This year’s Interactve Bafta Awards gave the award of Best Online Entertainment to “The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy Adventure Game – The 20th Anniversary Edition”. The original Hitchhiker’s Adventure game has been created by Douglas and Steve Meretzky in 1985 for Infocom. It has been a big commercial success for a text only adventure (250.000 copies sold) and remained a quite popular version of H2g2 during all these years (for more infos about the original game check this place).
Douglas, who was quite proud of the game, had an online playable version of the game on his official website. And when Radio 4 decided to launch a big website for the upcoming broadcasting of the new radio series based on the last three books of the Hitchhiker’s series, they chose to work on a new version of the Hitchhiker’s Adventure Game which would be playable on their website.
But Radio 4 did not just put the old version of The Adventure Game online. They asked to Rod Lord (the guy who created the guide graphics in the TV series) and to Sean Sollé (from Douglas’ company The Digital Village) to work on a brand new version to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the game (if you want to learn how they made such an exploit check here).
In fact, the new version of the Hitchhiker’s adventure game is one of the reasons why the Radio 4 website is so succesfull. The graphics are great, and Sean made a wonderful work to update it and attract new players to this wonderful game.
You can notice that there is now two versions of the game with some new graphics from the young artists Nolan Worthington and Andrew Wyld.
The new version of the game is excellent, has well deserved this prize and we all hope that Radio 4 will let it online after the broadcasting of the new series this spring.
