<extralore>**Starship Titanic Extra Lore**
At the heart of our Galaxy, an advanced civilization of which we know nothing has built the biggest, most beautiful starship ever: the Starship Titanic.

The Starship Titanic was conceived and designed as the most luxurious Galacticruiser ever built.

On its maiden voyage, the biggest, most beautiful, most technologically advanced interstellar Etherliner ever built unexpectedly crashes.

Into your house.

You find your way on board. It is like no alien spaceship you have ever imagined. It most resembles a mixture of the Queen Mary, the Ritz, the Chrysler Building and Tutankhamen's tomb, with Venice thrown in for good measure.

As you enter it you quickly discover that you are not alone. The ship is inhabited by a crew of malfunctioning robots and a semi-deranged parrot. What has happened here? What's going on? Well, why not ask the crew? You will find that they talk. And talk. And talk. And talk...

The robots are brought to life by a proprietary interactive language engine called SpookiTalk. You have not encountered anything like this before in any kind of game. It is truly revolutionary. When you talk to any of the characters, SpookiTalk enables them to respond with one of over 10,000 pre-recorded lines of dialog. The more you talk to them, the more they will respond and the more you will learn. The effect is uncanny. That's why it's called SpookiTalk. (UncanniTalk didn't work well for us.)

You'll meet Marsinta Drewbish. She's the rudest receptionist this side of Sarkibarst V. However, you have to deal with her because as a third class passenger you will quickly find yourself in the grip of one of the most powerful forces known to modern man: the desire for a free upgrade.

Then there's the Fentible, the gracious, charming and completely forgetful Doorbot. There's Nobby the hypocondriac Liftbot, there's Fortillian the semi-mendacious Barbot, and then there is the Parrot. There is no adequate warning to prepare you for... the Parrot.

Can you unravel the mystery of what terrible events have occurred aboard the Starship Titanic? Can you solve the problem of Titania whose strange brooding statues dominate the ship? Can you take control of the ship and navigate it back to Earth before the Parrot drives you finally and irrevocably mad? Only if you're very, very clever.

Can you have an enormous amount of fun trying? Absolutely.

**The Personal Electronic Thing**

To play the game, you will need your PET.

Your Personal Electronic Thing is a marvel of future technology which appears at the bottom of your screen. The PET allows you to communicate with characters, collect objects you find around the ship, control devices remotely, and keep track of where you are and where you've been. (It also interfaces with Real Life. Might be handy one day, you never know.)

**Meet the Bots**
The DoorBot
The first Bot you're likely to meet as you board the Starship Titanic is Edmund Lucy Fentible, DoorBot extraordinaire.

Amiable, charming and trustworthy, Fentible's personality (purchased and scanned at enormous expense by Starlight Lines for their exclusive new collection of Bots with "Genuine People Personalities") was ideal material for the luxury liner's first point of contact. You will find his manners impeccable, his discretion unequalled, and his calm cool and collected.

Except during the occasional bout of forgetfulness.

And then of course there are those rather unnerving mood swings... 

The BarBot
Fortillian Bantoburn O'Perfluous's personality has run bars all over the galaxy, but like most members of the Blarghish race he remains stubbornly and romantically Blarghish: one day he's going to return home to Blarghland and buy a little pub out on the stormy west coast.

Most of the time he's charming and funny. Friend, guide, sporting encyclopedia -- he's the perfect barman. So what if he's got a nice line in whiplash insults and a resourcefully economic way with the truth..? 

The DeskBot
The Starship Titanic's ultra-efficient ReaLife® Superior Class DeskBot, GPP Marsinta Drewbish, is a desk-clerk like no other. Witheringly condescending to the lower classes, ingratiating to VIPs, Marsinta maintains the delicate sociohierarchical ecobalance on board ship. If you have a snowball's hope on Sol of getting an upgrade, she's the one you'll have to convince.

And heaven help you if you're caught with a complimentary shampoo at check-out time... 

The Succ-U-Bus
Normally you get paid when you donate your personality. When Shorbut Sweet offered his, they told him not to worry, they'd take it away for free.

Given Shorbut's work history, becoming a Succ-U-Bus is a promotion, but it hasn't gone to his head: he hates his work, he hates life, he hates being disturbed. He does like sleep and chickens. Nobody knows why... 

The LiftBot
Like all lift operatives the galaxy over, Nobby was once an old soldier. He's no longer sure which war he fought in (he's seen so many action movies he gets confused), but he knows he did because he came home without an arm. Nobby's had every illness in the book and is determined to let you know the details.

Travelling with Nobby is torture unless you have a deep interest in military history or the secret workings of the body... 

The BellBot
When Starlight Lines bought Krage Koyotoal IV's personality to install in the BellBot, they couldn't have made a bigger mistake. You're only supposed to have your brain scanned once, but Krage's real-life original has found a way to do it once a week, using the money to finance all sorts of dodgy habits.

Krage's idea of heaven would be driving an open-top down an ocean highway, surfboard on the back, babe-bot in the front, six-pack in the cooler, and one of those romantic lime-green sunsets melting on the horizon... 

The Maitre d'Bot
D'Astragar "D'Astragaaar" D'Astragar is descended from an ancient family, renowned in their quadrant as top-flight maitre d's. Interestingly, the clan has also produced more than its share of ruthless assassins. It has, D'Astragar notes, occasionally been possible to combine the two in one job, though he hastens to add that he is on board the Starship Titanic solely in his role of cuisinier, not that of lethal and merciless killer.

Nonetheless, it would be wise to think twice before sending back the soup... 

**Chat**
Welcome To Starship Titanic Chat

Welcome to the Starship Titanic chat forums. Here you may meet and greet other players of this fine virtuality experience, engage in idle banter, pursue the elusive art of conversation, and perhaps even pick up some helpful hints as to what to do next. Be warned that in these forums you may see 'spoilers'. What are spoilers? Well, they are things like "If you give the dog to the parrot he will give you all the objects you need to complete the game." You see? So if you want to solve the game all on your own, you may prefer not to enter the chat forums.
There are 3 separate forums - one for each class of passenger aboard the Starship Titanic. Each forum has its own specific rules as explained by the capable crew of the Titanic.

SGT Forum - introduced by G. 'Nobby' Nobbington-Froat, Liftbot

2nd Class Forum - introduced by Mr. A. Parrot

1st Class Forum - introduced by D'astragar (D'astragaaar) D'astragar, Maitre D'Bot 

SGT Forum

Liftbot G. 'Nobby' Nobbington-Froat guides us through the do's and don'ts of chatting in the SGT class chat room.

"As any of you wot was military men will know, Rules is Rules, and it is my sworn duty to appraise your good selfs of the correct behaviour in the Super Galactic Traveller quarters and mess hall. And, I need 'ardly hadd, if any of you wossnames steps out of line, I'll have you up on a charge quicker than they obfuscated all the long-handled hairbrushes after that business with the Roedean 3rd Light Auxilliary Horse-Riding Reserves, if you follow my drift. So, without further ado, because you never want further ado - oh, no. That was what caused old Blimper Goodchimes all that trouble when he was our temporary assistant part-time trainee stand-in tea-boy when we was fighting the henemy at the Battle of Reborzo Hill. "Blimper," I says, as a class F 'screamer' missile plunged into our fighting pit which was only 4 foot by wossname, "the last thing we need is further ado." And without further ado, poor old Blimper sustained a direct hit from the screamer, which I need 'ardly point out to you military men, was an hincendiary device, and it reduces poor Blimper almost instantly into a pile of ash, most of which fell into the regimental teapot he had just put down at his feet. Still, waste not, want not, we always said, and as we remarked during our next hofficial break period, the one thing you could say about Blimper was, he made a lovely cup of tea. But I'm gettin' ahead of meself. Without further ado, here are the rules:

    Rule 1 is on a 'need-to-know' basis.
    Rule 2 is still being drafted.
    Rule 3 is on a charge, on account of its giving the C.O. too much lip.
    Passengers must not interfere with the regimental goat.
    Passengers with an authorised medical report of Asgon's Tregeriasis will be excused Vacuum Practice.
    The use of watermelons is deprecated." 
	
2nd Class Forum

The friendly Mr. A. Parrot gives us some kernels of information about how to merge seamlessly with the flock of 2nd class passengers.

"Squawk! What the bleedin' hell you asking me for? I'm a parrot! Parrots don't have rules! Parrots break rules! That's what we're here for. Birds aren't supposed to talk - parrots bleedin' well talk! That's one rule broken for a start. You could try asking a Great Crested Grebe, but you'd be there all bleedin' day, waiting for them to stop prancing around on the water. Stupid floppy things. Give the avian kingdom a bad name, they do. Not like parrots. Parrots are the uncrowned kings of the avian domain, and no mistake. Only trouble is, those flea-bitten Swans take all the credit. Bloody Swans - hate'em. Swanning around the place like they own it. Wouldn't have happened in my day. I used to come here when it was all just fjords! Wreerk!
Well if you're desperate for rules, buster, here are my rules for being a parrot:

    Any chicken you find is my chicken! Don't give it to that horrible green monstrosity. It's my chicken - MY chicken, all right?
    Squawk!
    And the same goes for any pistachio nuts too - they're all property of yours truly. You want a rule, you got one - all passengers must relinquish all pistachio nuts to me for immediate scoffing! Wraark!
    Vreeeerk! What do you think I am - some sort of addled Moorhen? Aaaarrk!
    And keep your bloody hands off my perch! It's mine! Gleeaaarrchk! Screeeeech!" 

1st Class Forum

D'astragar (D'astragaaar) D'astragar, Maitre D'Bot of the Starship Titanic's 1st Class Restaurant outlines the etiquette for 1st class passengers.

"Welcome, welcome indeed my most favoured guests, and, may I beg you in an unseemly and unworthy manner, listen to my exposition of the exquisite rules concerning the behaviour of all 1st class passengers in these delectable mechanical conversational areas! Poached Gorilla for Table 12!

    There will be no fighting in these chat rooms. If you disagree, I will fight you!
    Passengers will please avail themselves of the many virtual snack opportunities that our naughty chef has prepared for your delight.
    A jacket and tie will be worn at all times. By myself, in fact. Is very suave, non?
    Chargrilled Water for the party at Table 4!
    No spitting, unless ordering the Reborzo Goat's Cheese.
    Frederick! Toasted Tachyons for Table 23 - quickly!
    There is no rule 7." 

**Box Art (Back)**

“Possibly the most bizarrely imaginative game yet”
-—PC Gaming World (UK)

“The game itself is complex, involving,
deliciously absurd and hilarious”
-The Daily Telegraph

STARSHIP TITANIC
A NEW ADVENTURE GAME FROM
DOUGLAS ADAMS
CREATOR OF
THE HITCHHIKER’S GUIDE
TO THE GALAXY

“...a master at creating futuristic scifi puzzles, para-
doxes, and other logical perplexities...”
—Computer Life

At the heart of our Galaxy, an advanced civilization of which we
know nothing has built the biggest, most beautiful starship ever,
the Starship Titanic.

Majestic and luxurious, its interior resembles a mixture of the Ritz, the
Chrysler building, Tutankhamen's tomb and Venice. Starship Titanic is a
technological marvel. And it cannot possibly go wrong.

In theory.

Seconds into its maiden voyage it crashes into hyperspace, vanishes...
... and collides with your house.

Bewildered, you find your way aboard, and just as you are gazing at
its awe-inspiring interior, the ship takes off again and heads deep into
space. You are stranded. But you are not alone...

The ship is inhabited by a crew of malfunctioning robots and a semi-
deranged parrot. You discover that you can communicate with them,
a feat that is made possible by SpookiTalk, the game's proprietary
interactive language-ergine. You can chat with any of the robot
characters, like Fentible the distinguished Doorbot, Nobby the
hypochondriac Liftbot, or Fortillian Bantoburn O' Perfluous the
outrageously convivial Barbot. Talk to them. Interrogate them. Give
them orders. They will list to you, answer you and, if they happen
to feel like it, obey you. Sometimes.

To begin with, you are a third ciass passenger, and you quickly find
yourself in the grip of one of the most powerful forces known to
modern man, the desire for a free upgrade. As you move up to second
and at last to first class, more and more of the ship becomes accessible
to you, and more and more of its mystery unravels. What has
happened here? What terrible events occurred the night before the
launch? Who is the mysterious Titania whose brooding statues dominate
the ship? Can you solve a series of increasingly bizarre and surreal
puzzles, unlock the central mystery and return to Earth before the
parrot drives you finally and irrevocably mad?

Features:
* All original interactive characters and game design by Douglas Adams
* Stunning cinematic interiors from the Oscar®-winning design team of
Oscar Chichoni and Isabel Molina
* SpookiTalk — a cutting-edge, natuural language text parser, enabling
complex and entertaining conversations between the player and
the game's characters.

**The improbable voyage of Starship Titanic, the 1998 Douglas Adams video game filled with ‘unhinged’ chatbots**
Tasked with the ‘impossible,' the designers created one of the most puzzling games ever.

Douglas Adams originally devoted just half a page to eulogizing Starship Titanic in the tenth chapter of Life, The Universe, and Everything. A “sensationally beautiful, staggeringly huge” cruise liner resembling a “silver Arcturan Megavoidwhale,” the luxury ship did not even complete its first radio message—an SOS—before its “Improbability Field” engine prototype triggered a “sudden and gratuitous total existence failure” shortly after launching.

It was one of many in-world anecdotes scattered through the third part of the late sci-fi author’s revered “trilogy in five parts,” The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Over 17 years after its publication, most readers had probably forgotten about Starship Titanic. In 1998, however, the ill-fated intergalactic cruise liner’s tale suddenly expanded to include a video game featuring tens of thousands of lines of scripted dialogue, hours of vocal performance recordings, and a standalone 223-page novel written by Monty Python’s Terry Jones. But Starship didn’t just become an immersive puzzle game—like its “majestic” literary inspiration, its underlying prototype software is now both the stuff of legend and a premonition of our surreal, AI-saturated present.

An ambitious, if not impossible, project

“We knew that what we were doing was impossible,” software engineer Jason Williams admits to Popular Science.

It’s hard to imagine a time when a major literary publishing house felt confident shelling out $2 million for an experimental video game based on a bit of nerd novel trivia. But in 1996, Adams somehow convinced Simon & Schuster this was the future of entertainment. By that point, the writer was no stranger to embracing various mediums and technology to tell his stories—his 1978 Hitchhiker’s Guide BBC radio series adaptation was the first comedy program to ever be produced in stereo, and he helped craft a text-based video game from the original novel in 1984. Adams remained interested in the potential for “new media” storytelling throughout the next decade until the 1994 release of the now classic puzzle-based video game, Myst.

Although intrigued by the gameplay mechanics and puzzles, Adams ultimately felt Myst’s world was too empty due to its lack of characters and storyline. He soon envisioned a similar game taken a step further. Or, as Willaims explains, a gargantuan leap into uncharted waters.

“We had to build 14-and-a-half hours of responses to be able to have even basic conversations with people, because you had to anticipate everything they might ever ask,” Williams says.

Designed within Adams’ newly launched multimedia studio, Digital Village, Starship Titanic’s plot hinges on the eponymous cruise liner crashing into your house after undergoing a “Spontaneous Massive Existence Failure.” After being essentially kidnapped, a player must beat the game’s already maddeningly difficult point-and-click puzzles through help and hints from a diverse cast of robot crewmembers (and one loudmouthed parrot). But you don’t receive these tips and clues by selecting from a set of predetermined, multiple choice dialogue options like so many of Starship Titanic’s many contemporaries. Instead, you need to actually “talk” to the characters through a messaging portal. Type out a question, and bots provide one of the over 10,000 lines of pre-scripted, fully voiced answers with almost no lag time.

“It was a very complex piece of software, very ambitious” Williams admits.

