11 Maiden Lane, London, WC2E
The game with the magic words Douglas Adams on the cover. I remember Starship Titanic coming out. It was during that short period from 1996 to 1999 when I was gainfully employed by Virgin Interactive Entertainment and trying to work out if there was any way I could convert my job in Technical Support into some sort of meaningful career in the games industry. I had a friend who worked for a game magazine and I talked to them about Starship Titanic during the bubble of publicity which preceded release. What surprised me at the time was their response, they were already disappointed with it.
First I need to point you to the people who have actually done proper research. If you want to know more about Starship Titanic, and why it was a disappointment on release, then check out the good people at Rock, Paper, Shotgun. There's also this well written article from The Digital Antiquarian about The Later Years of Douglas Adams. Myself, I'm just hear to mop up the background details and talk a bit about The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
Bob Chappell fancied writing a game based on The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy so he wrote to Pan Books and asked their permission. Pan Books said yes, as long as they and Douglas Adams were credited. So Bob Chappell did.
This apparently was how licencing worked in 1981. Bob Chappell sold his game and the letterr on to a company called Supersoft who started selling it from July 1981; around midway between the paperback release of The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (October 1980) and Life, the Universe and Everything (August 1982). Supersoft carried on selling the game into 1982 and converted the game to the Commodore 64, with versions for the VIC-20 and Dragon 32 to follow from Audiogenic. And then Douglas Adams' agent Ed Victor signed a contract with Columbia Merchandising.
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| POPULAR COMPUTING WEEKLY 21-27 April 1983 page 1 |
A lot of people talked to their solicitors that week. Normally with these stories, nothing comes after coverage of the initial big legal explosion but in this case we get closure. Two weeks later POPULAR COMPUTING WEEKLY reported:
Hitch-hikers dispute is over
Supersoft, the Middlesex based software company, and Hitch-hikers author, Douglas Adams reached an agreement through their solicitors moments before the case came to court.
An injunction was sought by Douglas Adams on the grounds that Supersoft had no right to use the names and places from the book in the game.
In return for Supersoft dropping the game, Douglas Adams has agreed not to pursue any claims over royalties on those cassettes already issued... Pan have paid the legal costs of both sides.
That comment about Pan paying the legal costs of both sides is revealing. I think it's fair to read it as an acknowledgement that the original approval letter was a mistake. After this, Douglas Adams' agent was clearly keeping a closer eye on the UK software market and when Fantasy Software released Backpackers Guide to the Universe:
We [Fantasy] got into a legal squabble with the author of Hitch-hikers Guide to the Galaxy because of the title we had intended to use. We managed to resolve this and in fact we may be doing a project sometime with the publishing house.
(SINCLAIR PROGRAMMES April 1985 page 51)
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Douglas Adams worked on the Infocom game offering ideas to the game's designer Steve Meretzky. Their collaboration began in February 1984 according to this interview which gives a real sense of what it was like to work with Douglas Adams and the ideas he brought to the project:
His overall take on the game was a fairly direct adaptation of the existing storyline. Where he really had a flood of ideas was on some of the more incidental stuff, playing with the medium of interactivity and text adventures. Things like having an inventory object called "no tea"; having the game lie to you; having to argue with the game to get past a certain door; having an object called "the thing your aunt gave you which you don't know what it is" which keeps coming back to you even if you get rid of it; having a player input which results in a parser failure (that is, an input which couldn't be understood by the game for some reason) be the words which fall through a wormhole in the universe and start an interstellar war. And so on.
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| PERSONAL COMPUTING WORLD January 1985 page 136 |
It's really difficult to track when or how The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy was released in the UK. PERSONAL COMPUTING WORLD reviewed the game in January 1985, in an issue with a fantastic Mark Wing-Davey style Zaphod Beeblebrox on the cover. The magazine was thorough on the formats and price:
The
Hitch-hiker's Guide to the Galaxy is available on disk for numerous
machines including the IBM PC (this was the version used for the review
copy), Apple II, Macintosh, DEC Rainbow, HP150 and 110, Commodore 64
and Atari. Most versions cost £34.50 with the last two being slightly
cheaper at £30.20.
But disappointingly vague on where you could by the game:
UK distributors include Softsel on (01) 844 2040.
Softsel were importing the game for distribution but I don't know if they were licencing it in the way a company like US Gold would. Softsel did some additional work and converted it, and other Infocom adventures to the Amstrad PCW 8256 and then on to any Amstrad with a disc system. At least that's what AMSTRAD ACTION tell me (February 1986):
You can only play them if you’ve got a disc-drive. In fact, at the time of writing, you could only play them on a PCW 8256, since Softsel (the distributors) were having trouble getting the formatting right for the CPC range. However, we’re assured that by the time you read this you’ll be able to hitch through the galaxy on any Amstrad disc-equipped system.
Activision took over UK distribution at some point between February 1986 and January 1987. The game got released again by Mastertronic, in their Virgin Mastertronic phase which dates that release to between 1988 and 1990. In total The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy sold around 400,000 copies. Douglas Adams then helped design, but didn't directly work on, another Infocom adventure in 1987. This was Beaurocracy, in which the player is challenged to get their bank to acknowledge a change of address form. It sold 40,000 copies but wasn't The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, which Infocom would have preferred.
One of the reasons Douglas Adams didn't work on another Hitchhiker's game was because by 1987 he had finally broken free from that universe. Instead he wrote Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (1987) and its sequel The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul (1988) plus the radio series Last Chance To See (1989) and the accompanying book (1990). The autumn of 1991 saw Douglas Adams owing publisher Heinemann a book, the first of a contract of two, and THE FROOD: THE AUTHORISED BIOGRAPHY OF DOUGLAS ADAMS by Jem Roberts notes that and Adams' agent Ed Victor:
had long campaigned for Adams to turn the brief aside on the Starship Titanic from [Life, the Universe and Everything] into a full narrative, with or without the Hitchhiker regulars – indeed, Adams had been mulling it over as a TV series or a movie for many years – and so the title was tentatively applied to one half of the contract.
Instead that book became the fifth in the Hitchhiker's series, Mostly Harmless. And THE FROOD describes what happened after the dreadful process of writing Mostly Harmless had ended:
For
the rest of the decade Adams decided to take a far more relaxed,
workaday attitude to life, as part of The Digital Village – one of a
plethora of hot new multimedia (or rather, ‘multiple media’, the
distinction being that they would recreate specific projects across
separate formats) dot.com start-ups, but with the undeniable USP of
having Douglas as ‘Chief Fantasist’.
When I'm writing these blog posts I'll often run aground on a single question. In this case it was, what year did Douglas Adams get involved with The Digital Village? This turns out to be more complicated than you might expect.
1. Wikipedia implies it was 1992 but the article it links to for a citation is behind a paywall.
2. Companies House gives a founding date of 2nd September 1994; company number 02964486.
3. A 1995 GUARDIAN article (9th October, page 17) notes "[Douglas Adams] is launching with a consortium of colleagues including Richard Creasey, Mary Glanville, Robbie Stamp and Ian Stewart, a founder of Wired magazine, a "digital village"...."
The answer is probably some time between 1995 and 1996. It would be nice to be more specific but THE FROOD doesn't really help. Thanks. That passage quoted above also made me roll my eyes as Jem Roberts blithely glosses over some "Camden Town offices" for The Digital Village". What, no address? This is supposed to be an authorised biography. It's as if Jem Roberts just doesn't think this sort of thing is important. That Camden reference promptly beached me on another shoal because a straightforward internet search for "Camden"The Digital Village" lead me to this picture.
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Right, back to the office. It is clearly on top of a tall building looking out over a wide space with enough space for trees, and on the other side of the space is a tall flat roofed terrace (could be Georgian could be more modern) and beyond that a corner building with a tall steep-sided Victorian cupola. It's a distinctive skyline. But not, as it turns out, distinctive enough. I could still be sitting in front of Streetview gloomily clicking my way around Camden but I had to draw the line somewhere. Fortunately that search also lead me on to this interview with Robbie Stamp in which he recalled the establishment of The Digital Village:
We launched in a dial-up world. Amazing to think how far we've come. Our first office was on the top floor of a house in Bedford Square [Bloomsbury] in Ed Victor's agency, before we moved to Camden. Ed Victor was Douglas' literary agent and an early champion for the whole Hitchhiker body of work around the time the BBC aired the first episode of h2g2 [the radio series] in March 1978.
6 Bayley Street, Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3HE
Bloomsbury. Where else would a literary agent be based? I've passed through Bedford Square before, while I was writing about Entersoft. The software publishing arm of Enterprise. Entersoft were at 37 Bloomsbury Square, just down the road from Bayley Street which sits at the north west end of Bedford Square and joins it to Tottenham Court Road.
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| February 2025 |
Camden
Nuff said. If you know where The Digital Village were based in Camden then please drop an email to whereweretheynow@gmail.com.
