The Hitchhiker's Guide to Copyright Infringement

A couple of things combined to give me the idea for this post. The major one being Fantasy Software. I knew they'd had a brush with solicitors acting for Douglas Adams over their game Backpackers Guide To The Universe but I originally thought they had been unlucky and just chosen a bad time to release a game with a title parodying The Hitchhicker's Guide to the Galaxy. That is, sort of, the case but it's also the end point of a trend of Fantasy passing off Hitchhikers ideas in the scenarios of their games. After I noticed that, I seemed to keep falling over examples of other companies doing the same. 

I shouldn't be surprised the work of Douglas Adams occupies such a large place in the affections of people making games. It's a science-fiction series and they accumulate enthusiastic fanbases. And yet the people dropping Hitchhikers references into their games would also have grown up watching Doctor Who but that doesn't get referenced or borrowed from in anything like the same way. Neither does Blake's 7 [1] which was being watched by around 7-10 million people over the same 1978-1981 period. What's the difference between Doctor Who and Blake's 7 and Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy? Search me, guv. You might as well ask why Monty Python's Flying Circus gave us Spam emails and the Python programming language. When people are fans, they want to drop references to their favourite thing.

I'm going to have to start using words like intellectual property and franchise. I'm really sorry, Please don't hold it against me. I'm also going to end up using some sweeping statements which I don't really have anything to back up; like this next one. Star Trek must be a good candidate for the most number of unauthorised games anywhere ever. Look into the back catalogue of any software company knocking around in the late seventies/early eighties and lurking there you will find a Star Trek game. With a few minutes searching I've found versions by Silversoft, Mikro-Gen, Bug-Byte, Anirog, Cascade, Fuller, Salamander Software, and a lot more. Whether the software companies knew it or not, these games were adaptions of a 1971 computer game which swept like wildfire across mainframes in America and beyond. Star Trek became so ubiquitous it was almost a public domain idea. You weren't copying the TV programme [2] you were copying a game you'd seen other companies sell or a listing printed in COMPUTER & VIDEOGAMES.

It's not that people didn't care about copyright. Many companies would put copyright or other warning messages on games which traded on other people's intellectual property.  The inlay, above from Silversoft's game Starship Enterprise is a good example, as is Mikro-Gen's Star Trek. The name. The cover art. The instructions, which mention Klingons and stardates. These were all regarded as free range ideas. They grew wild to be plucked by anyone who saw them. It seems like every software company had a version of Star Trek in the same way every company had a version of Donkey Kong or Space Invaders or Pac-Man.  What was the worst that could happen? It's not like Atari was going to come to the UK and start suing everybody.

A few people flat out made unauthorised Hitchhikers games (in one case a company made what can only be described as an unauthorised officially licenced game) but mainly what you see are people borrowing elements to drop a reference and add a little flavour to a scenario or advert. The way Douglas Adam's ideas get used is a different to the way Star Trek was used as a genre. Let's start with Fantasy, as they were one of the seeds for this article. This is the instructions to their first game The Pyramid: 

The original answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the universe and everything was 42 but many aeons have now passed since Deep Thought produced that magical number. Ever greater and greater mega-computers have come and gone since then with no further advances being made - that is, until Ziggy came along.

Ziggy was both very inquisitive and very ambitious from birth. At the age of three months he decided that his life's quest would be to solve the puzzle once and for all. Instead of turning to the much tried computer, Ziggy decided to search for clues back in history and spent his 200 years of adolescence plugged into the memory banks at the offices of the Encyclopaedia Galactica.   

See what I mean? Sensibly Fantasy didn't put any of this on the box or adverts, they saved it for the instructions which would only be read by people who had brought the game. The instructions for their next game, Doomsday Castle, also mentions the Encyclopaedia Galactica but more interestingly the riffing on Douglas Adams' ideas leaks out into an advert. 

You can see Fantasy grow in confidence as they pluck ideas from the Hitchhikers universe. It's a bit like watching someone wade into the sea. Cautiously at first. Then a bit deeper. Then a bit further out. And then getting out of their depth. In theory, Fantasy should have been able to get away with calling their big Christmas 1984 game The Backpacker's Guide To The Universe. It's clearly a parody. It evokes the original but is different. The problem was, Fantasy were unlucky with their timing. The fourth Hitchhikers book So Long, And Thanks For All The Fish was released on 9 November 1984 almost the same time that Backpackers turned up on shop shelves. Worse, Backpackers was released just before Infocoms' officially licenced adaptation of Hitchhiker's Guide. It's unlikely Backpackers would take any of the market for Hitchhikers but the Douglas Adams literary management team was also probably a bit more sensitive because of an embarrassing event a year previously. 