Williams’ department logged hundreds of hours creating a completely new natural language parsing engine from scratch, dubbed SpookiTalk. Unlike the recent explosion of modern large language model chatbots, parsers such as SpookiTalk aren’t probabilistic. Programs such as ChatGPT devote massive computing power to analyzing a human’s text input, then calculating the most likely response composed of a string of letters and spaces that a user reads as a complete statement. Parsers like SpookiTalk, on the other hand, flag any discernible keywords in a user’s input, then match them to a (hopefully) applicable, pre-written response. In Starship Titanic’s case, it managed this across a three CD-ROM set totalling just 2 GB. While an unheard-of size for video games in 1998, that’s nothing compared to today’s titles—or what Google AI Overview requires to come up with a (glue-tainted) pizza recipe.

At the end of the day, SpookiTalk’s smoke-and-mirrors often fell short of approximating actual artificial intelligence.But in some ways that matched the game’s overall tone, especially when attempting to chat with the Starship Titanic’s unwieldy crew. That’s because Adams—not one to ever keep ideas simple—didn’t want in-game conversations to follow what most sensible people might consider normal logical trains of thought.

Starship Titanic’s plot involves solving the mystery of who sabotaged its sentient navigation system named Titania. So, it made sense that the saboteur went the extra mile by also frying every other robot’s cognitive settings. This, as one bot tells the player in the beginning of the game, means everyone on the ship has gone “a little doolally,” resulting in sudden shifts in mood, cognitive capabilities, and functionality.

“Even looking back now and having worked on a lot more games, the craziest idea was that each of the bots had five different levels of response,” remembers co-writer Neil Richards. “I’m not sure anybody really appreciated that instead of having [around] seven bots, this was now a game with 35 bots in it… it just sort of spiraled.”

“I’d actually forgotten about that,” Williams says with a grin.

“It wasn’t even really a gaming industry project. It was a bunch of TV execs and [similar] folks who wanted to explore the internet and interactivity in gameplay,” says Emma Westecott. “I think all of us across the whole team were naive about what [would be] involved.”

An uncanny experience

Starship Titanic was one of Westecott’s first professional projects after graduating college. Now an associate professor of game design and undergraduate department chair at Ontario College of Art and Design University (OCAD), she says her time working on the release’s gameplay was one of her favorite career experiences because of the freedom to experiment with completely new gaming frameworks and ideas.

“One of the things I realize [now] is that we didn’t consider the players at all, really. I would say I don’t think we could get away with that these days, right?” she laughs.

While Westecott’s team toiled on crafting the ship’s wholly unique animations and artwork, Williams’ department continued with SpookiTalk. After over two years of work and numerous release delays, a much-hyped Starship Titanic finally made it to store shelves—hilarious, smart, and packed with top-tier voice performances from the likes of Monty Python alumni, John Cleese and Terry Jones.

And yet the critics and players of 1998 were, to put it mildly, confused. Initial reviews were largely lukewarm, and sales numbers reflected similarly. “[A]n exercise in tedium and frustration for all but the most tolerant adventurers,” IGN said in its 4.9/10 review. CNN conceded the game to be a “zany, fun ride” while opining “it would be nice if the AI’s gave you more clues and remembered previous conversations,” betraying a fundamental misunderstanding of SpookiTalk’s capabilities.

In hindsight, Starship Titanic is arguably one of the most delightfully absurd, yet notoriously difficult and obtuse, video games of all time. It’s true that, despite being lovingly designed, SpookiTalk simply can’t hold up to a human player’s inputs beyond the most basic questions and instructions. Even then, the unhinged robots’ reactions would quickly deteriorate into nonsense thanks to their predesignated “Fuck Off Point,” as Richards coined it.

The “DoorBot extraordinaire,” Edmund Lucy Fentible, for example, would invariably exclaim “Memory failure! Memory failure!” after a handful of interactions. From there, Fentible remained terse, morose, and essentially useless until the player readjusted his “Cellpoint Settings” in the robot control room. Krage Koyotoal IV, your concierge BellBot, frequently would respond to questions with “I’m not going to answer that. Don’t feel like it,” even with allegedly healthy Cellpoint Settings. The talking parrot, with a distinct lack of Cellpoint Settings, generally either berated you and squawked.

Such experiences were so frustrating to players that later copies of the game would include a 120-page walkthrough strategy guide. Without it, as one writer warned in 2006, could result in “ripping out half your hair because you didn’t know that a… parrot enjoys eating brazil nuts instead of walnuts.” (For the record, the parrot prefers pistachios, not brazil nuts).

The main problem, like so many of today’s AI sales pitches, came down to overpromises. Starship Titanic’s official (still somewhat functional) website called the experience “truly revolutionary” and “uncanny,” while claiming that players “have not encountered anything like this before in any kind of game.” Some of the more patient players may have taken the time to experiment with SpookiTalk’s parameters and learn its conversational limitations. But for many others, they came away confused, if not annoyed.

The way [Starship Titanic] was promoted, it was, ‘Hey! You’ve got robots! You can talk to them and you can say anything you like,’” Williams remembers. “Techie people might have gone, ‘I know what the technology is capable of, and what they’ve done is amazing. But you also know the average person on the street is going to say, ‘[But] they said I could talk to a robot…’ They had to really understand the restrictions that were there just because of the technology of the day.” But according to Digital Village alumni, the general public’s lackluster response didn’t phase them at all. Instead, they were thrilled at how much they managed to accomplish in such a comparatively short time. 

“We knew we were trying to do something that actually wasn’t possible at the time,” Williams says. “We were trying to get as close to that as we could with the time and capabilities that we had.”

“I don’t remember any disappointment,” Richards says, while Williams remembers that, if anything, he came away “incredibly excited about the future.” Westecott, meanwhile, calls her time at Digital Village the “first really inspiring experience” of her career.

‘There is nothing like her in the universe…’

Over 25 years after its release, there is now a satisfyingly Adams-eque irony in Starship Titanic’s legacy. We live in an era when seemingly every major Silicon Valley company promises increasingly wild and wondrous AI-powered products. But even with exponentially massive amounts of computing power, many offerings continue to spout absolute nonsense that makes Starship Titanic bots sound well-adjusted. Nearly every month features yet another CEO debuting an AI “Ship That Cannot Possibly Go Wrong,” only to have it almost instantaneously succumb to a new version of “Sudden Massive Existence Failure.”

Meanwhile, Starship Titanic has not only avoided the dustbin of video game history; replays now offer a new and emotional experience thanks to the fundamental humanity and joy within every aspect of its design—the beautiful 3D art deco environment designs overseen by Academy Award-winning husband-and-wife, Oscar Chichoni and Isabel Molina, the joyous voice acting from comedy legends, and the relationships borne from building the game itself. Even decades later, Richards repeatedly describes the Digital Village team as an adopted family, and regularly keeps in touch with many of them, including Williams and Westecott. For years, some of the game’s most diehard apologists even continued an in-world online roleplaying campaign on the game’s official website forum—a portion of which is still live today.

The very end of a player’s misadventure through Starship Titanic sees them successfully return to their (still ruined) house. Once there, they receive a video transmission from the cruise liner’s architect, Leovinus, played by none other than Douglas Adams himself, whose brief monologue is all the more poignant now—the author suffered a fatal heart attack in 2001, barely three years after his game’s debut.

“Building this ship was my dream and now that dream is over… Thank you for restoring Titania. I know she isn’t real. Well, she’s ‘real,’ which is not ‘really real,’ if you see what I mean,” he deadpans before revealing that, by the galactic laws of salvage, the ship—its mercurial robots, its ambitious design, and its many endearing quirks—now belongs to you.

“There is nothing like her in the universe. I wish you joy…,” Starship Titanic’s creator tells you.

**Wikipedia Page**
Starship Titanic is an adventure game developed by The Digital Village and published by Simon & Schuster Interactive. It was released in April 1998 for Microsoft Windows and in March 1999 for Apple Macintosh. The game takes place on the eponymous starship, which the player is tasked with repairing by locating the missing parts of its control system. The gameplay involves solving puzzles and speaking with the bots inside the ship. The game features a text parser similar to those of text adventure games with which the player can talk with characters.

Written and designed by The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy creator Douglas Adams, Starship Titanic began development in 1996 and took two years to develop. In order to achieve Adams's goal of being able to converse with characters in the game, his company developed a language processor to interpret players' input and give an appropriate response and recorded over 16 hours of character dialogue. Oscar Chichoni and Isabel Molina, artists on the film Restoration (1995), served as the game's production designers and designed the ship's Art Deco visuals. The game's voice cast includes Monty Python members Terry Jones and John Cleese. A tie-in novel titled Douglas Adams's Starship Titanic: A Novel was written by Jones and released in October 1997.

Starship Titanic was released to mixed reviews and was a financial disappointment, although it was nominated for three industry awards and won a Codie award in 1999. It was re-released for modern PCs in September 2015 by GOG.com. 

Gameplay
Starship Titanic is a graphic adventure game played from a first-person perspective. The player moves on the eponymous ship by clicking on locations indicated by the cursor and advancing to the next frame after a blurred transition (although this can be avoided by holding down shift during clicks).[1] The mouse can also be used to pick up and store items in your inventory and interact with onscreen objects.[2] In the beginning of the game, the player is given a device called Personal Electronic Thing (PET), which serves as a toolbar on the bottom of the screen. The PET has five modes: Chat-O-Mat, a text parser through which the player can talk with characters by inputting text; Personal Baggage, the inventory in which the player can add or withdraw items; Remote Thingummy, a set of functions to interact with objects and locations; Designer Room Numbers, which indicates the player's current location; and Real Life, an options menu with settings and a game save/load system.[3]

Much of the gameplay involves solving puzzles by using items with other items or with objects and characters onscreen.[4] Another significant aspect of the game involves talking with characters in the game, namely the bots that work in the ship and a parrot, by inputting prompts in the Chat-O-Mat mode. Additionally to conversation with characters through interpreting of user input, the parser often provides hints or explanations that come in the form of pre-recorded speech, which can help the player in progressing in the game.[5]

The main objective of the game is to locate the missing parts of the ship's broken intelligence system in order to repair the starship. In order to advance within the game, the player must upgrade from the standard third class level to first class and thus gain access to areas that are restricted when the game begins.[6][7] The game also requires the player to transport items throughout the ship through the Succ-U-Bus, a system of tubes that transfer objects placed in them to other parts of the ship; these tubes can be found in many areas of the ship.[4][7] The player also needs to use the parrot to solve certain puzzles.[8] A talking bomb can be found in the game and unwillingly armed by the player; if that happens, the player has to either disarm it or distract it during countdown to prevent it from exploding.[9][10] 

Plot
Starship Titanic begins in the player character's house on Earth, which is partially destroyed when the eponymous cruise ship crash-lands through the roof. Fentible, the "DoorBot", informs the player that the ship and its crew have malfunctioned and needs help to get them back to normal. Once the ship is taken back to space, the player meets Marsinta, the "DeskBot", who makes them a third-class reservation, and Krage, a "BellBot". The player begins the journey as a third-class passenger and thus cannot access many areas of the ship that are reserved for higher class passengers until he or she obtains a second-class promotion and eventually convinces Marsinta to upgrade them to first class after managing to alter her personality.

Through backstory in the ship's email system, the player learns that Brobostigon and Scraliontis, two associates of the ship's creator Leovinus, double crossed him and deliberately provoked a "Spontaneous Massive Existence Failure" by hiding the body parts of the ship's humanoid intelligence system Titania in various locations within the ship as well as planting a scuttling bomb, in an effort to destroy the ship and profit from its insurance. However, both men perished in the attempt with the player finding their dead bodies on the ship. After exploring the vessel and solving puzzles, the player eventually finds all of Titania's body parts and awakens her, repairing the sabotaged ship and allowing for it to be navigated. The player then accesses the bridge and navigates the ship back to their home on Earth. Throughout the game, the player meets other bots, including Nobby, the "LiftBot", Fortillian, the "BarBot" and D'Astragaaar, the "Maitre d'Bot". The player also meets a parrot that accompanies them throughout most of the journey.

After returning to Earth, the player gets a message from Leovinus (played by Douglas Adams) who announces that he has decided to retire on Earth as a fisherman and to find a wife. Depending on if the bomb was disarmed, one of two endings occurs:
-    If the bomb wasn't disarmed, the ship takes off and explodes in midair.
-    If the bomb was disarmed, the ship simply takes off and the player is informed by Leovinus that, by galactic salvage laws, they now own the Starship Titanic.
	
Development
Background

Douglas Adams first imagined the Starship Titanic in Life, the Universe and Everything, the third entry in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series, where it is briefly mentioned in the book's 10th chapter. Adams describes the ship—named after the famous ocean liner—as a "majestic and luxurious cruise-liner" that "did not even manage to complete its very first radio message—an SOS—before undergoing a sudden and gratuitous total existence failure".[11][12]

Before making Starship Titanic, Adams had previously served as a designer for Infocom's 1984 text-based game The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which was based on his successful science fiction series of the same name,[13][14] and had been an advocate for "new media".[15] Since working with Infocom, Adams had expressed interest in returning to game design, and feared that he was spending too much time by himself writing.[16][17] He turned to game design again after playing Myst, which is when he said "the medium had gotten interesting again".[16] However, he thought Myst was lacking in story and characters.[18] Commenting on the gameplay of Myst and its sequel Riven, Adams said that "nothing really happens, and nobody is there. I thought, let's do something similar but populate the environment with characters you can interact with",[17] and hoped to combine graphics and a text-based system that allowed for players to converse with characters in the game.[19]

In 1996 Adams co-founded The Digital Village, a company intended to handle his future endeavours in film, print and new media.[20] Adams first discussed founding the company with Robbie Stamp, a producer at Central Independent Television in the early 1990s, and they did so along with Stamp's boss at Central, Richard Creasey; literary agent Ed Victor was also one of the company's founders. Ian Charles Stewart, one of the founders of Wired, joined the enterprise shortly thereafter.[21] In December 1995, The Digital Village arranged a deal to raise seed capital from venture capitalist Alex Catto, who bought 10% of the company's shares for £400,000.[22] In 1996 Simon & Schuster Interactive reached a deal with the company to finance Starship Titanic, whose budget was estimated at $2 million.[23]

Development of the game began Summer 1996.[24] Around 40 people worked on the game's development.[16] 

Writing
The story was created by Adams, who wrote the game's script with Michael Bywater[16] and Neil Richards.[25][26] Additional dialogue was written by D. A. Barham.[26] Adams's inspiration for the game—particularly the objective of upgrading from third to first-class—came from an experience with airline ticketing personnel, where he was told he would be given an upgrade from economy-class tickets upon checking in for his flight, but found out upon arrival that the upgrade had not been arranged; he said the idea is based on the premise that "everyone wants a free upgrade in life".[15][27] Adams had devised a story concept to add an additional gameplay element where players would be able to enter the ship's data system as a "full realtime, flyable environment" and control how information flows through the vessel, but the idea was abandoned because, according to Adams, it was "a bridge too far".[28]

Adams aimed to develop a text parser-based dialogue system as opposed to the drop-down conversation menus of contemporary adventure games, in which player have limited dialogue options.[28][29] The text parser includes over 30,000 words and 16 hours of dialogue recorded by voice actors.[17] According to Adams, over 10,000 lines of dialogue were recorded for the game.[16] In order to make conversations with characters convincing, The Digital Village's Jason Williams and Richard Millican created a language processor called SpookiTalk, which was based on VelociText, a software developed by Linda Watson of Virtus Corporation.[26][30] Producer Emma Westecott thought the processor was preferable as common text-to-speech programs "made the voices sound cold and distant". Douglas Adams claimed that they made "all of your characters sound like semi-concussed Norwegians".[31] The bots in the game understood around 500 words of vocabulary and were capable of conversing with the player as well as each other. According to Westecott, the developers' intention was "getting into characters" and cited games such as Myst and Mortal Kombat as contemporary games that lacked "proper interaction" with human characters.[32] Williams and Millican modified VelociText into SpookiTalk in order to improve recognition of complicated sentence forms from players, as well as reducing repeated responses, and retaining a character's memory of an object or topic as a conversation progresses.[30][33][34] Additional dialogue support was done by linguist Renata Henkes.[35][26]

