This is accurate gameplay from the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy text adventure that INFOCOM made with the help of Douglas Adams in 1984.

I thought people would find it interesting to see the way a game would creatively do a demo in print in the 1980s since doing it other ways was either too expensive or not very useful from a marketing perspective.

More info on the game- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hitchhiker's_Guide_to_the_Galaxy_(video_game)

It was very challenging. I never got all the way through it. Amazingly, it only covers a small portion of the first book despite taking hours and hours to play.

  • Got_Bent@lemmy.worldEnglish
    63·
    8 months ago

    This was an exceptionally difficult game from the very first scene. You were particularly hard pressed to even make it off earth if you hadn’t read the book.

    After that, it didn’t necessarily coincide with the book, so you had to put yourself into a Douglas Adams mindset for the duration, and that was no easy task.

    I think I may have gotten through roughly a third of it before moving on to other games.

    Zork was the other game I never did particularly well with. I think I got a little further in it than hitchhikers though.

    • AngryCommieKender@lemmy.worldEnglish
      52·
      8 months ago

      I got so frustrated getting killed over and over that I typed:

       Fuck Ford

      into the prompt. The game responded with:

       This is a family entertainment game, not a video nasty.

      Which is how I found out that was British slang for porn.

    • Flying Squid@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      8·
      8 months ago

      There were at least five Zork games I can think of that were purely text (graphical ones came later): Zork, Zork II, Zork III, Beyond Zork and Zork Zero.

      • Got_Bent@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        8 months ago

        I had one two and three but don’t recall playing the latter two. By then I’d moved on to the greatest game released in the mid-eighties - Autoduel.

        Then it was on to the original Bard’s Tale.

        I played both of those to completion then figured out how to cheat on both by finding character stats with a sector editor.

    • thisbenzingring@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
      7·
      8 months ago

      the only harder text based adventure game of that era was Steven Kings’ The Mist. That game was fucked! I cannot tell you how many times my friend and I tried to survive the god dam grocery store!