PERSONAL COMPUTER WORLD
July 1981 page 154

Back in 1981, Bob Chappell fancied writing a game for the Commodore PET based on The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. He wrote to Pan Books and asked their permission. Pan Books wrote a letter back and said yes, as long as they and Douglas Adams were credited. So that's what Bob Chappell did. He later sold the game and, more importantly, his letter of permission to a company called Supersoft. They started selling Hitch-Hikers 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 and converted it to the Commodore 64, with versions for the VIC-20 and Dragon 32 to follow from Audiogenic. And then, in 1983, Douglas Adams' agent Ed Victor signed a contract with Columbia Merchandising. The contract covered a film script Douglas Adams was writing and included the rights to make a computer game. The Supersoft game was then brought to Ed Victor's attention and a lot of people realised simultaneously that what Pan Books had done was a terrible way to do business. Solicitors got involved and the case was settled before it went to court. Pan Books paid the legal fees for both Douglas Adams and Supersoft. This is as close as you can get to an admission of liability without actually saying "we cocked it up, sorry."

PERSONAL COMPUTING WORLD
October 1981 page 123

The upshot was, Fantasy ran the advert at the top of the page and said they would change the name of their game to Back Packers. They then almost immediately went into liquidation and the problem went away.

Just before Bob Chappel's version, there was also an unofficial game called Galactic Hitchhiker which might also be the oldest published UK text adventure, beating by about six months the first instalment of Brian Howarth's Mysterious Adventure series for Molimerx. Galactic Hitchhiker was advertised from October 1980. It was a Bored of the Rings style parody trading off the Hitchhikers name and style and written for the CompuKit UK101 - basically just a circuit board with a keyboard hanging off it.

Only slightly later, September 1982, is this advert from ACORN USER issue two. It's for a company called Computer Concepts and there are some familiar concepts listed under the advert for a game known simply as Adventure 1.

That just about wraps it up for games based directly on the Hitchhikers series. I mentioned at the start of this article how once I began looking, I seemed to keep falling over companies borrowing freely from Douglas Adams. Here's another one, found originally by Iain Mew for his Super Chart Island series and posted on his Bluesky feed. It's an advert from Galactic Software, who later became Codemasters.

POPULAR COMPUTING WEEKLY
7-13 July 1983 page 21

Betelgeuse... Ultra Froody... there's two but the main references to Hitchhikers that caught my attention were "Colours that range from infra dead to ultra violent". That's virtually a direct lift from the text of the third Hitchhikers book Life, The Universe And Everything [3] which was less than a year old when this advert was printed. Granted, the advert is a stew of references. It also features Star Destroyers and rebel forces, but the Star Wars films are so well known their use here is more like dropping a brand name. No one's going to buy a game expecting to see the colour infra dead, or to learn what an Urk does when disguised as a pangalactic gargleblaster but it catches your attention if you are in the know. The same can be said of the advert for Molimerx's 1981 game Space Eye, in the June/July 1981 issue of YOUR COMPUTER [4], in which you "take the part of a Vogon space commander." Or indeed the companies Megadodo Software, of Sutton Coldfield and Deep Thought Software of Uxbridge. Or, for one final example, Where Am I? by SF-Soft, an adventure game so obscure it doesn't seem to be listed on Spectrum Computing. The game, by A O'Sullivan, is about an astronaut trying to get back to their home planet Eroticon VI; home in Hitchhikers of Eccentrica Gallumbits.

The use of all these different words and phrases from Hitchhikers reminds me of the way fans choose usernames on forums or named fanzines. It's sending up a flare -I like this and I hope you do as well. It's just unusual to see it being done in a commercial environment because fandom is usually a non-profit thing [5]. The other thing fandom tends to be is semi-professional and all these references and borrowings occur mainly in the 1980-1984 period when the UK software industry was itself semi-professional. Before people realised that copyright was something that applied to other people's ideas as well as their own. It's appropriate the release of the official Hitchhikers game at the end of 1984 largely marks the end of the software industry's semi-professional period, when companies realised there was more money in an official licence than a knock-off and also the point when the licence owners realised the value of what they held and started to crack down on illicit use. Hence the letter to Fantasy Software which started this article. It all goes to make me wonder if the 1984 Atlantis Software game Vagan Attack started out as Vogon Attack before having its vowels shifted.

I'm sure a few nudge-nudge references to the Hitchhikers series made it through into other games and if you know of any please send them to whereweretheynow@gmail.com. Likewise leave a comment if you are A O'Sullivan and want to pass on more information about your game Where Am I? I am on Bluesky @shammountebank.bsky.social

[1] Although the December 1982 edition of PRACTICAL COMPUTING claimed the Oric-1 was named after Orac.

[2]  Obviously the name recognition helped. The BBC repeated the series virtually continuously in the UK from 1969 to 2002, and you could still catch repeats all the way up to 2007.

[3] The bit with Agrajag, the unfortunate bloke who Arthur Dent keeps killing accidentally throughout space and time.

[4] This more or less neatly coincides with the BBC1 repeat of The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy television series.

[5] Says the guy who drives round the country looking for the offices of old software houses. Have you seen the cost of petrol recently?