Design
The futuristic, Art Deco visuals were designed by Oscar Chichoni and Isabel Molina, who also worked on the 1995 Oscar-winning film Restoration.[36][37] Chichoni drew the initial sketches of the ship on a flight to Los Angeles on the day he and Molina joined the project.[38] Adams described the ship's interior design as a mixture of the Ritz Hotel, the Chrysler Building, Tutankhamun's tomb and Venice.[17] In order to make the design of the ship similar to Art Deco, Molina and Chichoni drew inspiration from 1950s American electrical appliances and modern architecture; to design the ship's external shape, they also drew from bones and dinosaur skeletons.[39]

Adams, Chichoni and Molina gave detailed briefings for the animators for each environment and character in the game.[40] Modeling and animation for the 30 environments and 10 characters was done on Softimage 3D, version 3.5. Most environments were done separately. However, the center of the ship in particular also included other environments as it connects the first and second class canals, the top of the well and the central well; Darren Blencowe was responsible for modeling the ship's center.[41] A total of six 3D artists worked on the game.[32] Rendering was done on Mental Ray; in order to complete the rendering in time, the team's systems administrator wrote a Perl-based software to control all rendering jobs for up to 20 processors working 24 hours a day.[38] In order to animate the parrot, Philip Dubree, one of the team's animators, visited pet shops and studied macaws for inspiration. Dubree created a skeleton and modeled the wings and feathers, later adjoining the body. He also scanned photos of macaw features and used Photoshop to incorporate those in the parrot's textures.[41] In order to create Titania's statue at the Top of the Well, animator John Attard built the 3D model as a refractive metallic structure and texturized it with streaks of oxidation on her face; Attard used the Statue of Liberty as a visual reference.[40]

Programming was done on The Digital Village's own developed engine, Lifeboat.[32] The engine was developed by programmers Sean Solle and Rik Heywood, who joined the company in January 1997.[42] Their intention when developing Lifeboat was allowing simultaneous work on different parts of the game, facilitating game test runs and unifying the work of coders and 3D animators. The engine went live on 14 February 1997. To keep within a data budget of 1.8 gigabytes, the team used the MP3 sound format to compress the 16 hours of speech and dialogue, and compressed movies and cutscenes with Indeo. The final set of the game CDs were burned 400 days after the first build of Lifeboat.[35] 

Reception
Starship Titanic received generally mixed reviews. Review aggregator GameRankings gives the game a score of 63.79% based on 19 reviews in the website.[68] Charles Ardai of Computer Gaming World gave the game two and a half stars out of five, praising the graphics and visuals as "gorgeous", but criticizing the playability, the bots' responses in the text parser, and ultimately thought that the game is "just not very funny".[71] Adventure Gamers's Evan Dickens similarly praised the graphics and "beautiful" animation, but criticized the navigation and the parser, writing that the bots "won't understand or respond correctly to a single thing [the player asks]", and called it an "antiquated keyword-recognition system". He also described the puzzles as "contrived and unnecessary".[72] IGN reviewer Chris Buckman gave the game a 4.9/10 score, criticizing the lack of a backstory, the movement sequences and navigation, and the obscurity of the puzzles.[73] 

Writing for PC Gamer US, Stephen Poole called Starship Titanic "an uninspiring and ultimately tedious adventure." He criticized the parser as unhelpful and thought there are few characters to interact with, although he praised the puzzles as "involved and challenging" and compared them to those of classic adventure games.[74] David Wildgoose of PC Powerplay gave the game a 71% rating, writing that the parser is "a refreshing change to the predictable keyword or menu conversation systems" of most contemporary games, and praised the difficulty of the puzzles. However, Wildgoose thought the game was "a bit of a disappointment", believing that it should have been longer and expected it to be funnier.[75] In a review for Computer Games Strategy Plus, Cindy Yans gave the game three and a half stars out of five. She also criticized the parser for failing to understand context in conversations, and called the navigation and item usage "cumbersome"; however, she praised Adams's humor, the animations and graphics.[76] CNN's Brad Morris praised the game overall, but compared its graphics unfavorably to contemporary games such as Riven and Zork Nemesis, and said that "it is not a revolution in this genre".[77] Stuart Clarke of The Sydney Morning Herald praised the graphics and the game overall, but said players will "do much scratching of the head and aimless wandering in circles before the mysteries of the Titanic are solved".[7] GameSpot's Ron Dulin gave the game a 7.1 score, criticizing the lack of a story but praising the humor, graphics and the presence of a text parser as "a nice nod to the days of old".[78]

Next Generation praised the text parser and wrote that as the game progresses, "it's impossible to get anywhere" without asking the bots questions, adding that "the humor of the answers alone makes it worth asking questions".[5] Paul Presley of PC Zone gave the game a score of 91%, praising its atmosphere as "totally absorbing" and commended it for its humor and presentation as well.[79] Alex Cruickshank of PC Magazine called it a "pleasantly entertaining adventure" and praised the graphics, gameplay and puzzles.[45] Reviewing the Mac version, Mike Dixon of MacAddict gave it a positive review, praising the graphics, the recorded dialogue and the humor, whilst giving minor criticism to the interface.[6] Entertainment Weekly's Megan Harlan gave the game an A, praising the parser and the ability to converse with the bots, as well as their responses.[37] In a Computer Shopper review, Jim Freund wrote the game "provides many hours of enjoyable game play" and suggested that it might be "a milestone in the annals of interactive fiction".[80] Writing for USA Today, Jeffrey Adam Young rated it three and a half stars out of four, calling it a "hilarious blend of Monty Pythonesque humor and zany wordplay in a sci-fi setting" and praising it for its characters and script.[81] New York Daily News reviewer Kenneth Li gave the game three and a half stars out of four, calling it "breathtaking" and praising the storyline; however, he offered minor criticism towards repetitive replies in the text parser.[82] Joe Brussel of Adventure Classic Gaming rated the game four stars out of five, writing that the puzzles are "entertaining but not too hard" and praised the voice acting and graphics, although he wrote the story is "a little shortsighted".[83]

The game received two nominations for the BAFTA Interactive Awards in the categories of Comedy and Interactive Treatment in October 1998,[84] and was nominated for PC Adventure Game of the Year at the 2nd Annual Interactive Achievement Awards.[85] Likewise, the editors of The Electric Playground nominated Starship Titanic for their 1998 "Best Adventure Game" award, which ultimately went to Grim Fandango.[86] However, it was given a Codie award in 1999 for "Best New Adventure/Role Playing Game" by the Software and Information Industry Association.[87]

**Hidden Rooms, Robots & Cut Content**
Unused location voice line for the "Grand Axial Canal, Second Class". You can never enter this area in the game, and there are no videos for it. 

- Room #57 	Canal 	Empty 	You thought this was used, didn't you? But in fact, the end of the Grand Axial Canal First Class is internally called Arboretum despite the fact you can't go past the gate that leads to the actual arboretum. This unused 'Canal' room may therefore be referring to the Second Class canal, which is weirdly off-limits at all times regardless of your class in the final game. It appears to be the very last room in the game, so it's probable it was cut due to time constraints, given the game was behind schedule. It has no nodes, and it doesn't look like much, if any, work was done. The 397 Beta prototype does not appear to have this room, or at least the RoomXX.txt files cap at Room56.txt. 
- Room num 32 does not exist. The Embarkation Lobby has an unused exit to this room in addition to the exits for the Service Elevator and the Top of the Well. The Embarkation Lobby exit data to this room is: "_EXIT,2,3,N,32,3,N", which appears to be the same as the exit data for moving from the Embarkation Lobby to the Top of the Well, except with room 32 in place of room 36.
- For Beta 397: The second class axial canal has no click target, and the omnipresent text about passengers being unable to enter has not been implemented yet. Very sadly the symmetry breaking wall opposite the Pellerator is still there in this build, and this time does not even include a "There is nothing to see here, honestly" click target message. This may imply that the wall was always intended to be just that, a wall, and the message was added to prevent players from assuming it important. Ironic, considering this only added to the mystery of this wall in the final game. What the early\alternate pellerator seen in the final game was for then, is still a mystery.
- Another potential hidden room behind the "There is nothing to see here, honestly" wall on the opposite side of the pellerator at The Top of the Well. There is video footage showing an unused prototype pellerator, maybe it's from that.
- Unknown Room: Inside a used video is a clip that the game never plays of an unused room containing six unlabeled buttons. It can be seen, just for a moment, at 0:14. It has the same door, a similar size, and the same amount of buttons as the Pellerator. From the reflections on the door and the video that the clip is in, this room would have been at the Top of the Well, although the door opening sequence may simply be a quick cut-and-paste placeholder due to the way it is presented. It's worth noting that there is a mysterious wall on the opposite side of the Pellerator, breaking the otherwise perfectly and purposely symmetrical design of the Well, that taunts you if you tap on it. From the reflection on the door, this room might have been accessible there once, but note that if you look carefully, the wall can be seen still in place in the very same video (though this wouldn't be the first time early and final footage are found side by side in a single file). The level select screen uses a still image of this room to warp you to the final Pellerator in the prototype. 
- There is also a portrait for an unused bot. Interestingly, the unused bot can be seen in a sketch of some of the game's NPCs found in the First Class In-Flight Magazine. The prototype contains a text file which preserved the original file name for those two portraits. In the prototype, the portraits are saved under the names "y1314.tga" and "y1304.tga", which were originally titled "smchatter.tga" and "chatter.tga" respectively. This makes it likely to be the "ChatterBot" character referenced by some unused executable strings. See also this unused audio file. Judging by the relative height of this character compared to the others in the sketch, it would have always been below your viewport's height, so what the bot was ever intended for and how you would converse with it remains a mystery. Oddly, Maitre D is not present in this icon set, though the prototype DOES have one for him in that set.
- Starship Titanic: Beta Release, 397. The title screen marks the build date as February the 2nd, 1998, but has many differences to the final. The game claims that TrueTalk (the chatbot engine used by NPCs) has 'logging' enabled, but it's currently unclear where, if anywhere, these logs are saved. "a ChatterBot" The FileMap.txt in this prototype answers a question posed both by this prototype and the final build, specifically, who was the removed robot whose only surviving assets lay with the set of old small PET portrait icons used in this build? The original title for those graphics are "chatter.tga" and "smchatter.tga", from the "charactors" directory (typo included). This confirms him to be linked to a 'talking to' string found in the final game refering to him as a ChatterBot. 
- The "ChatterBot" mentioned by Parrot potentially appears to be the "BuffBot" mentioned by Fentible. Small, with 2 legs, appears to be a simple cleaning droid that was cut from the game. "ChatterBot alert! Beware" -> The Parrot can't comment on bots entering the room! ChatterBot would apparently have been mobile just like Krage and Fentible. Additionally, with this being so close to related lines for the DoorBot and BellBot, ChatterBot is obviously not an early name for one of them, but a third robot entirely.
- There is also a "BimBot" mentioned by Krage, not sure if that is the same as ChatterBot/BuffBot, or another idea that was cut, but it's implied to be about as small.
- Unused Key PRODUCT_KEY=LifeBoat.exe Part of the value.shl text file found inside the _user1.cab InstallShield cabinet. LifeBoat was the name of the engine designed for Starship Titanic, but all retail and beta builds known ship with the executable name ST.exe, even the one in the installers data1.cab cabinet. Weirdly, an identical duplicate ST.exe is also found in that cabinets ReadMe directory.
- DoorBot "EVIL TWIN": If you have at least one save file, launching the game will open a restore dialogue. On this dialogue, right click one of the DoorBot's eyes and his portrait will be replaced with this. The file name for this portrait is "EVILTWIN.BMP". [evil face, able to shoot lightning from hand]

**Unused Character Strings (ChatterBot)**
Bundled with the "Talking to" strings, e.g. "Talking to the DoorBot" where "Talking to" and "the DoorBot" are separate strings. In this case, the PET would have read "Talking to a ChatterBot". This seems to be a removed character. The PET still appears to have code to be capable of displaying this message, presumably assuming you could enter a conversation with them.

The Parrot has an unused line referencing the ChatterBot as probably being a bot with the ability of free movement throughout the ship, potentially similar to Fentible and Krage, rather then a bot confined to one room like Fortilian or Marsinta. This strings reference seems to be between the Barbot and the Bellbot.

There is a portrait and related sketch for an unused bot nearer the top of the page, and the prototype lends evidence that directly links these two things, the name and the portraits, as being the same character.
3PetSmlChatterbot
sm_chatter.tga

Bundled alongside the names of most of the other game's characters and in the same text formatting as them (3PetSml). The Maitre'D is not present in this batch of names.

As for the TGA filename, the filename can be found in one of the pet graphic blocks of the default save file, and is related to ChatterBot. Should link to this unused graphic, but the final game uses obfuscated filenames, while this reference is using the original filename as found in the prototype's FileMap.

Indeed, a PET graphic filename for the BellBot found directly above this one in the same file is "z#720.tga", the first letter referring to the archive in which the numbered file, be it a jpeg, a TGA, a WAV or MP3 that the save file is trying to find can be located. This could imply ChatterBot to have been scrapped very early, even before the game's prototype, as his portrait file name didn't get updated along with this new naming convention.

ChatterBot has not had any functionality discovered left over in the final game at this time. 

Oh, very clever. View source. See all the funny hidden stuff.
Look, nobody likes a smartass.

[b]Scrapped 'Notes' Item[/b]
Some unused voice lines in the final hinted towards a scrapped 'Notes' item in the game. Well, here it is. These two images appear to be the only further information on this item in this build. There's, sadly, no larger version of the actual note, making it impossible to read. It seems this item was scrapped before even this build.

They are referred to simply as "note1.tga" and "note2.tga" in their order of appearance here, by FileMap.txt. 

https://www.tcrf.net/images/e/ec/SST_Beta397_y1858.png

**Starship Titanic: Beta Release, 397**
This is a prototype with a currently unknown origin, curiously dated just eight days before the final games EU release date (although there is some confusion on the final game's EU release date, so this may not be entirely accurate). While the prototype is mostly planned out by this point, there is a lack of general polish seen in the final game. Also showing a few alternate puzzle solutions, bugs, and a few early versions of or entirely unused assets.

The title screen marks the build date as February the 2nd, 1998, but has many differences to the final. The game claims that TrueTalk (the chatbot engine used by NPCs) has 'logging' enabled, but it's currently unclear where, if anywhere, these logs are saved.

A text file titled "Created.txt" is put into the game's root directory after install, containing the following text: "Created : Monday, February 02, 1998 (17:58)" 

Contents
    1 The Answer
    2 FileMap.txt Oddities & Contextual Details
        2.1 Leovinus Sculpture
        2.2 PET Classes
        2.3 "a ChatterBot"
        2.4 Early Setup Application
            2.4.1 Autorun Dialogue
            2.4.2 Setup Splash Screen
        2.5 Unused or Different to final Images\Video Stills
            2.5.1 Parrot
            2.5.2 Early Maitre'D Arms
            2.5.3 Scrapped 'Notes' Item
            2.5.4 Items
            2.5.5 Miscellaneous
            2.5.6 PET Portraits
            2.5.7 Early PET Assets
                2.5.7.1 Early PET Remote-Thingummy Portraits
            2.5.8 Early Night Sky Photo
            2.5.9 Elevator PET Mode
            2.5.10 Early Cursors
            2.5.11 Starmap UI
        2.6 Scene Differences
        2.7 Unused\Different Videos
            2.7.1 Miscellaneous
            2.7.2 The Bomb's Speaker
            2.7.3 Fully Animated Orchestra
            2.7.4 Players' House Television
            2.7.5 Outro Movie
            2.7.6 Boarding the Titanic
            2.7.7 The Parrot
    3 Level Select
    4 Beta '397' VS Final Differences
        4.1 General
        4.2 Your Personal Electronic Thing (PET)
        4.3 Your Lovely Home
        4.4 The Service Elevator / The Pellerator / Stateroom Lifts
        4.5 The Bilge Room
        4.6 Moonlit Embarkation Lobby
        4.7 The Embarkation Lobby
        4.8 The Top of the Well
        4.9 The Bottom of the Well
        4.10 The Ballroom \ Parrot Lobby
        4.11 Titania's Chamber
        4.12 SGT Lobby \ SGT Class Staterooms
        4.13 Second Class \ Second Class Lobby \ Second Class Staterooms
        4.14 Sculpture Chamber
        4.15 Creators Chamber
        4.16 The Restaurant
        4.17 The Bar
        4.18 The Succ-U-Bus
        4.19 The Bridge & The Ending

The Answer

In the assets folder, there is a single file titled "y1916.xxx". The FileMap.txt says that it was originally called "answer.xxx". It contains a sequence of bytes that appear to spell out (using hexadecimal digits, not ascii) 16 instances of 42, five instances of "C0 FF EE", and another ten 42s. This file did not survive to the final game's files.

