The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy is a text-based adventure game based on the popular novel “The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy” by Douglas Adams. Released in 1984, published by the company Infocom (the makers of Zork games) and had become a huge success and won multiple game of the year awards and sold over 350,000 copies. It was released on the Commodore 64, DOS and the Atari ST. the game was written by Douglas Adams and programmed by Steve Meretzky.
The game was notoriously known for being difficult and not giving out instructions to the players to help them and making them kill their character and start from the beginning. The original game interface was just a simple black background, with text waiting for input from the player as the game did not give out any help to the player. In one level of the game there was an item you had to collect called the “babel fish” which required the use of several in-game items, in which the player had use them in a certain order to collect it and many players had to restart to get them in the correct order.
The game has been updated over the thirty years of it release by the BBC who have added HD art, music and built social features.
The visual style of the game is very 2D does not really show us any detail on the background we have to rely more on our imagination than visuals. The game is annoyingly difficult at times as there are hardly any hints for the player and this is what i think made this game very addicting for players knowing that they have accomplished something difficult without the aid of visual clues.
I think what made this game unique is because it is a text adventure that gives a lot to the players but also very little at the same time which back in 1984 was common practice for video games to do that, but in 2014 it doesn’t happen at all games give us all the facts and hold our hands through the game, I think this is what makes this game unique.
Screenshot comparison:
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