Camden was where the development of Starship Titanic took place. The game picked up a lot of pre-publicity because Douglas Adams could be relied on to be generous with his time when giving interviews. It's difficult to find contemporary coverage because a lot of the best-selling magazines came from Future Publishing (SFX, PC FORMAT, PC GAMER, EDGE) who have scoured them from the internet (which, as I've said before, they are well within their legal rights to do -I just wish they wouldn't).
Here's an old 1998 article resurrected by THE REGISTER. It illustrates the point in the previews where, having read about the story and the graphics, I would begin to suffer from creeping doubt:
When you play, you meet and converse with a number of characters. You type and they reply. At one stage in the game's development, it was envisaged that you'd be able to talk and the software would use speech recognition. The technology isn't quite there yet (although it won't be long), but Adams feels that as we've all got so used to typing to each other over the internet, it feels like a natural way to communicate.The characterisation and interaction was talked up as a technological triumph and the game's greatest strength but it began to sound more like an Achilles' heel every time I read that you typed your side of conversation. Yes, typing works when you are taking your time to write a reply to an internet message but that's not the same as having a real-time conversation. Imagine what it would be like, to have to type replies to someone having talking to you. It sounds interminable. It was at this point that I found myself in a pub with my friend and expressed the uncharitable view (I'd almost certainly had too much BEER) that the Starship Titanic previews were coasting by on goodwill because people were excited to meet Douglas Adams and overlooking the problems with text parser. The reply I got was one of those comments which stuck with me: "It was a shame to see him messing around with something so old fashioned."
Old fashioned. I never have expected to hear that phrase applied to someone with their finger so firmly on the technological pulse. But it fit. At the time the common preference for adventure games was to allow the player to select one of several dialogue options from a set menu of responses. Not a perfect solution but a good halfway house between no interactivity and laboriously typing out "say to Gandalf 'give me the map and attack the vicious warg with the sword'." Douglas Adams dismissed the idea to WIRED:
"In a lot of games," Adams says, "a tiny box comes up next to a character and gives you five choices of things to say – like that happens in real life!"
I appreciate Douglas Adams was reacting against the empty environments of Myst and trying to revive the interactivity he
found so enjoyable in Infocom games but it's hard to describe
what a technological dead-end the Starship Titanic text parser seemed in 1998. Still, the game got some great reviews. PC ZONE loved it, 91% PC ZONE Classic. Wikipedia reports sales in the US reached around 150,000 copies by August 1999 which is good, but a lot less than the 400,000 sold by The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.
Douglas Adams had promoted Starship Titanic by noting it was aimed at the "non-psychopath sector" (THE AGE, 13 May 1998 page 5). Douglas Adams dealt with the disappointment of the sales figures by modifying that quote, as THE FROOD records:
What we decided to do in this game was go for the non-psychopath sector of the market. And that was a little hubristic because there really isn’t a non-psychopath sector of the market.
This is, not really fair. As THE DIGITAL ANTIQUARIAN notes:
The 1.5 million people who were buying the non-violent Myst sequel Riven at the time might have begged to differ.
Twenty five-odd years later, and with the pressure to be cutting edge removed, people seem more nostalgic about Starship Titanic and, with the exception of dinosaurs like myself, I get the impression it is seen much more fondly these days.
11 Maiden Lane Covent Garden, London WC2E 7NA
The website for The Digital Village is still going, remarkably, and it includes a summary of the company history:
TDV has already moved twice in its life and is now happily based in Covent Garden in London's West End, where it employs over forty people.
The Covent Garden Address turned out to be really easy to locate. It's listed in the Companies House report on their website. And it turns up in several job adverts.
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| CREATIVE REVIEW May 2000 page 160 |
This earlier advert from 1999 THE GUARDIAN puts the address at 12 Maiden Lane.
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| THE GUARDIAN 21/08/1999 page 244 |
12 Maiden Lane is now home to the Big Easy Bar-B-Q & Crabshack. Number 11, which is a little harder to see in the picture above is home to Nimax Theatres who run the Palace, Lyric, Apollo, Garrick, Vaudeville and Duchess Theatres. Obviously I took a photo which showed both buildings.
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| February 2025 |
Maiden Lane was also once the home of The Edge, an 8-bit software house owned by Softek who were owned by Tim Langdell. If I ever put together a walking tour of central London software houses then Covent Garden will be the easy bit because the offices of The Digital Village and The Edge are all of 30 meters apart, and the Softek offices were also about 50 meters away.