It's also exactly 42 bytes large.
FileMap.txt Oddities & Contextual Details

There's a text file in the game's directory called "FileMap.txt". This file lists all of the original game asset filenames and their original path before being moved into the game folder and renamed to the less human readable codes used in both this prototype and the final game. It therefore offers invaluable clues as to the purposes and context surrounding said assets.

Notable examples from the file are described below.
Leovinus Sculpture

According to the FileMap.txt, the sculpture of Leovinus (which is actually a 3D scan of Douglas Adams head) was originally titled "ugly_bastard.avi". How lovely.
PET Classes

The file structure and references from the FileMap imply that the idea as to having unique PET graphics for each class had already begun to be implemented, but no unique graphics have been designed at this point.
"a ChatterBot"

The FileMap.txt in this prototype answers a question posed both by this prototype and the final build, specifically, who was the removed robot whose only surviving assets lay with the set of old small PET portrait icons used in this build? The original title for those graphics are "chatter.tga" and "smchatter.tga", from the "charactors" directory (typo included). This confirms him to be linked to a 'talking to' string found in the final game refering to him as a ChatterBot.
Early Setup Application
Autorun Dialogue

An earlier setup autorun application. Very similar in function to the final, and already has support for selecting up to three CD drives for disc swapless gameplay. 

An early or place-holder splash screen.
Unused or Different to final Images\Video Stills
Parrot

Unknown still image that doesn't fit anywhere, the parrot is normally fully animated at all times.
Referred to as "carryparrot.tga" by FileMap.txt.

SST Beta397 y1910.png
Early Maitre'D Arms

Included is what appears to be a very crude placeholder arm, presumably for Maitre'D. It's next to the unused notes item below in the files, interestingly. One of his arms may indeed be holding some notes, instead of the key as in the final. There is a graphic for one arm holding the Green piece of Titania's brain, though this is technically 'used'. It appears floating in the restaurant and can't be picked up. Because you can't get the key in this build (as far as we know, anyway), you can't complete the music puzzle and release the grip on Maitre d'Bot's arms, thus, you cannot see the graphic of the empty opened hand.

The image of the used arm is included here anyway since it seems to differ somewhat from the final one.

y1844.tga, the crudely drawn arm, is referred to as "testarm.tga" in FileMap.txt.

SST Beta397 y1851.avi-1.png SST Beta397 y1851.avi-2.png SST Beta397 y1851.avi-3.png SST Beta397 y1881.png SST Beta397 y1844.png
Scrapped 'Notes' Item

Some unused voice lines in the final hinted towards a scrapped 'Notes' item in the game. Well, here it is. These two images appear to be the only further information on this item in this build. There's, sadly, no larger version of the actual note, making it impossible to read. It seems this item was scrapped before even this build.

They are referred to simply as "note1.tga" and "note2.tga" in their order of appearance here, by FileMap.txt.

SST Beta397 y1858.png SST Beta397 y1857.png
Items

Mostly early renders with weird lighting and bad transparent edges. There's also a strange yellow gradient block in here, which the filemap refers to as the "musickey.tga", making it an early Music System Key graphic.

SST Beta397 y1847.png SST Beta397 y1862.avi.png SST Beta397 y1863.png SST Beta397 y1859.png SST Beta397 y1874.avi.png SST Beta397 y1903.avi.png

SST Beta397 y1890.avi-4.png SST Beta397 y1890.avi-3.png SST Beta397 y1890.avi-2.png SST Beta397 y1890.avi-1.png

SST Beta397 y1912.png SST Beta397 y1911.png SST Beta397 y1913.png SST Beta397 y1914.avi-2.png

SST Beta397 y1843.png SST Beta397 y1848.png SST Beta397 y1855.png SST Beta397 y1915.png

SST Beta397 y1882.png SST Beta397 y1883.png SST Beta397 y1888.png SST Beta397 y1899.png SST Beta397 y1873.png SST Beta397 y1861.png SST Beta397 y1891.png
Miscellaneous

SST Beta397 y1872.png

Originally titled "liftlight.tga", and was found in the 'objects' folder.
PET Portraits
Hmmm...
	To do:
Using final game assets for this section, mostly. They should be identical and are unused in both final and in this proto, but I want to make a note to triple check this.

This prototype makes use of most of the alternate PET portraits found left over in the final game, but it only uses the smallest versions, rendering the higher res versions unused both in the final and this prototype. Only the ones unused to this prototype are listed below.

StarshipTitanic z.st.726.png StarshipTitanic z.st.735.png StarshipTitanic z.st.736.png StarshipTitanic z.st.737.png StarshipTitanic z.st.738.png StarshipTitanic z.st.739.png StarshipTitanic z.st.740.png StarshipTitanic z.st.741.png

StarshipTitanic z.st.727.png StarshipTitanic z.st.732.png SST Beta397 y1310.png

That said, both portraits for Titania and the ChatterBot are universally unused in any known builds.

In addition, there is an unused very small portrait for Maitre d'Bot, who was notably absent from this portrait set as leftover in the final game.
Early PET Assets

Some of these can be found in the final game, but they are more complete in this build. FileMap.txt confirms that these assets were used in an old PET design prior to this prototype.

The purpose of many of these individual assets can be extrapolated from the original filenames in FileMap.txt, and will be detailed below. If cross-referencing the asset filenames found on each image on this page with FileMap.txt yourself, please remember that assets for the PET were originally and predominantly found inside the "hiddenroom" folder, as the PET appears to actually be the so-called 'hiddenroom'. Items are also moved to the 'hiddenroom' while they are in your inventory.

SST Beta397 y1208.png

SST Beta397 y1211.png

SST Beta397 y1210.png

SST Beta397 y1209.png

Unhelpfully referred to simply as "panels", though presumably intended to make up the bulk of the interface background. Based on the final game's interface rules, the ones containing a slim separate box at the bottom would have that be where the player's input text shows up, with the larger 'whole' box being for other PET modes, such as the inventory.
The purpose of the one with empty space on the right of the (probable) text input field is unknown, as is the purpose for the smaller set of boxes.

SST Beta397 y1198.png SST Beta397 y1197.png

These arrows were for scrolling the text parser.

SST Beta397 y1203.png

Purpose unknown. Originally titled "skrew.tga". Presumably interface fluff.

SST Beta397 y1277.png SST Beta397 y1205.png

Originally titled "send_to_suc.tga" and "get_from_suc.tga". Related to Succ-U-Bus PET remote control functions.

Note please the baked in circle shape, very similar in appearance to "skrew.tga" above.

SST Beta397 y1221.png SST Beta397 y1222.png SST Beta397 y1223.png SST Beta397 y1215.png SST Beta397 y1216.png SST Beta397 y1217.png SST Beta397 y1218.png SST Beta397 y1219.png SST Beta397 y1220.png SST Beta397 y1212.png SST Beta397 y1213.png SST Beta397 y1214.png

The specific purposes for all of these arrows are unclear. Definitely a part of the PET graphics, some of the arrows appear identical in shape while varied in colour. This could be an indication of early passenger class PET changes, but this cannot be confirmed nor denied by the context offered by FileMap.txt.

They are all prefixed in original title by the word "obcon_", e.g obcon_right_03.tga.

y1221, y1222, and y1223 originally all contained the word "bot" in their title (e.g. obcon_bot_03.tga)

SST Beta397 y1272.png SST Beta397 y1273.png SST Beta397 y1274.png

Seems related to the Starmap interface at the end of the game.

SST Beta397 y1225.png SST Beta397 y1224.png SST Beta397 y1226.png

Purpose uncertain. Originally titled "mode_off.tga", "mode_on.tga", and "mode_none.tga" respectively.

StarshipTitanic y.st.375.png StarshipTitanic y.st.374.png

Originally titled "petclass1.tga" and "petclass2.tga" respectively. Presumably some kind of toggle light or button related to your current class.

SST Beta397 y1287.png SST Beta397 y1288.png SST Beta397 y1289.png SST Beta397 y1290.png

SST Beta397 y1201.png SST Beta397 y1202.png SST Beta397 y1199.png SST Beta397 y1200.png

Early graphics for the Designer Room Codes, or chevrons, that act as a "serial number" for each room in the game. In this early set, the red components would be for 'lit' (or 'on') chevrons, while the blue components would be for 'unlit' (or 'off') chevrons.
Early PET Remote-Thingummy Portraits

A collection of red wireframe versions of the icons used both in the SGT class room puzzle, as well as for certain other game functions. These were from an even earlier PET then the one used in this prototype, according to FileMap.txt.

This first set of images are stored together in a video, the frames of which have been extracted for presentation on this page. Said video (y1204.avi) has the metadata title of "sgtIc".
Its original filename as per "FileMap.txt" was "sgtpeticon.avi", stored in the hiddenroom folder that houses PET-related assets.

Interestingly, the video has a fairly early last modified date of 01/08/1997 18:40.

SST Beta397 y1204.avi-0001.png SST Beta397 y1204.avi-0002.png SST Beta397 y1204.avi-0003.png SST Beta397 y1204.avi-0004.png SST Beta397 y1204.avi-0005.png SST Beta397 y1204.avi-0006.png SST Beta397 y1204.avi-0007.png SST Beta397 y1204.avi-0008.png SST Beta397 y1204.avi-0009.png SST Beta397 y1204.avi-0010.png SST Beta397 y1204.avi-0011.png SST Beta397 y1204.avi-0012.png SST Beta397 y1204.avi-0013.png

The next images are stored separately as individual images.

SST Beta397 y1280.png SST Beta397 y1281.png SST Beta397 y1282.png SST Beta397 y1283.png SST Beta397 y1284.png SST Beta397 y1285.png SST Beta397 y1286.png

In order from left to right, the original titles for these images were:

control_tv.tga,

control_sub.tga,

control_pellerator.tga,

control_light.tga (note that only the First Class Stateroom lights can be remote controlled),

control_lift.tga (note similarity to the fourth button here),

control_doorbot.tga,

and control_bellbot.tga.
Early Night Sky Photo

This asset is actually used in this prototype, but the final game replaces its place in the Starmap interface with a frame from its inventory video instead. In addition, notice that this version of the photo is in the player's home while its lights are on. The only time the item is seen is after the Titanic crashes into your house, obviously destroying the overhead lighting in the process. The final game uses a very similar image for the actual item (instead of the starmap as in this prototype) as it sits on the mantelpiece, but with the lights in the room 'off' (destroyed).

This asset has a file date of 28/12/1997 12:42, making it a fairly early asset in lines with the unused PET interfaces above.

SST Beta397 y1275.png
Elevator PET Mode

Two versions of the PET button pane exists in the files, the used one, and the version below with an extra button filling in the whole vertical space allocated for PET mode buttons (third from the bottom).

The full original filename & path as per "FileMap.txt" was "v:\starship titanic\rooms\public\hiddenroom\3classpet\3iconsold.tga", while the one that WAS used in this prototype was called "3icons.tga".

This icon is basically identical to another unused icon found here. Based on the title of that unused asset, we can safely assume that controls for elevators would have had a dedicated PET mode, before being rolled into the Remote-Thingummy both in this prototype and the final build.

SST Beta397 y1380.png
Early Cursors

Some minor differences for the cursors, including a lack of up and down arrows (opting to rotate the left and right arrows instead), along with an early magnifier and egg timer.

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Starmap UI

Unused instructional text and two unused star lock lamp colours.

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Scene Differences

The alternate upgrade banner seen in the SGT class room. It doesn't properly fit the exaggerated CRT curves.
Beta '397' 	Final Release
SST Beta397 UpgradeProcessTV.png 	SST Final UpgradeProcessTV.png
Unused\Different Videos
Miscellaneous

Video files for an unused D-Pad like control for the PET, as well as an unused colour variation for the play button on the music room puzzle control panel. The music room button is present but unused in the final assets folder, too.

The D-Pad videos metadata has a title of "BUTTONS1.AVI", indicating it may have been intended as part of the Starmap.

SST Beta397 - y1370.avi.gif SST Beta397 - z209.avi.gif
The Bomb's Speaker

A curious unused loudspeaker with very cartoonish animations that seemingly can't be triggered in this build and is entirely removed in the final game. Presumably this would have been for a particular joke, or otherwise, it could have been intended for use in all of the Bomb's voice lines similar to how every other character has video files associated with speaking. It also intersects with the tumbler video files, which would have made it awkward to include both on-screen.

Fully Animated Orchestra

There's a fully animated video with closeups on Boppy Headcases band playing... something. The video doesn't quite sync properly with the final correct song in the game, and this video doesn't play at all in the prototype. Note that the video's resolution fits perfectly on a 640x480 screen when including the space taken by the PET, so it would have played in fullscreen. You also have to be recording the song to complete the puzzle properly, so a video that takes over your viewport isn't ideal.

Players' House Television

Surprise! The television set at the start of the game originally had several channels to pick from, with each clip below being chosen by using the arrows on the front of the TV, or your PET if you've hacked it enabled at this point. Switching channels repeatedly eventually bugs out the TV, causing it to loop midway into a single clip. Note however, the final two clips are NOT played in-game, presumably they were dummied out because of the use of renders aboard the Titanic as a backdrop, which makes little sense since you are still watching terrestrial television at this point. Presumably it was trimmed to save space, taking the file down from 15.4MB to 1.28MB.

Volume warning for the second clip of the beta video.
Beta '397' 	Final Release
	
Outro Movie

As noted in the differences below, the endgame after landing on Earth is in a very early state, and regardless of whether you disarm the bomb or not, will always play this slightly awkward looking clip of the Titanic collapsing and exploding, softlocking on the white screened end of this video forever.
Beta '397' 	Final Release
	
Boarding the Titanic

This video shows off an early door design inside the service lift that just fades to the final design once you've transitioned fully inside. The final clip was re-rendered with the final door design, but unfortunately the entire ship's keel unnaturally shifts around much more in the final clip when compared with the beta one.
Beta '397' 	Final Release
	
The Parrot

The parrot has a more detailed set of clips in this beta, including eating the chicken, and being, shall we say, displeased with a sauce covered chicken. It also includes the full cage background rather than using a transparency mask as the final does. In the final, the Parrot won't even try to eat a sauce covered chicken at all.
Also, it seems that the central intellegence core's camouflage was supposed to flicker only when the Parrot shifted on it. It seems to flicker more or less randomly in the final game, probably due to the separation of these videos.
Beta '397' 	Final Release
	
Level Select

A functioning version of the level select screen found in the final exists in this build, but it doesn't seem as though the item select and puzzle cheats screen has been implemented at this stage, since no images for it can be found. To access it, hold down CTRL + SHIFT while changing screen, and you will be taken to the so called "Cheat Room" instead of the expected node. Beware that your current state carries over to the new scene, so if you do this right at the start of the game, you won't have your PET unless you hack it enabled, nor will you have the photo of the night sky above your house (how nice), making the game unwinnable. As noted in the differences below however, that is a moot point, since you can never reach the credits in this build regardless.
Beware, going into level select while talking to Krage or Fentible may render you unable to resummon them again that save session.

The chicken doesn't seem to do anything.

SST Proto LevelSelect 1.png
Beta '397' VS Final Differences

A general listing of differences noticed between this beta and the final game.
General

    The chicken cooling system doesn't seem to be implemented yet.

    It seems as though Fentible has the most polished AI in this build, while the other bots may be more difficult to converse with. At least as long as he has his memory.

    For some reason you can drag some items onto Krage specifically and they will stay floating atop him. Fentible does not work for this. Leaving the node will leave the item floating on the node of the room you dropped it in. Using this method, you may drop items anywhere on the ship where you can summon Krage, and they will remain there until you come back for them.

