Infocom’s Unreleased Sequel to Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: A Look From the Inside

It has been a long time since I had something worth posting here, so I hope I don’t disappoint with what I think is an utterly fascinating story. Yesterday, Andy Baio of Waxy.org posted a story reminiscent of a game archaeologist’s dream that he pieced together from internal e-mails, design docs, and prototype builds all culled from a network drive image of Infocom’s shared network hard drive. Yes, someone made an image of the “Infocom Drive” before splitting from the company in 1989 and has kept it safe for all these years. Revealed on the hard drive are (quoting Andy):

design documents, email archives, employee phone numbers, sales figures, internal meeting notes, corporate newsletters, and the source code and game files for every released and unreleased game Infocom made.

So why does this matter? Because he went through the drive and weaved together the tale of why Milliway’s: The Restaurant at the End of the Universe was never completed nor released. If you have not played the excellent Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy IF game (designed and created by Steve Meretzky and Douglas Adams) you’re missing out on a crucial piece of computer game history and a damned fun (difficult!) game. I’ll let Andy tell the story, except for two points:

1. It tells the story of a venerable game company in decline; crisis even. Being 1989, Infocom had already merged with Activision and Milliway’s had been languishing since its inception in ’85. The company closes with not a bang…
2. It comes with a playable prototype of Milliway’s (!!)

Comments from the ex-Infocom folks on the story seem to agree with some of Andy’s story, however it is quite clear that there is more to this than meets the eye. It will be interesting to see what comes of this in the following weeks, as it quite clearly has ruffled a few feathers – and for good reasons.

Thankfully Jason Scott’s new documentary, Get Lamp, is scheduled for release some time this year. I suspect that his own exploration into the world of interactive fiction, complete with interviews of major designers and programmers, should be just as utterly fascinating just as his epic BBS: The Documentary was.