The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

With the invention of the Internet and the rise of online gaming, it’s almost impossible to escape The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. This is a very big deal for fans who were waiting for nearly two decades to play another game set in Douglas Adams’ universe. Many people remember waiting in line or camping out overnight to get their hands on the original Infocom text adventure, only to be disappointed by a tedious gameplay and confusing story. Now there are countless new games based on Hitchhikers Guide, but how do they stand up to the old ones? Are they worthy successors that live up to the novels’ legacy?

Unsurprisingly, most of today’s H2G2 games tend to either be point-and-click adventures or browser-based Flash games. There are also quite a few mobile apps, which have become more popular than ever thanks to Apple’s App Store. However, every single one of these games has been created by a fan as a labor of love, rather than being developed by a company like Infocom (which is now defunct). Because of this grassroots origins even a relatively simple game can be surprisingly well-made and faithful to the books. On the other hand, sometimes when fans try too hard to replicate something from pop culture,

A new online game, The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy (THGttG), is a tribute to the Douglas Adams’ book and recent movie of the same name. THGttG is based on a text-based game that was originally developed in 1984 and is considered by many to be one of the first interactive fiction games. A text-based game means that the player interacts with the game by entering commands into a computer, as opposed to graphics-based games where players click on objects in their field of vision and watch them change.