    Entering an elevator will not automatically shift your viewport to Nobby, and so he will only begin talking when you manually look at him. Because of this, if you use the Remote Thingummy to control the elevator, it's possible to avoid speaking to him at all until you arrive.

    There appears to be no animation for elevators on mismatched floors arriving at your current location. Due to this, the system in which Elevator 4 randomly goes up and down is not present.

    The elevator floor indicator on the right of the main lifts is erroneously offset to the right.

    Many of the unused mechanical or physical sounds seen on the final game's unused audio page are used in this beta, but not in one specific place. Rather, a system that plays them at random is started the moment you board the ship's service elevator, and continues to play so long as you are onboard (The plinth intro cutscene pauses this system briefly, it starts again once you re-enter the ship.) The sounds are randomly chosen and have a seemingly random 3D audio position applied, likely using the game's QSound implementation, creating a slightly eerie feeling, as though another player were moving about the ship nearby. That said, the random nature of these sounds makes them feel disconnected from the area you're in, perhaps even becoming annoying. This randomness is also not ideal for slow CD-ROM drives or hard drives, and can easily cause a small stutter in gameplay as they are loaded. Obviously, this is not ideal when you are releasing a game with a minimum target of a 486 computer, which would almost certainly have a very slow optical drive and next to no hard drive space.

    The parrot's comments around the ship are absent. Some may consider this an upgrade.

    Some point and click nodes are misplaced or bugged, either taking you to the wrong place, or displaying the wrong icon.

    No cursor graphics exist for looking up or down, instead opting to use a rotated left and right arrow as a placeholder. There is no graphic for highlighting a button the cursor is hovering over; the final adds faux crepuscular rays around the cursor's point when hovering over a button. All cursors are either slightly or entirely different and can be seen above.

    The unavailable cursor is unavailable for most unavailable nodes, and as such only the PET informs you of some places your cursor says you can go, but cannot infact go. It does appear once in the SGT elevators, but funny enough, you can ignore it and go right on through to a nonexistent room.

    Television channels on the Starship Titanic are slightly different in this build. Chronologically specific instances will be documented here in their respective rooms, otherwise, more generic ones will be here. For instance, the unused mosquito channel seen on the final game's TCRF page is used in this build, only it has no specific trigger. It will instead always play on Titania's eye channel and loop abruptly. The video also suffers from interlacing issues.

Hmmm...
	To do:
Check if this door sound is used for anything in the final, it sounds familiar.

    Doors for the service lift, Embarkation Lobby, and top of the well make different sounds. This sound seems to play automatically upon the entrance to those rooms, even when entered via the Level Select. The earlier service lift door noted above when combined with this sound could imply that this door, and perhaps the others, were intended as sliding doors. There is discontinuity even in the final regarding doors, they can seemingly change size and type once you have gone through them and looked behind you, and this is the case with most of the doors in the game. That said, such a function is entirely scientifically possible within the game's canon.

    Krage's AI is less sophisticated, while it can often recognize what you're trying to convey, he isn't able to pull as many good responses, and so can't always tell you what room you're in, where your stateroom is, etc.

    Various bots splice lines together in a haphazard way that the final does not do so often, such as Krage appending "where they are." to a line that ended as "I'm not too sure" with each being separate recordings. Coincidentally, you can see that behaviour on the Level Select screenshot above, in the Chat-O-Mat panel of the PET. Bots are typically able to comment on other characters as in the final however.

    There doesn't seem to be an idle timer to automatically summon Krage or Fentible when loitering on the same node for a while, like the final has.

    Cellpoint indicator dials sometimes (but not always) vanish entirely if you are not talking to a bot, leaving only the dial background.

Your Personal Electronic Thing (PET)

    The PET graphics are entirely different, taking on a more blunted 2nd class silver style, with dull wooden accenting frames. The only thing left of this early pet in the final game are the chat box arrows, and the small versions of the Bots' icons, with the exception of the small Maitre d'Bot graphic present in this prototype, which did not survive to the final.

    According to the general file structure, the plan for altering the PET for each class had already begun to be implemented by this prototype, but no graphics for the other two classes had been introduced yet. The file structure and FileMap.txt suggest the PET graphics in this prototype were intended for SGT class, or 3rd class as many files refer to it as in this prototype.

    The Real Life mode of the PET uses basic icons, a black background with grey text, to represent the save functions. Additionally, the SOUND pane does not label the four volume controls, making them rather confusing, even though they are still fully functional. Two of the volume controls are vertical in this build.

    There are only three save files in the Real Life mode of the PET. Save files do not show up in the LOAD pane until you next launch the game or load a file, but are otherwise functional. There does not appear to be a text limit on save files, but while you can continue to type offscreen, some of your text may sometimes not display until you backspace some or type more letters.

    The mode selection panel has a different order of buttons, swapping Personal Baggage and Chat-O-Mat when compared with the final.

    Clicking off of an item in your Personal Baggage leaves half a glitched border around the previous item until you select it or something else, or change PET mode.

    There are no additional PET graphics for alternate classes. You get the one PET for the whole game.

Your Lovely Home

    If you hack your PET to become visible, the Remote Thingummy does not identify the television in the room, as the final build's one does.

    You can't do the early Fentible talk bug from the final game because your cursor doesn't appear soon enough.

    Classical Mozart music quietly plays in the background, rather then a track specifically composed for the game as in the final.

    The television at the start of the game has many other 'channels' in addition to Douglas' clip from the final, switchable by clicking the arrows next to the power switch that go unused in the final game. There are actually more channels in the video file this television uses than are shown in-game, involving footage of real people acting out various short skits using renders of rooms aboard the Starship Titanic as a chroma keyed background. These probably go unused in this beta because it makes absolutely no sense chronologically to have those backgrounds, be it on the television in the player's home, or aboard the Starship Titanic televisions with humans on-screen. The initial idea appears to have been to channel surf for a bit before Douglas' comes on telling you to get on with the game, but the final uses only Douglas' clip, scrapping the rest entirely. In addition, the channel swap buttons eventually bug out and get stuck on the 'C a t' channel. You can also use the channel buttons while the TV is off, which will play the television's audio without the video.

    The photo of the night sky above your house is erroneously titled as "Music System Key". It's actually impossible to get the real key in this prototype, so it's interesting that the string has already been implemented, even if it is improperly so.

    The unused gunshot sounds found in the final are used on one of the clips on this build's television.

    The computer in the Players' home has much larger click targets, being able to click anywhere on or near the computer to open the drive tray. You can also remove the disc while the computer is reading it, but this causes no ill-effects except to snap the tray to the closed position as the screen repositions for the Titanic's grand entrance into your modest abode.

    Compared to the final, Fentible seems more scatter-shot with his animations. He barely stays still.

Hmmm...
	To do:
Check if Fentible goes silent in final, pretty sure he doesn't.

    Fentible will not repeat his YES or NO question forever and will eventually go silent until you answer.

    You can get the picture of the sky above your house early. For some reason, you can also drop the picture onto Fentible, causing it to float atop him and slightly bug your PET's graphical state until you reach out and pick it up again. Leaving the item on top of Fentible and continuing to enter the ship causes you to lose the item forever for that game session.

    Fentible's cellpoint settings do not work during his intrusion into your home, and are stuck at zero on all three dials.

The Service Elevator / The Pellerator / Stateroom Lifts

    As above, Fentible's cellpoint settings do not function while he is in the lift with you.

    As you enter the service lift from your home, you'll notice an early version of the door inside for a moment before it fades into the final version of the door. The fact that an intentional fade was added here implies that the developers would have rathered not re-render the fairly computationally expensive video of entering the lift at this point, though they did eventually decide to re-render it for the final game.

    Though most video transitions in the game use a slightly lower detailed scene compared to the game's static images, the transitions with Fentible present in the service lift appear to use very slightly higher quality reflections compared to the static images in this scene. The sky outside is also darker, similar to the view outside your windows before your home is destroyed, while the static image is a fair bit brighter.

    Strangely, you are able to look around while in the service elevator for the first time with Fentible. Because his animations and the view outside of the ship are dynamic at this point, the transitions are slightly janky, probably why this function was disabled in the final game. However, even though he looks at the wall instead of the player, this build does have unique transition videos that include Fentible in the elevator.

    Entering the service lift from the lit Embarkation Lobby does not stop the music. It will abruptly end when entering the bilge room and loading its track.

    The pellerator sometimes bugs out when moving away from its control panel after pressing a button, showing a slightly offset positional view of where the game thinks you are in the pellerator.

    You can trigger the Pellerator announcers 'other side' warning multiple times, stacking them atop each other. There seems to be a hard integer limit on how many can be played at once.

    Sometimes after a journey in the Pellerator, if you turn around and choose the same location on the other control panel, you may go for another ride back exactly to where you already were.

The Bilge Room

    The Bilge Room appears to use a slightly different ambience, with a little less clanking and no dynamic echo.

    The longer you stay here, the more likely it seemingly is for random metal clangs to play, eventually becoming stacked on each other and sounding very unpleasant. It's conceivable the game might crash if left to this behaviour for a sufficient amount of time, but this is untested.

    For Mother, see: The Succ-U-Bus on this page.

Moonlit Embarkation Lobby

    Skipping the plinth introduction with ESC continues playing the introduction music until it ends.

    The top of the well door Easter egg is not implemented, and in fact the door does not appear to be a click target at all. Likewise, Marsinta's Easter egg is not implemented, the pet will still tell you off for ringing her bell but she will not say anything early. Her click target also appears to be larger compared to final.

    While facing the Service Lift from inside the Embarkation lobby, the left click target erroneously uses the right facing cursor, and weirdly snaps to the left facing angle without a transition, as though you had held Shift.

    The service lift door does not make a bang sound, but does register your click and tell you that it is not available.

    You may only go left or right from the service lift while facing out into the lobby, you may not move forwards to the centre as you can in the final. You can still move to the centre from this angle once the Embarkation Lobby has been lit up.

The Embarkation Lobby

    The node facing the lobby Succ-U-Bus is erroneously using the lower detail rendering settings used in the video transitions for the room, meaning no reflections.

    Marsinta uses a much quicker sign in process. In fact, after giving your name, you are immediately given a room. Afterwards, you will be dropped into a standard dialogue sequence with Marsinta. In the final game, Marsinta will, after a long questionnaire that has little effect on your actual room assignment, give you a room, then call Krage. In addition, if you turn away from Marsinta without saying anything while she is active, she will play a line of annoyance as to the fact that you just kind of walked off. Lines for this sort of behaviour exist in final, but they only play in the prototype. Doing this also causes the game to linger for a while before changing your viewpoint for some reason. The room assignment string is somewhat mangled, not placing spaces between each word (e.g. There's your room number.Elevator1Floor1Room1Good luck!Any questions?)

    The logic for assigning a random SGT stateroom seems to be either very buggy, or poorly seeded. It often fails to assign a valid room, instead giving out the game's default room code. Because this default 'room' apparently exists on Floor 1, which happens to be the Top of the Well, this may soft-lock the game.

    Responding to Marsinta's question about your reservation seems to immediately upgrade you to SGT class while printing the following message to your PET: You have been assigned 'Super Galactic Traveller' status

This message is never displayed in the final game.

    You can call Krage or Fentible either here or in the bilge room before signing in, but the function for them to tell you your room does not appear functional in this build. It would probably default to the game's standard Floor 1 Elevator 1 Room 1 setting in all likeliness however. If you call either one early, they will just appear after a few moments with no announcement requesting their presence. Indeed, anything involving Marsinta's voice is disabled until after you have activated her once.

    If you do decide to manually call Krage, he has a much shorter introduction: "Hi. The name's Krage. Spelt K-O-O-L."

The Top of the Well

    You have to use your PET to enter the elevators, as they will not open just by clicking on them.

    Looking down the well plays a rather disturbing ambience as in the final, but does not seem to stop the music. The final uses a chilling ambient music track that halts regular music while looking down. Looking up does nothing.

    The second class axial canal has no click target, and the omnipresent text about passengers being unable to enter has not been implemented yet.

    The four golden symmetrical chamber door nodes are really bugged out. Moving left or right from them almost never takes you the correct direction, as if someone quickly copied&pasted the nodes and didn't mirror them properly.

    Very sadly the symmetry breaking wall opposite the Pellerator is still there in this build, and this time does not even include a "There is nothing to see here, honestly" click target message. This may imply that the wall was always intended to be just that, a wall, and the message was added to prevent players from assuming it important. Ironic, considering this only added to the mystery of this wall in the final game. What the early\alternate pellerator seen on the final game's TCRF page was for then, is still a mystery.

    The music sometimes fails to play here.

The Bottom of the Well

    Like the elevators upstairs, the elevators down here cannot be entered with just the mouse and require use of the Remote Thingummy. However, more annoyingly, you cannot leave the up-close view of the elevators at the bottom of the well until you have called and entered it.

    You'll find LiftBot 4's head down here as normal, but you'll also find a crushed television set, since the system for Krage tossing it down the well has not been implemented yet. This ensures you can at least progress. It's possible at this point in development they had not even come up with the idea of making Krage toss the TV in the first place.

The Ballroom \ Parrot Lobby

    When you pick up the parrot, his icon in your inventory will be upside down. It is unknown if this is intentional or a bug. It appears as though he is not coded to immediately skip his timer and escape upon leaving the ballroom as he is in the final game, and will only escape on his timer\the player's screen transition count.

    When looking towards the back railing of the central well, the one opposite the second class canal, the right click target is bugged and always takes you left despite using the correct cursor.

    The real Parrots Perch is bugged and sometimes appears or disappears randomly. The grab cursor will always show when hovering over the Perch even if you have already taken it. You can put the Perch back for some reason. However, much of the time, you cannot take the Perch at all and will become soft-locked on the node looking at it (or the absence of it, as the case may be). In this event, you can't even load a previous game.

    There appears to be an alternative movement node between the stick and the entrance door that is unused in the final, possibly due to its ridiculously small click target. TODO: Is this unused? Check final video too and compare.

    The television here by default shows a static dark planet usually used in the channel transition. It vanishes if you turn the TV on and off again.

    You cannot get Krage to throw the television down the well, but fortunately for you, there's already a crushed television set at the bottom of the well, waiting for you. Small world, ain't it?

Titania's Chamber

    The fuse box click target is smaller, limited to the nameplates. Clicking anywhere else will just take you out of the fuse box.

    The yellow chicken fuse is not visible upon opening the fuse box, but is functional and present. You can click where it should be, which causes it to appear and float as an item until you manually pick it up and either place it or put it in your inventory. The red creators chamber fuse acts exactly the same and is present by default despite not being initially visible.

    The fuses are named differently in this build:

Yellow: Chicken dispenser bridging piece

Red: Suspension beam bridging piece

Blue: Fan bridging piece

Green: Season bridging piece

    The rotary switches do not flip back without a fuse like in the final game.

    The Missive-O-Mat e-mail system does not initially display the word 'Login', but otherwise functions as expected. It displays properly upon further uses.

    When looking at Titania, her intelligence core sometimes appears outside its slot, but cannot be interacted with. This happens regardless of if you have recovered it from the parrot or not. Clicking it, or any other part, causes the PET to display the test "It's some sort of slot".

    The bomb's count down is slightly quicker and freezes when doing video transitions. The final seems to move the countdown to an independent global variable that is not effected by transitions.

    The bomb has no lines for hitting the glass. TODO: Could have been a bug.

    The exit elevator leaves your view port reversed towards entry rather then exit, which can be rather annoying if you aren't paying attention, as you'll just keep accidentally clicking down back into Titania's Chamber.

SGT Lobby \ SGT Class Staterooms

    Music does not play in the SGT lobby for some reason.

    The Succ-U-Bus does not suck up the chicken from the malfunctioning SGT restaurant.

    You cannot read the SGT restaurant menu.

    The unknown object attached to the ceiling in the SGT lobby does not make a sound when clicked as in the final, and in fact, has no click target at all.

    While you can look up at the upper SGT rooms, clicking them does not give you the room number.

