Starship Titanic
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Starship Titanic is a computer game designed by Douglas Adams and made by The Digital Village. It was released in 1998. It takes place on a starship of the same name which has undergone "Spontaneous Massive Existence Failure" and crash landed on Earth on its maiden voyage (in an allusion to the 1912 disaster involving the real-world RMS Titanic).
The player acts the part of a human (whose house the starship crashed into) who goes aboard to help fix the ship, and must solve puzzles to collect the parts of the sabotaged onboard computer, Titania. Once all the parts have been collected and inserted in the correct places, Titania comes alive and talks.
One of the most significant parts of the game is the conversation engine (dubbed Spookitalk) used to interact with the robot staff onboard the ship. Players type what they wish to say into the Personal Electronic Thing (PET) at the bottom of the screen. The robots' responses appear as text in the PET and are also spoken. The conversation engine works by interpreting user input and selecting relevant pre-recorded speech responses.
A feature of the game and the starship itself is the "Succ-U-Bus", a communications system which moves physical containers through a network of tubes by vacuum. Messages and objects can be placed in the containers, and the system is used to deliver items to the player from other locations. The name of the system is a play on the word "succubus." Similar systems called pneumatic tubes exist in the real world; for example, those used by supermarkets to offload cash from tills to a secure area.
Among the voice actors for the game are former Monty Python members Terry Jones as the Parrot, and John Cleese (under the pseudonym of Kim Bread) as the Bomb. Adams himself is the voice of the Succ-U-Bus, and plays the part of the ship's creator, Leovinus, in one of the closing scenes.
A book entitled Douglas Adams's Starship Titanic, based on the game, was written by Jones. Critical reaction has been lukewarm; the general consensus is that the novel reads like a poor imitation of Adams' style.
The Starship Titanic and Spontaneous Massive Existence Failure were first mentioned in Life, the Universe and Everything, the third book in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy "trilogy". This would seem to suggest that the game takes place in the same fictional universe as the Hitchhiker's Guide stories. However, in response to mentions of characters or quotations from the Hitchhiker's Guide, the game will accuse the player of mixing up universes.
External links
- Douglas Adams' Starship Titanic - Official Website
- Starship Titanic Game
- Starship Titanic Novel
