Starship Titanic

Starship Titanic is a computer game designed by Douglas Adams and made by The Digital Village, set in Adams's Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy universe, before the action of his five-part "trilogy". It was released in 1998. It takes place on a starship of the same name (an early attempt at using the Infinite Improbability Drive) 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).

Related Topics:
Computer game - Douglas Adams - The Digital Village - Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - 1998 - Infinite Improbability Drive - Earth - 1912 - RMS ''Titanic''

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The player acts the part of a human that goes onboard to help fix the ship, and must solve puzzles to collect the parts of the onboard computer, Titania. Once all the parts are collected and placed in the correct place, Titania comes alive and talks.

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One of the most significant parts of the game is the conversation engine used to talk with the robot staff onboard the ship. Players type what they wish to say into the Personal Electronic Thingy (PET) at the bottom of the screen. The robot's response appears as text in the PET and is also spoken. The conversation engine works by combining relevant pre-recorded speech.

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A feature of the game and the starship itself is the "suck-you-bus", a communications system which works by moving containers around a networked system 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 pun on the word "succubus". Similar systems really exist in the real world, for example used by supermarkets to offload cash from tills to a secure area.

Related Topics:
Succubus - Supermarket

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A book entitled Douglas Adams's Starship Titanic has been written by Terry Jones based on the game. Critical reaction has been lukewarm; the general consensus is that the novel reads like a poor imitation of Adams' style.

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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".

Related Topics:
Life, the Universe and Everything - Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

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