    You can enter any SGT room to partially trigger the upgrade process, rather then just your assigned room. However, this often just causes every SGT room, including your own, to get jumbled up and become very extremely broken. This may soft-lock you, making it impossible to retrieve the magazine from the drawer. Speaking of...

    In this build, you do not go to the Succ-U-Bus for the magazine, you simply open your drawer after watching the advert. This explains why the video file the drawer uses had the magazine on it in the final game, but could otherwise not be found in that context in the final. Sadly, you still can't seem to read it, so those close up images of the magazine are unused even here.

    The PET descriptions of each module in the SGT rooms is different in this build. They are as follows:
    Flowers: Say it with... , Folded bed: Un/folds the bed , Toilet: If you feel the need , Closed drawer: Operate the drawer , Television: Operate the television , Settee: Relax in comfort , Unfolded bed: Un/fold the bed , Toilet Module: Jouer avec le commode pour se laver , Unfolded Desk: Operate the desk , Mini-settee: Un/fold the chair , Sink Unit: Sir/Dame would like to freshen up? , & Opened Drawers: Somewhere to put your things. Trying to use the bed before expanding the correct modules results in the different message: The bed will not currently support your weight. Thank you for trying.

    Channel 3 has an alternate competition banner upon completion of the SGT room, pictured here. You can also trigger it multiple times.

    Entering the correct SGT room after pre-configuring an incorrect SGT room that became yours causes it to bug out, apparently tossing the drawer module into the void.

    Weirdly, you can enter a room when the SGT elevators are at the bottom floor, which should be physically impossible, for the bottom floor rooms are offset for the sake of the elevator to the other two floors. Despite this, the unavailable cursor makes its first appearance, ironically in the one place you can apparently just ignore it.

    The buttons in the SGT elevators flash red when pushed. TODO: Does this happen in final?

    The Succ-U-Bus does not seem to say anything when you activate him after seeing the upgrade advert on the telly.

    On one transition inside the SGT Leisure Lounge, a small circular object can be found on one of the arm-rests. This object randomly disappears in the other transitions, and the video was re-rendered entirely without it in the final release.

Second Class \ Second Class Lobby \ Second Class Staterooms

    Marsinta has alternate, shorter dialogue for upgrading you to second class, and doesn't notice your magazine as soon as you start talking to her like in the final.

    The second class staterooms do not tell you the type of candy when you rustle them.

    A few transitions don't work, such as the one between the bed and the television.

Sculpture Chamber

    Marsinta's second knob sometimes disappears outright and can't be set.

    The sculpture dials make a different sound when interacted with, and behave differently. They linearly switch into the next position, rather then acting as a push-and-hold style switch that springs back afterwards. This, in theory, allows for full manual control of the bots cellpoints, rather then the just "ON" and "OFF" style seen in the final, however, the cellpoint settings fail to show up on the PET as you interact with the sculptures. The parrot seems absent from the room. It's likely this system was scrapped as the dials and knobs must return to their original position for the sake of the video transition back from them, this would absolutely have been confusing for new players. It was likely considered outright insane to render each and every possible dial state for every camera position in the room as well as every transition. It's a shame, as this beta system is much more satisfying to use. TODO: See if you can get Krage to discuss 'The Reason' with precise manipulation of his cellpoints.

    Several cellpoint knob positions bug out sometimes. Krage's seem the most stable.

Creators Chamber

    No televisions here (as the unused lines in the final implied), but the head sculptures do rotate entirely too fast to read the names on them in this prototype.

    There seems to be no animation for the head sculptures falling to the ground.

    The exit door suddenly starts using the Sculpture Chamber door while you are exiting, but apparently was edited or re-rendered on the correct side of the Top of the Well. This corner cutting doesn't quite pay off, because said door happens to be covered in Designer Room Codes for the Sculpture Chamber.

The Restaurant

    The Maitre d'Bots right arm is just floating off to the left of the screen, despite still being attached to his body and holding the green centre. Its transparency mask is not properly implemented, so it has pink edges. Trying to click it displays "You can't get this."

Hmmm...
	To do:
Reconfirm behaviour of final.

    Maitre d'Bot sometimes comments when you pick up his other arm off the table. "Ouch. Please. That too is my arm."

Hmmm...
	To do:
See if the real key can be found in this build. At least one other puzzle is different to the final, so it's possible the key is still in here.

    You can't rip off the Maitre d'Bot's left arm, so you can't get the Music System Key. This means you can never unlock the Music System box, and you can never get Maitre D to release his grip on the two items he holds. That all said, it's important to note that in this build, Maitre d'Bot only has graphics for holding a piece of Titania's brain (as in the final), and possibly some sort of notes. In that case, the arm doesn't even have the key in the first place, but is rather holding notes in this build instead. Where the key would have been found at this point, then, is unknown. And no, the erroneously titled night sky photo (which is actually called Music System Key in this prototype) does not unlock the box.

    In total, Maitre d'Bot appears to have three arms. The one floating off to the left that you can never get (holding the Green piece of Titania's Brain), the one on Scraliontis' table (possibly holding some notes), and the one visibly attached to his body that you can never remove.

    Maitre D has no chat icon, the space for an icon in the PET therefore remains blank. Since the final game doesn't include a portrait for him in the old set of small icons used in this prototype, we can safely assume he never received one until the change over to taller portraits.

    Some of the left and right nodes don't change the cursor, but work fine.

The Bar

    You can't talk to Fortillian by the TV like you can in the final, you have to ring the bell.

    The vision-center is far duller in colour. It was probably made more vibrant to stand out more.

    The bell Easter egg seems easier to trigger.

    The glass glitches on and off the table sometimes if you don't take it immediately.

    Fortillian won't comment on repeated bell presses, or breakages.

    The glass uses a different item video while in your inventory. It looks shinier.

The Succ-U-Bus

    Uses alternate denotation for 'gibberish' noises, e.g. <Foul noises>

    It appears to be next to impossible to get anything coherent out of Shorbert. He ignores everything you say or ask and merely spouts, as the game puts it, foul noises. More then usual, that is.

    He can however respond to queries about lost items, but just as the final, tells you to see... Mother. Mother of course will not give you your items. Just as in the final, you have to get your items from the Succ-U-Bus in Titania's Chamber after flicking the Succ-U-Bus fusebox switch, which is contrary to dialogue cues.

    Mother is not self aware and responds as any other Succ-U-Bus when queried about it.

    Mother makes a unique sound, like that of a printer or fax machine, when receiving, and can be triggered to 'receive' even when there is no item to get. This sound was listed as unused on the final game's TCRF audio page. This sound does not always play when receiving however, and may be semi-random or dependant on spam-clicking. More testing required.

The Bridge & The Ending

    The announcer doesn't seem to welcome you into the captain's transport. You also cannot go back to inside Titania's Chamber once on the bridge, so if you haven't disarmed the bomb, you're not going to either.

    No sounds play while the helmet is put on.

    A generic clunk plays instead of the normal 'scanner' sounds when inserting the photo into the navigation system.

    "Cruise around a bit" only turns the ship a little to the left, then back again.

    Switching to the photo during the 'Navigate-O-Ship' portion seems to just display a randomly chosen still from the 3D wireframe view, rather then the photo of the night sky above your house. That photo is still in the files for this prototype, so it appears to have just not been implemented yet.

    There doesn't seem to be any sounds for either the Navigate-O-Ship section as a whole, nor piloting the ship back to Earth.

    Once the ship lands on Earth, and you're looking at the keel, you curiously gain control back. You have no PET, but can choose to click either the television, or the starship's keel. If you click the starship, it will fly out towards the horizon without you, and you'll regain control. If you choose to zoom into the TV, it will automatically play Leovinus' left message for you, and you can also zoom out of the TV again while it's playing if you like. Zooming out of the TV moves the Titanic back into the horizon regardless, and the node to click on it is updated in accordance to its new position. You can replay Leovinus' message as much as you like before clicking the starship, or you can skip it entirely and click on the starship immediately. Clicking the starship causes it to immediately collapse and explode, softlocking the game on a white screen forever.

    There seems to be no way to win the game in this build, the starship will explode even if you disarm the bomb, and softlock on a white screen, never playing the credits for either the good or bad ending. The ship doesn't even take you with it, leaving you in the ruins of your old home.

**Missive-O-Mat Message Log**

Leovinus

Welcome, Leovinus.

This is your Missive-O-Mat.

You have received 1827 Electric Missives.

For your convenience I have deleted 453 things that people you don't know thought it would be terribly witty to forward to you.

63 Missives containing double or triple exclamation marks.

846 Missives from mailing-lists you once thought might be quite interesting and now can't figure out how to cancel.

962 Chain Missives.

1034 instructions on how to become a millionaire using butter.

3 Yassaccan Death Threats (slightly down on last week which is pleasing news).

and a Missive from your Mother which I have answered reassuringly.

I have selected the following Missives for your particular attention. You will not need to run Fib-Finder to see why. Something Is Up and I suspect those two slippery urchins, Brobostigon and Scraliontis are behind it.

---

Droot Scraliontis, Accountant

Hello Droot. I have evaluated your recent missives.

Contents break down as follows:

Good news 49%

Bad news 48%

Indifferent news 4%

Petty mailings and Family Missives 5%

Special Offers from the Blerontin Sand Society 1% (note - there's a rather pretty dune for hire on p4)

In general terms you Thrive. You continue to Prosper. Your shares are Secure. Your hair, as always, looks Good. Carpet 14 needs cleaning.

I am pleased to report there have been no further comments about foot odor.

Recommend urgently you sell all fish paste shares as Market jittery.

As your Great Scheme nears completion I have taken the liberty of replying to all non-urgent Missives and list below only communications with Manager Brobostigon and His Pain in the Ass Loftiness Leovinus.

Beware - Leovinus grows suspicious. Don't take your eye off Brobostigon.

Weather for the Launch tomorrow is bright and sunny. Hazy clouds will be turned on at eleven. I suggest the red suit with the streamers.

All money transfers will be completed through alias accounts by moonsup.

Eat well. Your fish levels are down and you may suffer indecision flutters mid-morning.

Here are you Missives.

---

Antar Brobostigon, Project Manager
Hello Antar, this is your Missive-o-Mat. Not that you need reminding but today is the Glorious Dawning of a New Age in Luxury Space Travel.

Generally my assessment of your position this morning is that you are well, albeit not as rich as you would like to be. I hope your interesting collaboration with Mr Scraliontis will soon bear fruit.

I trust your flatulence has eased during the night. Such a distressing condition for a man in your position.

Most of your Missives are routine construction matters which I have dealt with and deleted. All Missives from Mr Scraliontis and His Loftiness Leovinus are here.

Leovinus To: Brobostigon, Scraliontis
What's going on Brobostigon? My Missives are all over the place. All routings through Titania are accumulating inexcusable delays. I'm copying this to Scraliontis (yes Droot I want a costing of this as I fully intend to make a claim).

Brobostigon To: Leovinus
Great Genius I am appalled that you should suffer public embarrassment as a result of any failing of my own. However, I must say in this cast that the Missive System is an entirely Yassacan construction (whose installation on the cheap I have to say was the bidding of your own Scraliontis against my advice).

By the way I thought you were absolutely stunning at today's press conference, skillfully rebuffing these ridiculous rumours which have begun to shadow the project. As if we could be launching tomorrow with the ship only half finished!

Scraliontis To: Brobostigon
Just for the record, you wanted the cheap missive system. I merely voted that way to reassure The Genius Who is Always Tiresomely Right.

Brobostigon To: Scraliontis
What does it matter who's to blame? No-one's going to be reading their missives where this ship's going. And anyway, I only said that to give him the impression we were still at loggerheads.

And we are, aren't we?

Scraliontis To: Brobostigon
But of course.

Leovinus To: Brobostigon
I've just had a visit from the Yassaccan delegation who tell me that the Titanic is in a worst state than when they fitted her out. This is of course nonsense, but I sense litigation on its way. What are they up to do you think?

Scraliontis To: Leovinus
Wise one you are Doubly Wise to mistrust the Yassaccans. The Ship of course is in fine shape and you shall revel in Abundant Glory tomorrow at the Launch. The Yassaccans in typical mealy mouthed fashion are fraudulently claiming that the construction process was further advanced before your Inspired Decision to transfer to Blerontin in order to fend off our own suits of non-completion.

Leovinus To: Brobostigon
What do you know about parrot droppings?

Brobostigon To: Leovinus
Oh Tremendous Brilliance! Do I sense one of your hilarious riddles coming? What do I know about parrot Droppings Oh Perspicacious One?

Brobostigon To: Scraliontis
He's on to us. What have you told him?

Scraliontis To: Brobostigon
What do you mean?

Brobostigon To: Scraliontis
He's going on about parrots. Has he been on board?

Kworf, engineer To: Brobostigon
His Loftiness has not been on board the Titanic since the unfortunate slipping accident.
I have recorded 29878 telepresence visits and he remains on-line in all state-rooms.

Brobostigon To: Scraliontis:
As far as I can tell he is still falling for the virtual reports. Perhaps he has a spy.

Scraliontis To: Brobostigon
Just what the hell do you mean by that? I'm with you - remember? Unless we go through with this we're both finished. By the by, you'll be pleased to know I picked up the Object Which We Are Not Allowed To Mention But Which Will Go Off With A Very Big Bang last night.

Brobostigon To: Scraliontis
Are you sure it's going to work?

Scraliontis To: Brobostigon
And how am I supposed to ascertain that? Set it off? It's no wonder the ship's not ready if that's an example of the Project Manager's thinking.

Leovinus To: Scraliontis
Droot, I think Antar [Brobostigon] has finally cracked. I asked him a perfectly sensible question about parrot droppings and he's come back to me with a riddle. One of the sub-engineers, Florn I believe (talented youngster, wears a rather fetching nasal flower) mentioned the mess to me the other day when I bumped into him by chance in the Great Mall. "What mess" I said to him. "The mess on board the Titanic" he said. Parrots everywhere, rooms unfinished, substandard materials. What do you make of it?

Scraliontis To: Brobostigon
You're right. He's had contact with an engineer - Florn. (I've had the youngster arrested on grounds of larceny and impersonation). So who knows what he really knows. Do we go ahead or abandon the whole thing?

Brobostigon To: Scraliontis
We have no choice. We'll just have to hope we get there before him. Can you meet me in an hour?

Scraliontis To: Brobostigon
Yes. I'll bring the Extremely Loud Dangerous Thing.

Brobostigon To Scraliontis:
I'll dismantle Titania as well. That'll hurt the old bastard - he's like a worb on heat these days if you even mention her. Shouldn't have lived in a virtual world so long or he would have seen what was going on.

Scraliontis To: Brobostigon
Will the ship still launch with Titania dismantled?

Brobostigon To: Scraliontis
Oh yes. Shame we won't be able to stay on board - it should be fun. Lofty's Paradise populated by lunatics. All the bots will be completely crazy. That'll stop anyone who has it in their heads to stay on board and dismantle the you-know-what. By the by, did you catch the latest SMEF research?

Scraliontis To: Brobostigon
Catch it? I paid for it. Or rather we did. Through your worb-food processing plant overseas miscellaneous educational funding account. I thought it read rather nicely. I think I might tell The Miserable One. I rather like the irony of his commenting upon the phenomenon which will destroy his beloved Titanic. By the By, at last count you and I had one hundred and three insurance policies running - most of them off-galaxy accounts. When the ship that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong you and I stand to gain to the tune of one hundred and forty billion horrints. Even split two ways that's a rather satisfying sum. Are you sure you can handle such wealth?

Scraliontis To: Leovinus
Oh Architect of Architects! Splendid Attainer of the Previously Unimaginable! New research on SMEF just published may be of interest to you. Shall I send you details? I'm sure your response would be gratefully received by our Scientific Community.

Leovinus To: Scraliontis
No. It's utter bollakosh. I get enough nonsense mail as it is. I'm tiring of you Scraliontis. And I am also getting leg twitches. Do you know what that means? It means that somebody somewhere is trying to pull the snork-hair over my eyes. I do hope it isn't you. Is it you Droot? Or is it that dullard I employed to look after the paperwork?

