Starship Titanic
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- This article is about the 1998 computer game. For other uses, see Titanic.
Starship Titanic is a computer game designed by Douglas Adams and made by The Digital Village. It was released in 1998. It takes place on a starship of the same name 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).
The player acts the part of a human (whose house the starship crashed into) who goes aboard to help fix the ship, and must solve puzzles to collect the parts of the sabotaged onboard computer, Titania. Once all the parts have been collected and inserted in the correct places, Titania comes alive and talks.
One of the most significant parts of the game is the conversation engine (dubbed Spookitalk) used to interact with the robot staff onboard the ship. Players type what they wish to say into the Personal Electronic Thing (PET) at the bottom of the screen. The robots' responses appear as text in the PET and are also spoken. The conversation engine works by interpreting user input and selecting relevant pre-recorded speech responses.
A feature of the game and the starship itself is the "Succ-U-Bus", a communications system which moves physical containers through a network 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 play on the word "succubus." Similar systems called pneumatic tubes exist in the real world; for example, those used by supermarkets to offload cash from tills to a secure area.
Among the voice actors for the game are former Monty Python members Terry Jones as the Parrot, and John Cleese (under the pseudonym of Kim Bread) as the Bomb. Adams himself is the voice of the Succ-U-Bus, and plays the part of the ship's creator, Leovinus, in one of the closing scenes. If you turn on the television in the prologue of the game Douglas Adams will appear and tell you to get on with the game
A book entitled Douglas Adams's Starship Titanic, based on the game, was written by Jones. Critical reaction has been lukewarm; the general consensus is that the novel reads like a poor imitation of Adams' style. The novel can be read on Starship Titanic's website, but every single word has been arranged in alphabetical order, making the book practically unreadable.
The 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". This would seem to suggest that the game takes place in the same fictional universe as the Hitchhiker's Guide stories. However, in response to mentions of characters or quotations from the Hitchhiker's Guide, the game will accuse the player of mixing up different universes.
Prior to the game's release, the publishers launched a web site purporting to be that of an intergalactic travel agency called Starlight Travel, which in the game is the Starship Titanic's parent company. The site combined copious amounts of Python-esque writing (by Terry Jones) with methods commonly associated with Alternative Reality Games to generate interest in the site, and in the game, long after the initial site visit. A typical example of this occurred when a site visitor filled out a personal information form, including email address and "favorite frog" (from a convenient -- and long -- drop-down list); approximately one week later, a spam email for something other than Starlight Travel would arrive, and would include a reference to the specific frog that the visitor had selected. Another example involved a series of three emails; the first called the reader's attention to a password-protected area of the Starlight Travel site, the second urged the reader to delete unread any future emails, as confidential information was being erroneously emailed, and the third revealed the confidential password for the restricted site: "1".
[edit] External links
- Douglas Adams' Starship Titanic - Official Website
- Starship Titanic Game
- Starship Titanic Novel
- Starship Titanic at MobyGames
