Milliways: Infocom's Unreleased Sequel to Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Andy Baio at Waxy.org, found himself in possession of a complete backup of Infocom's shared network drive from 1989.
He describes it as a treasure chest documenting the rise and fall of the legendary interactive fiction game company
, and in amongst the the archives are details of Milliways: The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, the unreleased sequel to Infocom's The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
The links below you can download the file and the emulator necessary to run the game:
Milliways: The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
Java Emulator for PC
Java Emulator for Mac
Read the original article it quite lengthy but fascinating. I particularly like this idea from the original design notes:
For example, the game could begin with the parser introducing itself to the player, asking the player to type a few sentences to "warm up" the parser, before getting on with the story itself. The parser could take on a personality, explaining that this is its first job, that it means well but it may not succeed. Perhaps it gets depressed and refuses to work at all. Perhaps the parser is in fact Marvin's new aural interface module, depressing him even further
It seems the collision of a creative mind and bureaucracy terminally delayed the project, ironic that shortly after Hitchhiker's was released, Douglas Adams proposed making Bureaucracy instead.
Milliways: Infocom's Unreleased Sequel to Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy