The site combined copious amounts of Python-esque writing (by Michael Bywater) with methods commonly associated with alternate reality games to generate interest in the site, and in the game, long after the initial site visit. 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. If a player in Starship Titanic mentions characters or quotations from the Hitchhiker's Guide series, the game will accuse the player of mixing up different universes. However, details regarding the ship's construction in Life, the Universe and Everything do not match those in the novel Starship Titanic. This may suggest that the game takes place in the same fictional universe as the Hitchhiker's Guide stories. The Starship Titanic and "existence failure" were first mentioned in Life, the Universe and Everything, the third book in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy "trilogy". The book follows a group of three humans who are taken aboard the Starship when it crashes on Earth and returns to the planet Blerontin where it was launched, with various subplots including an onboard bomb, a love-triangle between the characters, and an attempt to commit insurance fraud by the investors in the ship. The two formed a creative design partnership in 1994, and served as the concept and design directors for the game.Ī novel entitled Douglas Adams's Starship Titanic, based on the game, was written by Terry Jones. Much of the stylized concept art is credited to Oscar Chichoni, an Oscar-winning Argentine illustrator who specializes in highly-detailed, mechanical subject matter, and Isabel Molina, a registered British architect. Starship Titanic features a predominantly Art Deco style in its architectural design, as well as in the design of its robotic characters and ship components. 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. 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. 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.Īmong 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, itself an in-joke as this was the nickname John Cleese wished to be credited as when appearing in a Doctor Who serial written by Douglas Adams) as the Bomb. The name of the system is a play on the word " succubus". Messages and objects can be placed in the containers, and the system is used to deliver items to the player from other locations. The recorded phrases would take over 14 hours to play back-to-back.Ī 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. The engine has the ability to converse with the player in an almost lifelike manner, partially because it incorporates over 10,000 different phrases, pre-recorded by a group of professional voice actors. The Spookitalk engine was developed exclusively for the game by creator Douglas Adams and several programmers from The Digital Village, the company working with Adams to develop the game. The conversation engine works by interpreting user input and selecting relevant pre-recorded speech responses. The robots' responses appear as text in the PET and are also spoken. Players type what they wish to say into the Personal Electronic Thing (PET) at the bottom of the screen. One of the most significant parts of the game is the conversation engine (dubbed "Spookitalk") used to interact with the robot staff on board the ship.
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