DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

The BBC has published a Flash (!) version of the old Infocom text adventure based on the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

That was the first and only Infocom title I ever bought. I’d poked at a few pirated copies of the Zork series and maybe Planetfall, but never played seriously or with any intention of finishing. Although I did download the instruction set for winning Zork I in the fewest possible moves, because I thought that was an important thing to have handy. (Geek trivia note: as it’s largely a series of one-letter instructions and short commands, the whole thing fit easily onto a couple lines of text on the BBS screen I downloaded it from.)

So I played the H2G2 game for an hour or two… got off the planet, got the fish in my ear, and got frustrated. I don’t think I ever ran the program again. I didn’t have much patience for games, much less games that lie to the player.

But now, thanks to the BBC, I can relive all my adolescent frustration for free, online, with pictures!! — a real change of pace considering the game’s ancestry.

Now I’ve spent about 20 minutes at it, and I can’t even stop the bulldozer. Clearly I was a cleverer guy at age 17 than I am now. Note to self: all those jokes about killing brain cells in college may have, in retrospect, been less funny than originally believed.

The BBC site also contains an interview with Steve Meretzky, the programmer who worked with Douglas Adams to create the Infocom game. (The interview alludes to the great difficulty of the Babel Fish puzzle, suggesting that, 20 years ago, I downloaded the solution to that from the BBS, too. Hmph.)