The process of producing the game, explains Adams, was in fact just like writing a book: "You've got a character in mind, and you say, 'Well, this little thing he would say would be this, and the way he would react to the situation would be this.' You make lots and lots of those kinds of notes, and then you have to construct in the novel the situations that are going to illustrate the way they behave." In the "Starship Titanic" game, however, it's the player who constructs those situations, and the notes themselves that become the text. The result is like stepping into one of Adams' novels and having a spontaneous conversation with the characters. While Nobby the Liftbot speaks in Kiplingesque prose, other bots spit out surfer slang or the mellifluous tones of a British butler. ![]() Although the bots can reveal clues to the mystery if properly queried, they can also simply ramble for hours in semi-lucid conversation. To create those characters, Adams and two co-authors wrote 10,000 lines of dialogue, or the equivalent of 16 hours of conversation. "With 'Starship Titanic,' I thought, 'Let's put characters in here and turn that language technology to being able to converse with a character.'" What's missing is precisely what text adventure games excelled at - that real sense of being locked in a conversation with the software." This is a beautiful realization of a world.' But with graphics games, after a while you feel like something's missing. Then, when someone showed me 'Myst,' I thought, 'Well, this is terrific. What makes this game different from your average "Myst" clone, however, is a purely Adams touch: The Art Deco interior of the doomed cruiser is populated with dysfunctional bots like Nobby - who can talk to you for hours using a proprietary language recognition system that the Digital Village affectionately named "SpookiTalk." You can hear their voices on the game's soundtrack and also read and respond on-screen via your "Personal Electronic Thing" - or "PET."Įxplains Adams, "When I was doing the 'Hitchhiker' game, I enjoyed that kind of engagement that comes from being in a virtual conversation between player and machine. The premise: The Starship Titanic is the world's most luxurious intergalactic cruiser - "the ship that cannot possibly go wrong." Of course, everything does go wrong (sound familiar?), and your task as an unwitting guest on board is to find out what happened and fix it. The CD-ROM, released in mid-April, comes from the school of post-"Myst" immersive environment mystery games. "Starship Titanic" is the first project to come out of that pipe. Or as the Digital Village Web site touts its future plans: "Bigger than Texas, better than Birmingham, more interactive than a friend's skin." We're also happy to drive it by being in other media as well - television or movies or whatever." The Digital Village wants to be in that pipe - content providers, creators and publishers. As he recently detailed his vision over tomato consommi: "We are moving towards a position in which all ways we communicate and inform and entertain ourselves are coming down a digital pipe. And the above monologue is not from a book, but a conversation held with Nobby the LiftBot, one of the seven characters populating Adams' new game, "Starship Titanic."Īn imposingly British 6-foot-5, Adams in person is decidedly more sober than his books, and prone to rumination about the future of the digital world. ![]() Twenty years after he penned the first book of the "Hitchhiker" trilogy, which envisions intergalactic travel and the meaning of life as the number 42, his bizarre science-fiction worlds are still selling strong.īut Adams has expanded far beyond books, and in his most recent incarnation he is at the helm of a modest multimedia empire called the Digital Village. To anyone familiar with the work of Douglas Adams - and, judging by the sales for his book "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy," there are at least 15 million readers who are - this kind of gibberish is a jolly good read. ![]() 45 calibre wossnames, and charged across the burning devastation and massacred us to the last man, but was we downhearted? No. Sodden, and the sinkimutts up to the top of your wops and your doings jammed - we had Heckler & Kock & Snartigern & Eaboy & Erasthidmites & Eably's Cousin's Friend Nerick point four-five calibre wossnames, which was always prone to logging, but what we done, we waved them at the tribesmen and when they saw them they thought to themselves. "It's not something I like to chat about, casual-like, but down in the devastation of Hadjadji, desert country of course, and sodden.
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