The Digital Village announced a new Hitchhiker's game [1], possibly based on Life, the universe and everything, due to be released in the summer of 2000 at the same time as the also forthcoming Disney film.
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| PC ZONE December 1998 page 21 |
30th April 1999 saw The Digital Village launch h2g2. This was a user-generated collaborative website which beat Wikipedia online by two years. If Starship Titanic seemed outdated then h2g2 was years ahead of the curve. THE GUARDIAN reported on 17 December 1999:
Mobile phone users will be able to connect to Mr Adams' website h2g2... information available to users with global positioning system phones will be tailored to their geographical location and they will be encouraged to contribute their own thought and facts, updating them constantly.
"The standard restaurant guide can tell you which is the best restaurant in Paris but this will be able to tell you which waitress is in a mood today and how to avoid her," Mr Adams said.
Douglas Adams moved to California to shepherd the film through production in the summer of 1999 but stayed on as a director of The Digital Village. The following year, The Digital Village was renamed h2g2.
And then the dot com bubble burst. Funding for h2g2 dried up in the autumn of 2000 and in January 2001 the BBC brought the h2g2 website for, as THE INDEPENDENT reported (4 March 2001) "an undisclosed amount" and quoted Robbie Stamp: "I was thoroughly delighted that it has gone to a good home, it's original home in the BBC."
Two months later Douglas Adams died on 13th May 2001. He was too young, just 49.
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| THE OBSERVER 13 May 2001 page 3 |
Camden Revisited (101 Bayham Street, 4th Floor, NW1 0AG and Regina House, 124 Finchley Road, NW3 5JS)
It
turns out, I might know where The Digital Village was based in Camden.
The following paragraphs are built on a foundation of sand. Treat with
scepticism.
The Companies House records for The Digital Village are still stored online. Just. Companies that are still trading have rich files full of scanned copies of original documents. The Digital Village was dissolved in 2007 which means its records exist as a much sketchier summary. That summary lists three addresses; Regina House, 124 Finchley Road, NW3 5J; 101 Bayham Street, 4th Floor, NW1 0AG; and 11 Maiden Lane WC2E 7NA.
I paid a lot of attention to that Regina House address. It's in the London Borough of Camden and just over a mile from Camden Town itself. It could potentially be the location of the Douglas Adams photo above because it's a tall building overlooking a wide street, etc. I know the quote from THE FROOD references Camden Town but its possible people were being imprecise with their language, or thought Camden sounded better than Finchley Road. The problem was, it didn't take long for me to realise the buildings on the other side of the street didn't match the photo and no amount of Streetview clicking could locate anything like the tall building with the steep-sided roof. I reluctantly rejected it on the grounds it was probably a registered business address used by The Digital Village while they were working out of Ed Victor's agency. I admitted defeat.
And I missed the other address. This was careless.
Later on, I was trying to find out when The Digital Village moved into Maiden Lane. That's when I realised the Maiden Lane address didn't follow on immediately from Regina House. What was this Bayham Street address? Was it possible NW1 was a Camden adjacent postcode? It was. It was considerably more Camden adjacent than Regina House. In fact, it was actually in Camden Town, one road along from Camden High Street and less than 200m from Camden Town underground station.
More excitingly (for me not for anyone else) 101 Bayham Street is also 200m from this building:
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| February 2025 |
Now that definitely looks like the building from the skyline in the Douglas Adams office photo.
I can't rule out the possibility that 101 Bayham Street is another trading address but I'm 80% confident that this is where Starship Titanic was developed.
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| February 2025 |
After all that effort, it's a shame the building is covered in scaffolding. Still, I was gratified to see that the fourth floor office has a set of nice big windows with a safety rail in front of them, just like in the photo up the page.
Finally, because I like to be through, here's a picture of Regina House, Finchley Road.
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| February 2025 |
While I was putting together this page I found several interviews with Douglas Adams conducted over the years. It seemed silly not to link to them.
Douglas Adams Interviews
YOUR COMPUTER October 1982 page 42 (natch).
MICRO ADVENTURER February 1985 page 9.
PC ZONE December 1997 page 36
ONION AV CLUB 01/28/1998
[1] That picture of Arthur Dent in the PC ZONE report comes from the 1994 The Illustrated Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
If you know where The Digital Village were based in Camden then please drop an email to whereweretheynow@gmail.com. Particually if I've got it wrong, although I'm quietly confident that I'm on target. Follow me on Bluesky @shammountebank.bsky.social
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