Scraliontis To: Leovinus
Maestro Of Many Metals! How can you even think these things? I have been your servant for thirty years - my loyalty is unswerving. You are surely distracted by tomorrow's launch. Please, please, eat a sleeping-load and rest: you must be refreshed for the great launch tomorrow.

Above all ignore your leg.

Scraliontis To: Brobostigon
Right. That does it. I'm not just going to destroy that ship I'm going to enjoy doing it. I don't care if he does know what we're doing. In fact I WANT him to know.

Brobostigon To: Scraliontis
I'll have no trouble spending it. Ever since it became clear that Leovinus was going crackers I've been looking for a way to salvage my reputation. This way I get rich at the same time. I must say you've been a most unexpected accomplice - I always had you placed a Mr Clean Whistle. And how wrong I was - you're actually very nasty at heart Scraliontis. I'm glad I never got on the wrong side of you. By the By, you're welcome to help me take Titania apart. We'll break his precious Cyberintelligence into little pieces and scatter them to the winds. No I'm getting carried away. We'll have to hide them on the ship - they'll be picked up by the jetty alarm systems if we remove them.

Scraliontis To: Brobostigon
Oh I'm sure we can do better than that. I'd like to think we could show him we did at least have a sense of humour whilst we did it. That cyberintelligence cost more than the whole ship put together - I shall greatly enjoy sticking the bits in the unlikeliest places possible. And woe betide any of his bots that get in my way. You're right - I can be rather nasty when circumstance demands.

Leovinus To: Brobostigon
Brobostigon. I am getting leg twitches. Do you know what that means? It means somebody somewhere is trying to pull the snork-hair over my eyes. I do hope it isn't you. Is it you Antar? Or is it that shrivel-eyed shark I employ to look after the numbers?

Brobostigon To: Scraliontis
What about the parrot? I've grown rather found of it over the last month or two. Shall we remove it before the launch?

Scraliontis To: Brobostigon
No, the parrot's going to have to bite the bullet I'm afraid. It's been a good warning system I'll grant it that. If Leovinus had ever got off his virtual backside and actually visited the ship that parrot would have bought us some precious time. We'll keep the parrot on board till it launches - just in case he gets it into his sentimental head to make an inspection.

Brobostigon To: Scraliontis
By the By, if you do help me with the Brain Parts watch out for the Metamor - there's a security chip in each part (my own design to be honest but one which FancyPants no doubt claimed as his own) which enacts a 3D Security Conversion on removal from the Central Host.

Scraliontis To: Brobostigon
I have nothing else to say. I shall see you tonight. By the By, do I need to destroy this Missive Record?

Brobostigon To: Scraliontis
Are you crazy? By the time this ship blows she'll be in another dimension and she'll have taken the Missive system with her. Good luck Scraliontis - I'll see you on board tonight.

Scraliontis To: Leovinus
Splendid Leovinus! Yet again another of your Magnificent Creations is readied for Launch. How proud I am to have served you and in some pitifully small way assisted in this Portentous Project. How Deserved is your Long Life, your Wealth, your Reputation, your Success!

Your Humble Servant,
Droot Scraliontis

Brobostigon
To: Leovinus
On this Glorious Day, O Engineer of Extraordinary, may I wish you formally my heartfelt congratulations on a Titanic Achievement! May the great Ship forever be a shining Beacon to your Genius as she Glides through the Ethers!

Your Devoted Servant,
Antar Galoot Brobostigon

**Starlightlines Employee Forum**

In the mid-1990s Douglas Adams formulated the idea for a new storytelling concept, an idea that would span multimedia formats. Providing a basic background and cast the story would effectively evolve along many different threads but retain the same general theme. This was the Starship Titanic, the starship that cannot possibly go wrong.

And so The Digital Village - Adams's online thinktank, multimedia company - and the ex-Python Terry Jones were set to writing material about the great, but unfortunate, vessel called the Starship Titanic. A game, book, T-shirts, towels, pamphlets, Help Guides, chat rooms, Band-Aids, calendars, screensavers, mouse cursors, breakfast cereals and engine lubricants were produced and released with much fanfare.
Starlightlines Inc.: The Forum

Amongst the mass of material that came about in the wake of the creation of the Starship Titanic was the Starlightlines Employee Forum. For those who were interested it was reached by way of some interesting, if unintelligible, e-mails that related this existence of a mainframe of information maintained and supported by Starlightlines Inc., the company responsible for co-ordinating the construction and staffing of the Starship Titanic. Visiting the site - the Starship Titanic Construction Intranet - provided overviews of the Ship, it's robots, various systems and two Forums - the Management Forum and Employee Forum.

While both Forums had security passwords, the Management version was purely designed as a means to provide additional background to the Starship Titanic story. It related conversations between Leovinus, architect of the Starship Titanic, Antar Brobostigon, project manager, and Droot Scaliontis, Accounts Manager, concerning the mismanagement of the ship's construction and funding, and the inclusion of parrots anywhere onboard.

**Starship Titanic Construction Intranet**
Star-Struct Inc. (a wholly-owned subsidiary of Starlight Lines Corp.) Starship Titanic Construction Intranet: RESTRICTED ACCESS

It is 25:23, Welday the 12th of Genneth, 139 RE

HYPERPIPE: ACTIVE
INTELLIGENT MAILSERVER: ACTIVE
CORPORATE BCC: DISCRETIONARY, LEVEL 3
SECURITY MONITOR FEED: ACTIVE
GO TO DESIGN OK STATUS 4
GO TO ENGINEERING PARTIAL FEED
GO TO PROJECT MANAGEMENT FEED DAMAGED

**DESIGN**
Star-Struct | Design | The Titanic Sketchbooks
A SPECIAL PRIVILEGE OFFER TO THE STARSHIP TITANIC TEAM FROM THE GREAT DESIGNER AND ONLIE BEGETTER
LEOVINUS HIMSELF.

"In Communion with the entire Family of the Starship Titanic, remembering the great Cause which we have come together to celebrate and build, it is my Wish that the humble Designs, of which I am the unworthy Instrument, should be so made available on this Web that all who are of pure Heart and devout Mind may gaze upon the Works, even from their Infancy in the Conceptions of my Intellect; and so be brought to greater Understanding; that in the fullness of Time they may better know Me, and strive everlastingly for that greater Good, whose service is Delight and in whose Accomplishment lies that Peace which knows no Limit. By the Grace of the Financial Consortium and for the greater Glory of our Self, Voyage without End."

Leovinus

[SO BE IT.]

THE TITANIC SKETCHBOOKS 
Ship 
Robots
Facilities
Accommodation
Features

**ENGINEERING**
STATUS OVERVIEW

Due to circumstances beyond the control of Starlight Lines corporate data management, all engineering pages will reflect CURRENT status and work-in-progress ONLY.

Corporate teamsters requiring historic and/or cumulative data will be required to file all such requests for manual de-archiving with the Project Archivist, Chirurgeon-Lieutenant The Hon. Rev. Dr. Dr. Hugo Stitt-Posauner, D.Arch., MBSTCC quoting authorisation and reference number (new system (revision c6)).

H.S-P.

ENGINEERING INDEX

WIREFRAMES
Ship: Rotation
Core: Axonometric
Top of Well: Side Elevation
Central Well: Plan

ROOM STATUS
First Class Cabins
Second Class Cabins
Third Class Cabins
Bridge
Cocktail Bar
Elevator Systems
Bilges
Grand Axial Canal
Central Well
1st Class Restaurant

SYSTEM STATUS
Navigation
Anaxiomat
Propulsion (Other)
Feedback & Monitoring
Seasonal Adjustment
Suc-U-Bus

ROBOTICS STATUS
BarBot
BellBot
RowBot
DoorBot
LiftBot

1ST CLASS SUITES

DATE 	37/6/22
JOB # 	114.116.9307
LOCATION 	First Class Suite #9712
OPPORTUNITY 	Suc-U-Bus #2991B54 crying Ruth all over the place, regurgitating esp. navigational log sheets from Bridge area. Room approx 12 bogues deep in paperwork and rising.
REPORTED BY 	Quinlan McBottlang (Pre-stewardship divn.)
ACTION 	

(1) Suc-U-Bus switched out of Re-Gurge-O-Mat mode (toggle switch had been moved/jiggled). Toggle-switch position spring replaced. Suc-U-Bus cleaned and lip nozzles regreased.

(2) Routeing system to be stripped down and examined for flap malfunction.
STATUS 	(1) Okay. Unit now functioning correctly. Referred to Systems maintenance for resolution of (2). -- Bledwin Zbwg, LHE1.

DATE 	38/6/22
JOB # 	114.116.9319
LOCATION 	First Class Suite #9712
OPPORTUNITY 	Nasty stains on exclusive Text-R-Weeve carpeting beneath Suc-U-Bus #2991B54. Surely not a coincidence?
REPORTED BY 	Q.McB
ACTION 	Suc-U-Bus lip nozzles degreased. Lip grease slippage found, cause unknown, although mechanism appears to have been interfered with.
N.B. Personal property item found jammed behind toggle-switch fallback pillar has been removed and may be claimed from Transit Control (Room 11927)
STATUS 	OK -- B.Z.

2ND CLASS ACCOMMODATION

DATE 	1/7/22
JOB # 	CA/232/17
LOCATION 	Second Class accommodation
OPPORTUNITY 	Second Class accommodation compares poorly to First Class in terms of luxury and sumptuousness.
REPORTED BY 	Sllrp H Gilgigilgil
ACTION 	None. Second Class accommodation SUPPOSED to compare poorly to First Class in terms of luxury and sumptuousness. That why it called Second Class. For heaven's sake, Sllrp, are you from Planet Splod or something?
STATUS 	OK. --S.S.

DATE 	1/7/22
JOB # 	None
LOCATION 	--
OPPORTUNITY 	As a matter of fact, yes, I am from Planet Splod.
REPORTED BY 	S.H.G.
ACTION 	None this time but any more smart-ass comments like that and a certain Stimp Stimpsen will be finding himself punched in the borms. If he has any borms.
STATUS 	Watching carefully. --S.H.G.

3RD CLASS ACCOMMODATION

DATE 	1/7/22
JOB # 	1081.1081.1081.1081
LOCATION 	Third class cabin #1081
OPPORTUNITY 	Snivelling noise apparently issuing from behind personal hygeine unit. (Room DISTAR unit in full-compression mode).
REPORTED BY 	L.Agronome
ACTION 	Cabin DISTAR unit jammed by foreign body. Emergency room demondrianisation performed using override code. Aesthetician (3rd Class) S.H.Gilgigilgil located and removed from personal hygeine unit. Snivelling noise now ceased.
STATUS 	PHU: OK. A3C Gilgigilgil: sedated, recovering in sanitarium. Incidentally, Lavabo, congratulations on a truly wonderful job number here. And the same as the cabin number! Now don't tell me that's a coincidence. -- Bledwin Zbug (Duty Engineer)

BRIDGE

DATE 	38/6/22
JOB # 	PTNS/1331a/EXQG/1
LOCATION 	Bridge
OPPORTUNITY 	Substantial parts of pre-commissioning navigational test and calibration paperwork missing.
REPORTED BY 	Yossa gan Hoorg (Navigation Systems Divn)
ACTION 	Missing paperwork traced to First Class Suite #9712. Re-routed to Bridge via Suc-U-Bus system.
STATUS 	Enroute. Q.McB.

DATE 	39/6/22
JOB # 	PTNS/1331a/EXQG/1B
LOCATION 	Bridge
OPPORTUNITY 	Paperwork still missing.
REPORTED BY 	YgH
ACTION 	Paperwork traced to main bilge outflow (qv) and rerouted.
STATUS 	Enroute. Q.McB.

DATE 	39/6/22
JOB # 	PTNS/1331a/EXQG/1B/b
LOCATION 	Bridge
OPPORTUNITY 	Paperwork damp and stained.
REPORTED BY 	YgH
ACTION 	Paperwork dried out. Stains removed where possible.
STATUS 	Slightly foxed. Q.McB.

COCKTAIL BAR

DATE 	26/6/22
JOB # 	1105.66.1929
LOCATION 	Cocktail bar
OPPORTUNITY 	Arragement of bottles is unpleasing.
REPORTED BY 	Sllrp H. Gilgigilgil (Aesthetics Divn)
ACTION 	Bottles rearranged. Lovely green ones brought forward, minatory purple muted, everything gorgeous now.
STATUS 	Really, really nice. S.H.G.

ELEVATORS

DATE 	39/6/22
JOB # 	EPS11959
LOCATION 	Elevator shaft #277
OPPORTUNITY 	Elevator #277 running roughly.
REPORTED BY 	Q. McB.
ACTION 	Shaft checked. Gondola bowsprit shard, damp wadded paperwork, length of garment elastic, chicken-leg and congealed grease removed from #6 safety channel near Suc-U-Bus system interchange valve. Referred to Internal Transport Divn. for further inspection of Suc-U-Bus.
STATUS 	Shaft now running smoothly. -Stimp Stimpsen

BILGES

DATE 	39th Tarbert 122
JOB # 	1221.9.9.9.9.9.9.9.9.9.9.9.a
LOCATION 	Central Bilge Outflow
OPPORTUNITY 	Suc-U-Bus bilge drainage bunged up.
REPORTED BY 	Waznboom h'Whr (Non-solid Effluent Manager)
ACTION 	Unbunged. Large quantity of navigational system paperwork removed from main throat of central Suc-U-Bus outfall. Suspect possible link with other Suc-U-Bus system malfunctions.
STATUS 	OK. At least, as okay as what is an obviously flawed system concept can be. My opinion only. But you wouldn't get me in one of them things. No way. -- B.Z.

DATE 	39th Tarbert 122
JOB # 	03
LOCATION 	Central Bilge Outflow
OPPORTUNITY 	Gondola wreckage found in bilge outflow
REPORTED BY 	W.h'W.
ACTION 	Gondola wreckage removed
STATUS 	Bilge outflow now free of gondola wreckage

GRAND AXIAL CANAL

DATE 	39/6/22
JOB # 	0000000000000000000000000000000002000000000001a
LOCATION 	Grand Axial Canal
OPPORTUNITY 	Undul-O-Mat malfunctioning. System set to Regulo 2 - gentle rocking wavelets suitable for romantic excursions on canal - but instead generated storm force seas in excess of 50 decabogues in height. One gondola lost, presumed irrecoverable, plus Arboretum inundated.
REPORTED BY 	Arr Aharrr (Canalman, 2nd Class)
ACTION 	Undul-O-Mat reset. Arboretum Seasonator set to Deep Midwinter, frozen and cleared. Gondola not found.
STATUS 	Balmy. -- U. Hu. (General engineering divn.)

DATE 	39/6/22 (Later)
JOB # 	As above
LOCATION 	As above
OPPORTUNITY 	As above
REPORTED BY 	As above
ACTION 	Gondola wreckage located. Sent for rebuilding.
STATUS 	Still balmy. --U.Hu

GREAT CENTRAL WELL

DATE 	2/7/22
JOB # 	Hell, I don't know
LOCATION 	That damn great hole runnin down to heck knows where.
OPPORTUNITY 	Them ParaBots. What happens is, see, a fella can be like standing by the, you know, rail, minding his own business, and these guys, these ParaBots, okay, they suddenly come like shooting upwards outta the darkness like, like I don't know what, like corks out a bottle, right? Hell, I'm no fancy engineer but I don't mind saying it scares the hell outta me. I mean, it ain't right. It ain't natural. Okay, Woodrow, I said my piece. What do I do now? Oh, right.
REPORTED BY 	Guane. Woodrow's pal. The lard guy? Woodrow on security? Okay? So what now? Press the button? Which bu
ACTION 	Intermittent negative gravitational anomaly in Central Well identified and corrected. ParaBot vertical speed governors recalibrated.
STATUS 	OK. -- U.Huh (Duty Night Engineer) NB Pse ensure that ALL future squawks are entered by properly authorised personnel ONLY and carry a VALID job number. Squawks not meeting these criteria will NOT be attended to.

