"Very grateful sentient tomatoes busily working on their third opera"
February 19, 2022 12:18 PM Subscribe
Halfway through the third book of the Hitchhiker's Guide series, there is a throwaway reference to a doomed starship, one whose incredible splendor was matched only by the cosmic absurdity of its maiden-day annihilation.
But the story didn't end there. Unbeknownst to many fans, this small piece of Adamsian lore was the inspiration for an ambitious and richly-detailed side-story: a 1998 computer adventure game called Starship Titanic.
Designed by Douglas Adams himself, the game set players loose in the infamous vessel, challenging them with a maddening mystery laced with the devilish wit of the novels.
The game was laden with extra content, including an in-depth strategy guide, a (mediocre) tie-in novel (and audiobook) by Terry Jones, a whimsical First Class In-Flight Magazine, and even a pair of 3D glasses for one of the more inventive puzzles.
Key to solving these puzzles was the game's groundbreaking communications system -- players interacted with the ship's robotic crew through a natural language parsing engine called SpookiTalk, whose 10,000+ lines of conversational dialogue spawned 16 hours of audio recorded by professional voice actors, including John Cleese, Terry Jones, and even Douglas Adams himself in several cameos (spoiler cameo). Want to experience the voyage for yourself? Then pick up a $6 modernized copy of the game on Steam or GOG, watch this narrated video playthrough... or peruse this spectacular MetaFilter comment from developer Yoz Grahame, which touches on not just behind-the-scenes trivia and unknown easter eggs, but the most remarkable story of accidental online community you're ever going to hear.
The pith of yoz's story:
The Forum at the End of the Universe, The Economist's coverage of the affair
#1305: Undocumented Feature, an eerily similar xkcd comic
More on the game itself:
Excerpts of extra material included with the original copy of the game, including a fictional newspaper, profiles for all the bots and helpful guides to their "cellpoint" settings, the rantings of the infamous parrot, background articles from the strategy guide, and a map of the ship (.ZIP file download with all images plus the In-Flight Magazine).
"Parrots, the Universe, and Everything" - A full-length video and transcript of one of Douglas Adams's final speeches, in which he discusses his environmental book Last Chance to See at UC Santa Barbara.
[This updated and greatly expanded post brought to you by #DoublesJubilee!]
The pith of yoz's story:
When we created the initial fake-brochure site, we thought it'd be a fantastic laugh if the fictional shipbuilders had their own intranet. If you filled in the form on the brochure site (specifying your name, email address and favourite species of frog) we followed the occasional mail about the game. Then, one day, folks got a mail from the intranet admin, "Chris Stevedave", giving folks the link to the intranet and the current password, which was hurriedly followed by a second mail apologising for the accidental mail leakage and urging customers not to click the link, then a third email noting that Chris Stevedave had been demoted to Bilge Emptier Third-Class. It worked fantastically (so fantastically that some people really did send the emails back, reassuring us that they hadn't looked at the site) everyone poured into the Starlight Lines intranet. [...]The forum is sadly down as of this writing, but survives on the Wayback Machine and in coverage of its homegrown community from RPGGeek and most thoroughly on (where else?) H2G2.com.
Have a wander around the intranet. Look at the wireframes, enjoy the status reports and play with the currency calculator.
Then go look in the forum.
The idea was to present a read-only Senior Management forum in which you'd see some of the key backstory characters getting on each others' nerves. But we figured there should probably be a writeable forum for the lower-level employees, so I spent half a day hacking up a stupidly basic forum system and forgot all about it.
Six months after the site launch, I happened to peek at the employee forum and there were ten thousand posts in there.
A brief aside: Working for Douglas Adams, you get exposed to a huge variety of Hitchhiker's fans. Somehow, these fans think that Douglas's humour is a rarely-enjoyed thing, only appreciated by a specifically-tilted mind, and so in meeting other fans they will find a kinship. It's bollocks, of course; Douglas's humour has very wide appeal and these people tend to have surprisingly little in common with each other. But the effect at the TDV end was that any online community we created with Douglas's name attached was instantly flooded with fans looking for their kinds of people and their kinds of silliness.
