The Hitchhikers Guide To Infocom
The Hitchhikers film has got me all nostalgic about the early eighties. That's when I first became aware of the Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy radio series and books. I was still at school then. When the adventure game came out, I remember many a happy hour spent with my Atari ST wondering what to do with my Atomic Vector Plotter and Advanced Tea Substitute. I have been playing the excellent 20th Anniversary Edition version of the game on the BBC Radio4 Hitchhikers Guide web site a lot recently and I’m determined to finish the whole thing this time round.
I also played a few of the other Infocom adventure games. I was a big fan of the text only adventure game – none of those tacky graphical adventures for pure adventure game fans! – and the Infocom adventures were obviously the best text adventures around. I am pleased to find that Activision, which eventually bought all of the rights to the Infocom adventure game series, are planning to re-release them all complete with the original box art and artifacts! I really hope they do this - I for one would love to buy the re-released games. I can then bug the kids for hours on end and tell them how things used to be in the old days, when 1K RAM was all you had and you were glad of it too, and real programmers wrote Z80 machine code, and didn’t want or need all this 3D graphics rubbish to create an atmosphere…