Hitch-hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the sequel
By far the biggest news in recent times in the interactive fiction community is Andy Baio’s uncovering of the unpublished sequel to the 1984 game published by Infocom.
That’s right. A whole unpublished game. Or actually just a duo of prototypes with very limited functionality.
But it’s not really the game (playable on the page with an embedded Z-machine interpreter) that’s the highlight of the show, but the story of the game - told both in the blog entry, and the long string of comments to it.
The comments are worthwhile indeed, as the writers include several Infocom implementors (and also quite a bit of extended flaming). The game spent a long time in pre-production, including a stint when it was to be co-developed by their worst rivals, Magnetic Scrolls. But in the end it did not really go far, as Infocom was scuttled by Activision’s closing of the Cambridge office in 1989.
The game design is also featured on the page, detailed to a level on which a programmer could easily take the basic plot and whip it to a shape in a couple of evenings. Obviously, filling out the details and otherwise productizing the game would consume a whole lot more. And there would be the nasty issue of copyrights to consider…
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