But what happened inside the Starlight Lines employee forum was even stranger than that. Because it was buried one password and six clicks into the site, only a few dedicated people found it, and found each other. And once they were there, they started roleplaying Starlight Lines, and didn't stop evolving a long and bizarre narrative for the next thirteen years. When TDV died I moved the forum to my own hosting; every so often one of the players will poke me because something's broken, and I'll eventually fix it and they can carry on with their adventures. It's been thirteen years of hosting an accidental community. It's somewhat like ignoring the vegetable drawer of your fridge for a year, then opening it to find a bunch of very grateful sentient tomatoes busily working on their third opera. It's one of the most remarkable things I've seen on the internet and I'm honoured to have inadvertently helped create it, not least because it got me a few fun speaking gigs.
The Forum at the End of the Universe, The Economist's coverage of the affair
#1305: Undocumented Feature, an eerily similar xkcd comic
More on the game itself:
Excerpts of extra material included with the original copy of the game, including a fictional newspaper, profiles for all the bots and helpful guides to their "cellpoint" settings, the rantings of the infamous parrot, background articles from the strategy guide, and a map of the ship (.ZIP file download with all images plus the In-Flight Magazine).
- A charmingly old-school walkthrough
- A highly amusing story about an unusual contest tied into the novel and one fan's quest to crack it. (You can still see the prankish contest page now!)
- Listen to the BBC's hourlong 2021 radio adaptation of the game on Archive.org
- Original concept art by Oscar Chichoni, the Academy Award-winning designer of the game's environments, plus a high-quality version the cover art.
- TheCuttingRoomFloor.net has scads of unused game assets and other curiosities
- Douglas Adams talks about the game, Y2K, and the future of interactive entertainment on the program Quantum
- An interview on DouglasAdams.com about the making of the game
- An explanation by Douglas Adams in response to incendiary emails complaining about the delay in the Mac version of the game
- The obligatory TVTropes article
- Starlightlines.com - the still-active in-universe website, though the forum is no more
- Vogon.com - A curious fansite for the series composed of several in-universe corporate sites
"Parrots, the Universe, and Everything" - A full-length video and transcript of one of Douglas Adams's final speeches, in which he discusses his environmental book Last Chance to See at UC Santa Barbara.
[This updated and greatly expanded post brought to you by #DoublesJubilee!]
Great post! Flagged as fantastic (for the second time).
This was one of the first games I played with my mum (or, really, sat beside her and occasionally in her lap while she played it on our boxy old PC, along with Monkey Island and Grim Fandango). We had a great time getting thoroughly confused by all of the puzzles and even now I'll remember it every so often and ask her, "remember Starship Titanic and the parrot?". Through playing it I came to understand her and her sense of humour better, so for that I'll always be very grateful.
That developer comment and the forum, the roleplayers and the community of delightful opera loving sentient tomatoes -- amazing. Definitely one of those "hey, this whole humanity thing isn't so bad, I guess" moments.
posted by fight or flight at 12:34 PM on February 19, 2022 [4 favorites]
This was one of the first games I played with my mum (or, really, sat beside her and occasionally in her lap while she played it on our boxy old PC, along with Monkey Island and Grim Fandango). We had a great time getting thoroughly confused by all of the puzzles and even now I'll remember it every so often and ask her, "remember Starship Titanic and the parrot?". Through playing it I came to understand her and her sense of humour better, so for that I'll always be very grateful.
That developer comment and the forum, the roleplayers and the community of delightful opera loving sentient tomatoes -- amazing. Definitely one of those "hey, this whole humanity thing isn't so bad, I guess" moments.
posted by fight or flight at 12:34 PM on February 19, 2022 [4 favorites]
Great post. Not sure how I missed that comment from Yoz before!
