The Hitch Hiker's Guide To The Titanic [Titanic II Week]

Starship Titanic was an experimental computer game designed by galactic hitch-hiker Douglas Adams. The experimental element was the existential gameplay which involved asking questions of a series of eccentric robots, to which they universally failed to reply. Kafka would have been impressed. Where the game failed in artificial intelligence breakthroughs, it succeeded with artwork, animation and atmosphere, providing the player with (for it's time) a highly detailed art deco starship interior to explore.

Douglas Adams first mentioned the Starship Titanic in the third Hitch-Hiker novel Life, The Universe and Everything - a prototype Improbability Drive ship that unfortunately suffered a gratuitous Total Existence Failure during its maiden voyage. Terry Jones' novel "Douglas Adams' Starship Titanic" develops this story arc further in parallel with the computer game.

Doctor Who is indebted to Douglas Adams in many ways and the Russell T. Davies and Steven Moffat series are laced with references to Adams' books. The 2007 extended episode Voyage Of The Damned, starring David Tennant and Kylie Minogue, was also set on a Starship Titanic, although arguably the plot itself had more in common with The Poseidon Adventure. This Titanic was once again staffed by mad robots - robotic angels with deadly, detachable halos.

Douglas Adams has a history of developing brilliant but tricky computer games - his two Interactive Fiction games, Bureaucracy and the official Hitch Hiker game, are both masterpieces of fiendish multi-layered puzzles. Success is virtually impossible but failure is fun. I don't know what happens if you complete either one of them - possibly the entire Universe is destroyed and replaced by something even more fiendish (there are of course those who claim this has already happened.) You can play a version of the Hitch Hiker game here on the BBC Radio 4 website, updated with some fantastic new artwork. The original text-only game is hosted here.

You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike

The Great Maze at Blake End is an annual event - a labyrinth grown in a 10-acre maizefield, one of the many maize mazes that springs up around the UK at this time of year. Exploring it brought back a lot of memories, such as playing text adventures on a BBC Micro as a child. Mazes were a common element of Sphinx Adventure, Philosopher's Quest and similar games: usually the various parts of the maze were joined non-logically (if you go north from point A and reach point B, going south won't necessarily bring you back to A) so you either had to come up with a way to map the locations or some other out-of-the-box solution.
I later graduated to PC games such as the original Colossal Cave or Zork. The genre has continued to grow and develop and there are scores of indie games on the net. However while mazes are still found in more recent interactive fiction, they often take fourth place to characters, atmospheric settings and other kinds of puzzles.
Running through maizefields is almost a cinematic subgenre of it's own - Children of the Corn and the more recent Signs being obvious examples.

I was also reminded of two of my favourite cinematic mazes, Labyrinth and Cube. Both films are structured around the maze, with it's hazards and puzzles - they're basically non-linear road movies. The Cube is a little more deadly but sadly lacks a Bowie soundtrack or any Jim Henson inhabitants. Being a good logician would help you survive the Cube but might actually endanger you in the Labyrinth which is all about subverting your assumptions and preconceptions.