Starship Titanic
Starship Titanic | |
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Simon & Schuster Interactive | |
Producer(s) |
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Composer(s) | Wix Wickens Douglas Adams |
Platform(s) |
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Release |
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Mode(s) | Single-player |
Starship Titanic is an
Written and designed by The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy creator Douglas Adams, Starship Titanic began development in 1996 and took two years to develop. In order to achieve Adams's goal of being able to converse with characters in the game, his company developed a language processor to interpret player's input and give an appropriate response and recorded over 16 hours of character dialogue. Oscar Chichoni and Isabel Molina, artists on the film Restoration (1995), served as the game's production designers and designed the ship's Art Deco visuals. The game's voice cast includes Monty Python members Terry Jones and John Cleese. A tie-in novel titled Douglas Adams's Starship Titanic: A Novel was written by Jones and released in October 1997.
Starship Titanic was released to mixed reviews and was a financial disappointment, although it was nominated for three industry awards and won a Codie award in 1999. It was re-released for modern PCs in September 2015 by GOG.com.
Gameplay
Starship Titanic is a
Much of the gameplay involves solving puzzles by using items with other items or with objects and characters onscreen.[4] Another significant aspect of the game involves talking with characters in the game, namely the bots that work in the ship and a parrot, by inputting prompts in the Chat-O-Mat mode. Additionally to conversation with characters through interpreting of user input, the parser often provides hints or explanations that come in the form of pre-recorded speech, which can help the player in progressing in the game.[5]
The main objective of the game is to locate the missing parts of the ship's broken intelligence system in order to repair the starship. In order to advance within the game, the player must upgrade from the standard third class level to first class and thus gain access to areas that are restricted when the game begins.[6][7] The game also requires the player to transport items throughout the ship through the Succ-U-Bus, a system of tubes that transfer objects placed in them to other parts of the ship; these tubes can be found in many areas of the ship.[4][7] The player also needs to use the parrot to solve certain puzzles.[8] A talking bomb can be found in the game and unwillingly armed by the player; if that happens, the player has to either disarm it or distract it during countdown to prevent it from exploding.[9][10]
Plot
Starship Titanic begins in the player character's house on Earth, which is partially destroyed when the eponymous cruise ship crash-lands through the roof. Fentible, the "DoorBot", informs the player that the ship and its crew have malfunctioned and needs help to get them back to normal. Once the ship is taken back to space, the player meets Marsinta, the "DeskBot", who makes them a third-class reservation, and Krage, a "BellBot". The player begins the journey as a third-class passenger and thus cannot access many areas of the ship that are reserved for higher class passengers until he or she obtains a second-class promotion and eventually convinces Marsinta to upgrade them to first class after managing to alter her personality.
Through backstory in the ship's email system, the player learns that Brobostigon and Scraliontis, two associates of the ship's creator Leovinus, double crossed him and deliberately provoked a "Spontaneous Massive Existence Failure" by hiding the body parts of the ship's humanoid intelligence system Titania in various locations within the ship as well as planting a scuttling bomb, in an effort to destroy the ship and profit from its insurance. However, both men perished in the attempt with the player finding their dead bodies on the ship. After exploring the vessel and solving puzzles, the player eventually finds all of Titania's body parts and awakens her, repairing the sabotaged ship and allowing for it to be navigated. The player then accesses the bridge and navigates the ship back to their home on Earth. Throughout the game, the player meets other bots, including Nobby, the "LiftBot", Fortillian, the "BarBot" and D'Astragaaar, the "Maitre d'Bot". The player also meets a parrot that accompanies them throughout most of the journey.
After returning to Earth, the player gets a message from Leovinus (played by Douglas Adams) who announces that he has decided to retire on Earth as a fisherman and to find a wife. Depending on if the bomb was disarmed, one of two endings occurs:
- If the bomb wasn't disarmed, the ship takes off and explodes in midair.
- If the bomb was disarmed, the ship simply takes off and the player is informed by Leovinus that, by galactic salvage laws, they now own the Starship Titanic.
Development
Background
Douglas Adams first imagined the Starship Titanic in Life, the Universe and Everything, the third entry in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series, where it is briefly mentioned in the book's 10th chapter. Adams describes the ship—named after the famous ocean liner—as a "majestic and luxurious cruise-liner" that "did not even manage to complete its very first radio message—an SOS—before undergoing a sudden and gratuitous total existence failure".[11][12]
Before making Starship Titanic, Adams had previously served as a designer for Infocom's 1984 text-based game The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which was based on his successful science fiction series of the same name,[13][14] and had been an advocate for "new media".[15] Since working with Infocom, Adams had expressed interest in returning to game design, and feared that he was spending too much time by himself writing.[16][17] He turned to game design again after playing Myst, which is when he said "the medium had gotten interesting again".[16] However, he thought Myst was lacking in story and characters.[18] Commenting on the gameplay of Myst and its sequel Riven, Adams said that "nothing really happens, and nobody is there. I thought, let's do something similar but populate the environment with characters you can interact with",[17] and hoped to combine graphics and a text-based system that allowed for players to converse with characters in the game.[19]
In 1996 Adams co-founded
Development of the game began Summer 1996.[24] Around 40 people worked on the game's development.[16]
Writing
The story was created by Adams, who wrote the game's script with
Adams aimed to develop a text parser-based
Design
The futuristic,
Adams, Chichoni and Molina gave detailed briefings for the animators for each environment and character in the game.