I loved this game. I got to within a few puzzles of the end and then my younger sister accidentally saved over my game file and I lost all my progress. I was pretty annoyed and couldn't bring myself to start over.
I might have to grab it and give it another go.
posted by knapah at 12:57 PM on February 19, 2022
I loved this game. I got to within a few puzzles of the end and then my younger sister accidentally saved over my game file and I lost all my progress. I was pretty annoyed and couldn't bring myself to start over.
I might have to grab it and give it another go.
posted by knapah at 12:57 PM on February 19, 2022
Yoz just mentioned this on a social network! I wrote that Economist piece way back, and remember how charming the whole thing was.
I set up some discussion forums in 1995 for a small computer-book publisher, and I think it was three years later, after they had basically stopped watching the boards, we discovered 1,000s of posts to a thread about canceling AOL, where people had decided this forum was HOW you canceled your AOL account.
posted by GlennFleishman at 1:20 PM on February 19, 2022 [6 favorites]
I set up some discussion forums in 1995 for a small computer-book publisher, and I think it was three years later, after they had basically stopped watching the boards, we discovered 1,000s of posts to a thread about canceling AOL, where people had decided this forum was HOW you canceled your AOL account.
posted by GlennFleishman at 1:20 PM on February 19, 2022 [6 favorites]
OMG! Just saw the cover of the original game. I guess that's where the Pixar folks got the idea for the design of the Axiom in 'Wall-E'. Is this a well known thing?
posted by Insert Clever Name Here at 2:51 PM on February 19, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by Insert Clever Name Here at 2:51 PM on February 19, 2022 [1 favorite]
And the game is available on steam, as a little sleuthing revealed. Cool!
posted by Insert Clever Name Here at 2:56 PM on February 19, 2022
posted by Insert Clever Name Here at 2:56 PM on February 19, 2022
(Shite. That link to steam was just buried in the original post. Sorry for the dup.)
posted by Insert Clever Name Here at 2:57 PM on February 19, 2022
posted by Insert Clever Name Here at 2:57 PM on February 19, 2022
Anyone know how well the mac version on Steam works in modern macOS? I've got a lot of stuff in my steam library that was sunsetted by Catalina dropping 32 bit support.
posted by Kyol at 7:24 PM on February 19, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by Kyol at 7:24 PM on February 19, 2022 [1 favorite]
Thanks for this post. Despite being a H2G2 total fanboi, I didn't get the Starship Titanic game; I think it was Mac only?
posted by Artful Codger at 7:26 PM on February 19, 2022
posted by Artful Codger at 7:26 PM on February 19, 2022
Beautiful post. I'm still working my way through it, but this is neat.
I was incredibly excited to get boxed edition of the game for $3 at a local thrift store 15 years ago. I installed a new/old OS on a virtual machine to play it. . . and then I realized why it was $3.
I love the author and the concept and the boldness. The game itself is hard to love, at least for me.
[edit: I returned the novelty objects that came in the box when I gave the thing to the next thrift store. It seemed only fair]
posted by eotvos at 7:41 PM on February 19, 2022
I was incredibly excited to get boxed edition of the game for $3 at a local thrift store 15 years ago. I installed a new/old OS on a virtual machine to play it. . . and then I realized why it was $3.
I love the author and the concept and the boldness. The game itself is hard to love, at least for me.
