the game in bed in the
dark. After turning on the light, getting out of bed, eating a pill for your hangover, picking up your gown, toothbrush, a screwdriver and some junk mail and going out of the front exit, you find yourself in front of bulldozer that is coming towards you. Here you lie down and await the arrival of your friend, Ford who doesn’t notice about your predicament until you shout FORD, WHAT ABOUT MY HOME at him. He is of course an alien from somewhere within vicinity of Betelgeuse but you do not know that until he drags you off to the pub, insisting that you drink some beer.
One of the hardest bits is getting out of DARK this is impossible unless you’ve cheated or read the signs very carefully. It involves a lot of WAITING but not too much mind you or you’ll die and have to start the game over. If you ever want to restart the game you can either type KILL MYSELF or RESTART. To load a saved game type RESTORE.
