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Douglas
Adams was born on March 11, 1952 in Cambridge, England.
Little is known
about how much of a nuisance he might have been to his elementary
school teachers, but his refined sense of humor was already
alive when he graduated from Cambridge's St.
John's College, where he was a member of the "Footlights
Club," a starting pad for many of Britain's comics.
His performances
on stage brought him to working for radio shows, which eventually
led to the birth of the famous "Hitchhiker's Guide"
in 1978, when he and a friend persuaded BBC
4 to let him do a science-fiction series. In the meantime
he had also worked for "Monthy
Python" and was a script editor for the "Doctor
Who" TV show.
"Hitchhiker's
Guide" turned out to be a gigantic success and was not
long after transformed into a series of bestselling novels,
which Douglas is now best known for.
In the early 80's
the success ot the books naturally spread to the US and among
the fans were the people from Infocom. Vice versa just at
that time Douglas found out about Infocom adventures and concluded
that if there was to be a computer game based on his novels,
he wanted it to be done by Infocom. Marc
Blank later recalled in an interview with Commodore Power/Play
magazine: "Imagine our surprise when Doug Adams walked
in one day and said he's been playing our games for awhile
and wants to work on one. We were totally floored."
Chosen to team
up with Douglas was Steve
Meretzky, based on his previous experience with science-fiction
themed adventures. To work together was quite a challenge,
as Steve was in Massachusetts and Douglas in England. Eventually
the two connected their computers through the Dialcom network
and started to exchange emails. Later Steve also flew in to
England, to hold another meeting with Douglas in person. The
game was finally finished in 1984.
The result of this
hard work was an adventure
that baffled and made laugh hundreds of thousands of people.
"With most of the games, I was very much aware of the
fact that they were written by computer people who had branched
out into writing," Douglas recalls about other computer
game companies in the above interview, "I wanted to be
one of the first to come from the other side of the tracks.
While I was writing the game, I frequently had the feeling
'I don't think anybody's ever done this before.' It's very
exciting working with this new medium, and I'll be pursuing
it further."
There indeed were
talks about another "Hitchhiker" game and actually
one had been in the making, but it never got finished - the
heroes are up to today still standing on the planet Magrathea.
Instead the next collaboration between Douglas and Infocom
came in 1987 with "Bureaucracy,"
a delightful adventure about Douglas' own experiences with,
well, bureaucracy.
After that Infocom's
and Douglas' ways parted, but Douglas was still interested
in the interactivity of computer games. While writing more
books (including the "Dirk
Gently" series) and collecting even more fame (countless
awards roam his bookshelves), he in 1998 came up with "Starship
Titanic," a graphical adventure on a large scale.
Though it might
appear that Douglas' life was only based on humor, he also
explored the more serious of its elements. Evidence to this
was given when in 1990 he cooperated with zoologist Mark
Carwardine on a book about endangered species: "Last
Chance to See."
Douglas Adams died
in 2001.
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