[edit: I returned the novelty objects that came in the box when I gave the thing to the next thrift store. It seemed only fair]
posted by eotvos at 7:41 PM on February 19, 2022
I would love to see a second version of Starship Titanic with the natural language processing we have today, although I think key to the whole affair would be to send all the failed prompts back to a central server and then update the game with new handling for all the reasonable ones.
posted by Merus at 9:17 PM on February 19, 2022
posted by Merus at 9:17 PM on February 19, 2022
I've been waiting for this one to reappear during doubles jubilee, One of my all-time favorite posts!
posted by rouftop at 9:58 PM on February 19, 2022
posted by rouftop at 9:58 PM on February 19, 2022
Ah, excellent post as always. Tell me: is <a href=""><> burned into your muscle memory too?
posted by JHarris at 3:16 AM on February 20, 2022 [4 favorites]
posted by JHarris at 3:16 AM on February 20, 2022 [4 favorites]
Last year I wrote a little script to extract all the dialogue captions from Starship Titanic's files; the results are here (along with some notes about running the game on Window 10; it's supported by ScummVM).
The game contains a substantial amount of fully-voiced dialogue for each character, although I suspect some of it is unused. The DeskBot has the most lines (2,219), with second place going to the BellBot (1,990) and the DoorBot a close third (1,985) . Even the Succ-U-Bus (an antisocial pneumatic tube transport system that could hardly be described as a conversationalist) has 242 lines.
Given the quantity of dialogue available, it's unfortunate that the performance of the game's text parser didn't live up to Adams' expectations. In the official strategy guide (included with the "first-class cruise kit" release I purchased as a child) he claimed "YOU WILL NOT GET BORED TALKING TO THESE ROBOTS", which regrettably was not consistent with my own experience.
I suspect the game would have been more successful if it had used conventional conversation trees; if nothing else, that would have made it easier to access and appreciate the dialogue, which might have compensated for the baffling puzzle design!
posted by CahootsMalone at 1:58 PM on February 20, 2022 [3 favorites]
The game contains a substantial amount of fully-voiced dialogue for each character, although I suspect some of it is unused. The DeskBot has the most lines (2,219), with second place going to the BellBot (1,990) and the DoorBot a close third (1,985) . Even the Succ-U-Bus (an antisocial pneumatic tube transport system that could hardly be described as a conversationalist) has 242 lines.
Given the quantity of dialogue available, it's unfortunate that the performance of the game's text parser didn't live up to Adams' expectations. In the official strategy guide (included with the "first-class cruise kit" release I purchased as a child) he claimed "YOU WILL NOT GET BORED TALKING TO THESE ROBOTS", which regrettably was not consistent with my own experience.
I suspect the game would have been more successful if it had used conventional conversation trees; if nothing else, that would have made it easier to access and appreciate the dialogue, which might have compensated for the baffling puzzle design!
posted by CahootsMalone at 1:58 PM on February 20, 2022 [3 favorites]
I had vague recollections of playing and discarding it when it originally came out. Got the Steam version to give it another go and remember why I blew it off the first time; the navigation deeply is obnoxious; trying to figure out where I actually am and and whether I can actually get to a given point is wayyy too much work.
A full remake would be interesting to see, if it included enabled a modern first-person navigational metaphor.
posted by microscone at 2:59 PM on February 20, 2022
A full remake would be interesting to see, if it included enabled a modern first-person navigational metaphor.
posted by microscone at 2:59 PM on February 20, 2022
I do love this kind of game, and I started playing last night, but it felt like I was doing a lot of running around and not finding many puzzles or information for solving the puzzles - can anyone give me some general guidelines (spoiler free, please) as to how to approach this game? like: when you're talking to the characters, do you need to use full sentences? should I be trying everything willy-nilly to see what works, or is there generally a logic to solving the puzzles? how closely should I be paying attention to the parrot? Any other tips?
posted by 5_13_23_42_69_666 at 3:20 PM on February 20, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by 5_13_23_42_69_666 at 3:20 PM on February 20, 2022 [1 favorite]
When the forum changed URLs, attempts were made to get sites that covered the story to update their links.
Only one site actually responded and did it.
A wholly remarkable site.
posted by BiggerJ at 4:28 PM on February 20, 2022 [1 favorite]
Only one site actually responded and did it.