Programming was done on The Digital Village's own developed engine, Lifeboat.[32] The engine was developed by programmers Sean Solle and Rik Heywood, who joined the company in January 1997.[42] Their intention when developing Lifeboat was allowing simultaneous work on different parts of the game, facilitating game test runs and unifying the work of coders and 3D animators. The engine went live on 14 February 1997. To keep within a data budget of 1.8 gigabytes, the team used the MP3 sound format to compress the 16 hours of speech and dialogue, and compressed movies and cutscenes with Indeo. The final set of the game CDs were burned 400 days after the first build of Lifeboat.[35]
Sound
Sound designer John Whitehall, who was in charge of the company's sound studio during the recording process, worked with Adams on creating the sound for the game. Whitehall and Adams had previously collaborated in the radio version of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy for the BBC, where Whitehall was a studio manager. The voice cast included actors Laurel Lefkow, Quint Boa, Dermot Crowley and Jonathan Kydd, who voiced the bot characters in the game.[43] Monty Python members Terry Jones and John Cleese also lent their voices to characters in the game. Jones, a longtime friend of Adams, provided the voice of the parrot,[44] while Cleese (who is credited as "Kim Bread")[26] voiced the bomb.[45] Actor Philip Pope was also involved, having voiced the Mâitre d'Bot.[43] Adams himself also did voice acting for the game,[11] voicing the Succ-U-Bus[28] and Leovinus.[26]
The ambient music for the game was composed by
Novel
A 1997 novelisation was written by Terry Jones as part of his involvement with the game development, the spinoff planned alongside the game. An audiobook version was also released, followed by an e-book version ten years later, and a radio dramatisation over twenty years later.
Release
In May 1996,
The game was eventually released on 2 April 1998 for PC,
Sales for the game were financially disappointing. [51] Simon & Schuster marketing VP Walter Walker estimated that the game had sold over 60,000 copies by the end of April, far below the expected number of 200,000.[61] In the United States, it sold 41,524 copies and earned $1,841,429 by July;[62] sales in that country rose to 150,000 copies by August 1999.[63] According to the company's creative director Jeff Siegel, a DVD version of the game "did not really sell" despite being an alternative to the three-CD original release.[64] According to Douglas Adams biographer Nick Webb, The Digital Village CEO Robbie Stamp sold the rights of Starship Titanic and all associated intellectual property to Thomas Hoegh's Arts Alliance in September 1998.[65]
The game's Windows version was re-released for modern PCs on
Reception
Aggregator | Score |
---|---|
GameRankings | 63.79%[68] (score based on 19 reviews) |
Publication | Score | |
---|---|---|
Adventure Gamers | ||
Computer Gaming World | ||
GameSpot | 7.1/10 | |
IGN | 4.9/10 | |
Next Generation | [5] | |
PC Gamer (US) | 64% | |
PC PowerPlay | 71% | |
PC Zone | 91% | |
Computer Games Strategy Plus | ||
Adventure Classic Gaming | ||
PC Games | B+
MacAddict | "Freakin' Awesome!"[70] |
Starship Titanic received generally mixed reviews. Review aggregator GameRankings gives the game a score of 63.79% based on 19 reviews in the website.[68] Charles Ardai of Computer Gaming World gave the game two and a half stars out of five, praising the graphics and visuals as "gorgeous", but criticizing the playability, the bots' responses in the text parser, and ultimately thought that the game is "just not very funny".[71] Adventure Gamers's Evan Dickens similarly praised the graphics and "beautiful" animation, but criticized the navigation and the parser, writing that the bots "won't understand or respond correctly to a single thing [the player asks]", and called it an "antiquated keyword-recognition system". He also described the puzzles as "contrived and unnecessary".[72] IGN reviewer Chris Buckman gave the game a 4.9/10 score, criticizing the lack of a backstory, the movement sequences and navigation, and the obscurity of the puzzles.[73]
Writing for
The game received two nominations for the BAFTA Interactive Awards in the categories of Comedy and Interactive Treatment in October 1998,[84] and was nominated for PC Adventure Game of the Year at the 2nd Annual Interactive Achievement Awards.[85] Likewise, the editors of The Electric Playground nominated Starship Titanic for their 1998 "Best Adventure Game" award, which ultimately went to Grim Fandango.[86] However, it was given a Codie award in 1999 for "Best New Adventure/Role Playing Game" by the Software and Information Industry Association.[87]
Legacy
In a 2015 article, Kotaku contributor Lewis Packwood wrote that "perhaps the Starship Titanic's most enduring legacy" is a forum in the older version of the game's official website, which was developed by The Digital Village's web developer Yoz Grahame. The starship's fictional construction company Star-Struct Inc. Archived 1 January 2014 at the Wayback Machine, "a wholly-owned subsidiary" of the fictional travel agency Starlight Lines Corp., contained an "employee forum" that became popular months after it was created, entirely through user-generated content. Users role-played as fictional employees and characters in the ship, and created scenarios, storylines and in-jokes that developed over years. After The Digital Village closed, Grahame hosted the website himself and kept the domain alive.[88]
Shortly after Starship Titanic, The Digital Village (which was renamed to h2g2) developed an online guide based on Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy called h2g2, which became a BBC domain after the company shut down in 2001.[89][90][91] In 2011, the BBC sold h2g2 to Not Panicking Ltd.[92]
References
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Bibliography
- Richards, Neil (1998). Starship Titanic: The Official Strategy Guide (1st ed.). ISBN 0-609-80147-3.
- Webb, Nick (2005). Wish You Were Here: The Official Biography of Douglas Adams (1st American ed.). ISBN 0-345-47650-6.