STARSHIP TITANIC THEME CODE

So he wanted to make an equivalent that did. Adams had played Myst and its sequels, and rightly pointed out they had no bloody story. It also didn't help that the game was a Myst-clone. If you were ever understood it felt so extraordinary, and then came crashing down the very next line when you received one of the many, many variants on, 'I don't understand.' How could it ever have been any different?! 16 hours of dialogue would barely be enough for a single minor character! Oh dear. Terry Jones (RIP) would relentlessly squawk at you in the form of a parrot.īut of course as soon as you typed stuff in, nothing worked. At least 16 hours of dialogue was recorded by proper actors, with text-to-speech rejected because it sounded 'like semi-concussed Norwegians' (sorry Norway). The bots within would remember their conversations such that they'd not repeat themselves too often, or recall earlier chats.

STARSHIP TITANIC THEME CODE

Experts in the fields of language interpretation worked on this, teaching the game's code to understand the nuances with which players would enter sentences. An adventure game where the characters within it could converse naturally with you, in recorded speech! Oh my goodness, how did anyone even allow $2m to get spent on such an obviously impossible idea? And yet, they really tried. Starship Titanic was to be this extraordinary marriage of old and new, text parser and modern shiny graphics. So I was so excited about the game too! And of course what I played in 1998 was barely playable at all.

He was really excited about the game! I don't know if this was just his doing his job well, or if he somehow believed it was all going to come together in the remaining two months before release, or perhaps it was that more traditional issue of being so close to a project that he could no longer see it for what it was. He was somehow never an author to me, but gosh I was so excited to speak to him. Adams was peripheral to so much of the most important comedy of the '60s and '70s, before he even started on his masterpiece. And I believe he wrote some Doctor Who too. And of course there was that text adventure based on H2G2. (I have the cassette of the interview, still, but thank goodness no means to play it.) He wrote for The Burkiss Way, which later was endlessly mean to him, featuring a regular character called 'Mister Different Adams', who only ever said, 'I see comedy as a kind of.' with an irrelevant word finishing it, before being rudely cut off.

I owned a book which featured a picture of the two of them sharing a bath, although grimly I cannot remember what it was. He'd written for Monty Python's Flying Circus and was a good friend of the Pythons, most especially Terry Jones. Because it was! That's what it was created to be! Fight me!īut Adams was also a comedy writer for other things I cared passionately about. But to me, who'd been played the original broadcasts by my dad as a boy, it was and always will be a radio programme. Which to so many must seem like sacrilege. I had then, and ridiculously still today, never read the books. To me at that time, Douglas Adams was the writer of my favourite ever radio series. He was so astonishingly kind, warm, and most of all, generous, giving answers to questions he must have been asked ten thousand times with verve and wit and no hint of weariness at this 19 year old's green, green approach. I got to talk to Douglas Adams, for what felt like ages, and it was utterly wonderful. Yes, it's a massive namedrop, but you would too, wouldn't you? It was a telephone interview, for my university newspaper, for which I was the 'comedy editor'. Primarily because, by some exceptional fortune, I had the opportunity to interview Adams about the game before its release. Adams wouldn't have approved of a miracle. Starship Titanic was never going to work. In fact, almost entirely because of ambition. This masterful creator, the man who brought us The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy in all its forms, spent what would turn out to be his last few years working on a fundamentally broken videogame. It was Douglas Adams's last work of fiction, and it was a truly terrible one. I find Starship Titanic such a sad thing. Past Perfect is a retrospective column in which we look back into gaming history to see whether old favourites are still worth playing today.

Starship titanic theme