A wholly remarkable site.
posted by BiggerJ at 4:28 PM on February 20, 2022 [1 favorite]
CahootsMalone: "Last year I wrote a little script to extract all the dialogue captions from Starship Titanic's files; the results are here (along with some notes about running the game on Window 10; it's supported by ScummVM)."
Awesome stuff, thanks! Though I thought the GOG/Steam versions used ScummVM too? Hopefully it's at least more stable than that convoluted Sheep Shaver emulator tutorial I had included in the original post.
5_13_23_42_69_666: "I do love this kind of game, and I started playing last night, but it felt like I was doing a lot of running around and not finding many puzzles or information for solving the puzzles - can anyone give me some general guidelines (spoiler free, please) as to how to approach this game? like: when you're talking to the characters, do you need to use full sentences? should I be trying everything willy-nilly to see what works, or is there generally a logic to solving the puzzles? how closely should I be paying attention to the parrot? Any other tips?"
So I love this game and explored it a lot as a kid, but the thing is that it's borderline-unplayable without the Official Strategy Guide or some other walkthrough. I mean, you can explore the ship, chat with the bots, etc., but a lot of the puzzles needed to progress are completely unintuitive -- Myst it ain't. You can certainly try to solve it on your own, but if you approach it more as an interactive multimedia comedy story with step-by-step instructions you'll probably enjoy it a lot more. If you do want to give it a shot, I would definitely at least check out these resources excerpted from the strategy guide: helpful guides to the bot's "cellpoint" settings and a map of the ship.
posted by Rhaomi at 7:17 PM on February 20, 2022 [4 favorites]
Awesome stuff, thanks! Though I thought the GOG/Steam versions used ScummVM too? Hopefully it's at least more stable than that convoluted Sheep Shaver emulator tutorial I had included in the original post.
5_13_23_42_69_666: "I do love this kind of game, and I started playing last night, but it felt like I was doing a lot of running around and not finding many puzzles or information for solving the puzzles - can anyone give me some general guidelines (spoiler free, please) as to how to approach this game? like: when you're talking to the characters, do you need to use full sentences? should I be trying everything willy-nilly to see what works, or is there generally a logic to solving the puzzles? how closely should I be paying attention to the parrot? Any other tips?"
So I love this game and explored it a lot as a kid, but the thing is that it's borderline-unplayable without the Official Strategy Guide or some other walkthrough. I mean, you can explore the ship, chat with the bots, etc., but a lot of the puzzles needed to progress are completely unintuitive -- Myst it ain't. You can certainly try to solve it on your own, but if you approach it more as an interactive multimedia comedy story with step-by-step instructions you'll probably enjoy it a lot more. If you do want to give it a shot, I would definitely at least check out these resources excerpted from the strategy guide: helpful guides to the bot's "cellpoint" settings and a map of the ship.
posted by Rhaomi at 7:17 PM on February 20, 2022 [4 favorites]
thanks Rhaomi! much appreciated
posted by 5_13_23_42_69_666 at 4:28 AM on February 21, 2022
posted by 5_13_23_42_69_666 at 4:28 AM on February 21, 2022
Cripes, CahootsMalone and Rhaomi! Those are great. Thanks!
posted by eotvos at 8:40 AM on February 21, 2022
posted by eotvos at 8:40 AM on February 21, 2022
[Archive.org copy of this post, which should include most of the game resources]
posted by Rhaomi at 5:58 PM on February 27, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by Rhaomi at 5:58 PM on February 27, 2022 [1 favorite]
Well how did I miss this?
Starship Titanic Original Soundtrack (1998)
It wasn't a physical release -- they're all tracks pulled directly from the game files!
posted by Rhaomi at 2:39 PM on March 7, 2022 [2 favorites]
Starship Titanic Original Soundtrack (1998)
It wasn't a physical release -- they're all tracks pulled directly from the game files!
posted by Rhaomi at 2:39 PM on March 7, 2022 [2 favorites]
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