It's been a long time since I've thought about text adventure games. These days my mind is usually thinking about World of Warcraft, and the old adventures from the DOS days (and the Apple ][, and even going back to mainframes!) are a long-forgotten memory.

That's why the discovery of an old hard drive containing unreleased portions of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy sequel was such a pleasant surprise. The author of this blog lucked upon a disused hard drive (no word on whether he found it in a lavatory with a sign on the door that said 'Beware of the Leopard') that just happened to contain not only internal corporate e-mails from Infocom employees, but the last build of the unreleased sequel to the second-best selling text adventure of all time, the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

The story contains some fascinating politics and infighting in a company that only a few years earlier was riding high, but was now quickly spiraling down to oblivion, thanks to technological shifts. Video game graphics were getting a lot better in the mid to late-1980s (think Amiga!) and text adventures had no future, at least from a commercial standpoint.

I remember playing the original Hitchhiker's on a copy-protected 5.25-inch floppy on my old Packard-Hell XT with its crappy orange monochrome screen. You had to boot the floppy to play the game, an inconvenience that I didn't mind at all given how much I loved the source material (I had all the books) and how much fun—albeit frustrating!—the game itself was.

These days, you can play the sequel (what there is of it--it's only the first few areas and most are not even fully described) right in your browser using Java. What's more interesting than that, however, is how the modern Internet enabled many of the people who worked for Infocom at the time—including cofounder Steve Meretsky and contractor Michael Bywater—to find this article and add their own comments and views to the end.

In days gone past, all this information, knowledge, and folklore would simply have been lost, as there was not enough demand for a book or film to be produced describing how things were in the short-lived text gaming industry.

These days, we not only have this blog, but independent film maker Jason Scott (who made the incredible BBS documentary) is making a whole film about text gaming, called GET LAMP. I was a bit skeptical about how cool such a film would be, but after having read the comments on the Hitchhiker's post, I can't wait for it to come out!

The best comment was this:

> OPEN CAN OF WORMS

Can opened.

Boy was it ever!