1ST CLASS RESTAURANT

DATE 	40/6/22
JOB # 	1R10983
LOCATION 	First Class Restaurant
OPPORTUNITY 	Funny smell in dining room.
REPORTED BY 	Sllrp H. Gilgigilgil (Aesthetics Dept.)
ACTION 	Aromatic Aral Blibber in Sun-Turned Snork's Butter cartridge removed from Olfact-O-Mood ambient scent generator . Replaced with Roganberry & Chavender Coulis.
STATUS 	Fragrant. -- Hecate Convolvulus (Sensory Divn.)

NAVIGATION

DATE 	40/6/22
JOB # 	OBNS322 (33).1.1
LOCATION 	Bridge/Subsidiary Navigation Console
OPPORTUNITY 	Navoplex system giving accuracy problems opportunities. When operating in 5-D "QuikFix" mode, produces intermittent (<30%) azimuth errors of average ±4000Vk. While this would not necessarily impede operational safety it raises questions about the integrity of the Navoplex as a whole.
REPORTED BY 	Yossa gan Hoorg (Navigation Systems)
ACTION 	None necessary. The QuikFix® mode is designed solely for enroute position reporting and accuracy is well within the tolerances specified by GIT (Galactic Interstellar Traffic) Control. For actual enroute navigation, the system should be engaged in 7-D mode, and for terminal area operations INCLUDING orbital insertion, 13-D "PinPoint" mode should be used.
STATUS 	OK -- Bom ou Yattatatah (Site Rep., Navoplex Corp.)

DATE 	1/7/22
JOB # 	OBNS322 (33) 2.1
LOCATION 	Bridge
OPPORTUNITY 	Navoplex test run parametrically satisfactory but whining noise heard after system shutdown.
REPORTED BY 	S.H.G
ACTION 	Yossa gan Hoorg removed from Bridge area. Whining noise ceased.
STATUS 	Blissfully silent. -- B. O. Yattatatah

ANAXIOMAT

DATE 	38/6/22
JOB # 	11919.3.90a
LOCATION 	Anaxiomat
OPPORTUNITY 	False proposition generator lapsing into interrogative mode. Generating random internal NP loops -> timeouts in logic condensation circuit. THIS IS A CAT. "A" PROBLEM. Risk of transient epistemological uncertainty spikes. Also significant possibility of SMEF under high semiological stress situations.
REPORTED BY 	R.J.J.Wittgenhooft (Logical Positivism Admin Team Supervisor)
ACTION 	Software debugger run. Idle Curiosity Loop deactivated.
STATUS 	OK. NB: Currently checking for knock-on effect in Central Gullibility Monitor. CGM U/s UFN (ETR U/K) - Euphragia Thwft, LE2i/c

PROPULSION

DATE 	1/7/22
JOB # 	31/5/775.2
LOCATION 	Higgs drive unit
OPPORTUNITY 	Clogged
REPORTED BY 	B.Z.
ACTION 	Unclogged. Strange Attractor changed.
STATUS 	Not clogged. -- Argus McBarg.

FEEDBACK SYSTEMS

DATE 	40/6/22
JOB # 	GMSS.33.18.BZ.1(iii)
LOCATION 	Central Core
OPPORTUNITY 	Emotelligence Governor intermittently overreacting to digressions from normal green-are operating limits by >0.5%. Problem revealed when Suc-U-Bus initiated uncommanded suck-and-disgorge operation on slightly overcooked chicken-leg in process of consumption by Wang ti'Po in course of scheduled meal break (39/6/22). (Location of chicken leg U/k)
REPORTED BY 	W. ti'Po
ACTION 	Relentless Perfectionism module reset. Tolerance system override cut-in reduced. Chicken leg located and available for collection from Central Disposal. (Shed #2991) N.B. Central Disposal will be closed from 2700 this evening until 2nd Voedio for Reversible Sausage Day celebrations.
STATUS 	Tested, functioning OK. --Euphragia Thwft (Logic Engineering)

ARBORETUM

DATE 	1/7/22
JOB # 	00020990
LOCATION 	Arboretum/Cellpoint Control
OPPORTUNITY 	Seasonator jammed on Spring mode. Bird-O-Mats jammed in tweet mode, overheating.
REPORTED BY 	W.t.P.
ACTION 	Seasonator control mechanism stripped and greased. Reassembled, functioning OK. Seasonator cycle through Bitter Midwinter to disengage tweet mode. Fall mode selected on manual Hold to allow Bird-O-Mats to return to normal operating temperature. NB: Fall mode should remain in place until next Spryday.
STATUS 	OK pending observation. --U. Huh

SUC-U-BUS

DATE 	2/6/22
JOB # 	477.2.A.9196(RE107).9(c)
LOCATION 	(General Suc-U-Bus network)
OPPORTUNITY 	Major routeing fault in Suc-U-Bus network. Uncommanded suck-and-disgorge operations, misdeliveries, valve blowouts etc. See inter alia status report sheets for first class staterooms, feedback systems, elevators, bridge area, and main bilge outfall. The situation is clearly unsustainable and a major investigation by Systems Management is indicated before the commission process can proceed.
REPORTED BY 	Mac "Mac" McMackie (Chief Propulsion Engineer, Director of Engineering.)
ACTION 	Investigation proceeding. Valve routeing interchange system stripped down and replaced. Numerous foreign objects removed from central well plexus, including 1,271 items of wearing apparel, 2.8 cubic kilobogues of shredded 12-column financial analysis paper (used), 1 small ambassador, 72 unghhs undercooked chicken, 1 blimpht, 1 flock starlings (thriving), 18 crushed television sets, 1 barrel contaminated edible fat, 1 set of antigravity shoes (3 pcs), 1 "Perky Polly" Parrot's In-Cage Multigym, 1 working model of the Prophet Bazakiel (incomplete), 1 canister of #3 debabelizing powder, 1 copy "Teach Yourself Gibbs-Gefilte-Westecott Equations" (slightly stained, vulgar annotations), 1 copy "Bluffers' Guide To Control Engineering" (battered), 1 copy "Lives Of The Great Fraudsters" (damp stains, broken spine), 1 copy filing papers for Certificate of Intergalactic Spaceworthiness (Public Transport Category) (completed, unstamped), 3,188 draft press releases, 1 death threat from Save The Nauga Association (unsigned), an assortment of cheeses, 5 laptop computers, 1 bundle love letters (Authenticated sender: Your tinky-winky Frou-Frou sugar-wugar kissy-poo, presumed to be an alias) 1 fundamentalist, 1 Doctor Hippomantia's Celebrated Wab Truss (perished), 1 adjustable indoor barbecue fork, 1 latex buttock, 1 copy "Living with Tregariasis", 1 souvenir Battle of bin j'Jabbli commemorative moustache cup, 1 Giant Celebration Home-Style Family Reversible Sausage, 1 copy "Gas Pump Girls From Planet Sprod #221" (some pages missing), 11,281 partially-drunk cups of Vend-O-Mat plegetable soup, 1 smoked cigar in aspic and 1 showgirl from the Hotel Gat Girls Girls Girls Tropicana Lounge 'n' Bar Girls Girls Girls (bewildered but stoical).
STATUS 	Proceeding.

BARBOT

DATE 	32/6/22
JOB # 	HRE103.22
LOCATION 	Cocktail Bar -- BarBot
OPPORTUNITY 	Mix-O-Mat function erratic.
REPORTED BY 	Arb'b Nozzl (Robotics Inspection)
ACTION 	

Tested. Fault confirmed: 89% requests improperly mixed/bad proportions/incorrect ingredients. CUSIU* checked and functioning OK. Software stripdown performed. Fault located to modulo error caused by misplaced pointer in Hardihosh Online Cocktail Manual. Pointer recalibrated. Fault caused by tequila stain in optico-hydraulic lookup circuit. New routine added so that BarBot moves out of spillage/sloshage range when customer becomes unsteady on feet.

Robot unit re whoops retstetd exhsta exhuastdl xehast LOTS
adn found tobe wrknig jus FN
INE whit acccurasty levelels >299% hrooay.

(* Cherry, Umbrella and Sparkler Insertion Unit)

 
STATUS 	Bluudy MRAVELOUS. Fan STAS-tic. -- Lavabo Agronome (Hstipality Egeneer)

BELLBOT

DATE 	33/6/22
JOB # 	928.33/4D
LOCATION 	???
OPPORTUNITY 	BellBot missing.
REPORTED BY 	Stimp Stimpsen (Aviatrics Dept.)
ACTION 	Looking for BellBot
STATUS 	BellBot still missing. -- Arb'b Nozzl.

DATE 	34/6/22
JOB # 	928.33/4D
LOCATION 	???
OPPORTUNITY 	BellBot missing.
REPORTED BY 	Stimp Stimpsen (Aviatrics Dept.)
ACTION 	Looking for BellBot
STATUS 	BellBot still missing. -A.N.

DATE 	35/6/22
JOB # 	928.33/4D
LOCATION 	???
OPPORTUNITY 	BellBot missing. What am I supposed to do with this Phlogist-O-Mat then? It weighs about 10 ungghs.
REPORTED BY 	Stimp Stimpsen (Aviatrics Dept.)
ACTION 	Looking for BellBot
STATUS 	BellBot still missing. Why not just find a trolley, Stimp? -A.N.

DATE 	36/6/22
JOB # 	928.33/4D
LOCATION 	???
OPPORTUNITY 	BellBot missing. Have YOU tried getting off your bleb and finding a trolley in this chaos, Arb'b? Forget about it.
REPORTED BY 	Stimp Stimpsen (Aviatrics Dept.)
ACTION 	Looking for BellBot
STATUS 	BellBot still missing. No. What would I want a trolley for? - A.N.

DATE 	36/6/22
JOB # 	928.33/4D
LOCATION 	???
OPPORTUNITY 	BellBot missing.
REPORTED BY 	Stimp Stimpsen (Aviatrics Dept.)
ACTION 	BellBot found on upper exterior of hull, attempting to lift entire superstructure and remove it to Third Class Cabin #19871. Tid-Y-Up® module deactivated pending reprogramming.
STATUS 	OK -- Arb'b Nozzl.

ROWBOT

DATE 	2/7/22
JOB # 	8885.22z(c).IV.ii
LOCATION 	Grand Axial Canal
OPPORTUNITY 	RowBot refurbished after Undul-O-Mat incident on 39/6/22 exhibiting repertoire attenuation. Sings rubbish, repeats self.
REPORTED BY 	Arr Aharr (Canalman, 2nd Class)
ACTION 	Figarosity setting jammed at zero. Reset at cellpoint control. Should now balance OK.
STATUS 	OK pending observation. -- Prebastian Huxtabude (Music Engineering Divn).

DOORBOT

DATE 	39/6/22
JOB # 	9499/B/366a23
LOCATION 	Passenger embarkation area
OPPORTUNITY 	DoorBot emitting aimless optimistic wittering noises.
REPORTED BY 	Wang ti'Po (Customer Relations)
ACTION 	None. Doorbot specification provides for aimless optimistic wittering as part of normal operational parameters. Will keep under observation however.
STATUS 	Monitoring, provisionally OK. --Arb'b Nozzl (Robotics)

LIFTBOT

DATE 	40/6/22
JOB # 	199928
LOCATION 	Elevator/pellerator systems
OPPORTUNITY 	LiftBot "Nobby" conversation rambling and disjointed. Specifically, military remeniscences do not stand up to even basic verification. E.g., bot claims to have fought at Battle of bin j'Jabbli but also remenisces about fighting the Balneans at Phlegnos: obviously impossible even to most ill-informed of passengers. Suggest memory problems or possibly even fundamental flaw in original personality donor.
REPORTED BY 	Slrrp H. Gilgigilgil
ACTION 	None. The GPP of the Bot in question is functioning within spec. Note that originally contractors undertook to provide a variety of different LiftBot personalities which were commisioned via military agency specialising in obtaining ex-services donors. Understand initial response of 26,501 potential personality-donors screened, 11,337 cleared for donation and 9,552 actually went ahead with donation process. Unfortunately due to typically military cock-up, instead of being shipped directly to contractors, the agency stored the donor modules in unstable conditions and massive personality "print-thru" or concatenation ensued. The result was one working personality which incorporated memories, grudges, views, etc., of all 9,522 individual donors. To avoid widespread cognitive dissonance errors in SST's feedback system, it was decided to install three modules, operating on a 2+1 polling basis, in the central core, and distribute personality affects to the actual lift modules by means of a specially-modified Ubiquitron multiplexer unit. This information is freely available in project documentation, with which you should perhaps better acquaint yourself before your kvetching becomes irksome, Slrrp.
STATUS 	OK. -- A.N.

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BROBOSTIGON, ANTAR, FGTS,
PROJECT MANAGER STARSHIP TITANIC
PERSONAL FILE AREA

DIARY INDEX
19/2/22
29/2/22
33/2/22
39/2/22
40/2/22
1/3/22
1/3/22.b
2/3/22
5/3/22
15/3/22
16/3/22
16/3/22.b

AB Diary | Worried about L
BROBOSTIGON, ANTAR, FGTS,
PROJECT MANAGER STARSHIP TITANIC
PERSONAL FILE AREA

DIARY 19/2/22

Memo to self: very worried about L's emotional lability. He has always been wilful but in all the years I have worked with him I have never seen him so determined to avoid any contact with the realities of this project. He is determined to make the Starship Titanic into a monument to his "greatness" even if we all have to go down the tubes in consequence.

The financial situation is grave. Scraliontis says so in no uncertain terms. He was at his most jejune and pompous this morning. I had to throw him out of my office. But what he says makes sense.

On the other hand, S. is an old windbag who needs a kick. I can't imagine how Mrs S. puts up with him, if there is a Mrs S. Sometimes I think it's all nonsense and that S. lives alone in a shuttered room. I expect there's a wardrobe containing the corpse of his mother. If S. has a mother.

AB Diary | Robots nothing but trouble
BROBOSTIGON, ANTAR, FGTS,
PROJECT MANAGER STARSHIP TITANIC
PERSONAL FILE AREA

DIARY 29/2/22

We have had nothing but trouble with the robots. Meeting with Minskin Marvie this morning. MM wild-eyed, arms waving, hair standing on end. And I wish he would do something about his expression. Although the retrofitted compound eyes do little to help, he seemed more than normally baleful and distracted. You can never tell what he's looking at. Everything, I suppose.

I begin to wonder whether MM is not >50% robot himself.

MEMO: What are we paying the blugger? Whatever it is, it's either too much and he's incompetent, or it's not enough and therefore unmotivated. What a situation for a project manager: that the only thing I know for sure is that we are paying a madman the wrong amount.

AB Diary | Dancing girls
BROBOSTIGON, ANTAR, FGTS,
PROJECT MANAGER STARSHIP TITANIC
PERSONAL FILE AREA

DIARY 33/2/22

Someone is playing tricks. Settling down to re-calibrate Gantt charts to take account of tesselation (Embarkation Lobby) overrun, when inundated with females. Came into office, took off outer garments, said "Well?"

Not well at all. Busy man. No time for females in scanty clothing. Turns out joke. Notice put on External Web to effect SST hiring chanteuses, speciality dancers, exotic cabaret acts etc. Ha ha ha v. funny. Wouldn't mind so much if at least one applicant of same species as self. On other hand sometimes wonder if Mrs Brobostigon same species as self, also know Mrs B. feels same. Only other night said "What planet you from, B, no, don't answer, sick sound voice, only twist knife wound."

Suspect L. in childishly jocular mode. Makes sick to stomach. Sent applicants to his office. 327 sent. 319 returned. L. becoming increasingly indiscriminate.

AB Diary | Anaxiomat worries
BROBOSTIGON, ANTAR, FGTS,
PROJECT MANAGER STARSHIP TITANIC
PERSONAL FILE AREA

DIARY 39/2/22

Increasingly worried about Anaxiomat. Unconvinced principle, dubious execution, reservations re McMackie (dour scepticism masking wild romantic interior, little grip reality), doubts re engineering, unsure re schedule-keeping, fed up whole thing. Consider better take chances minor engine problems than risk catastrophic Spontaneous Massive Existence Failure.

Later: just spoke Scraliontis. S. all in favour SMEF. Says probably only way out of financial predicament if L. goes on like. Also says L. falling in love with ship's feedback and emotional intelligence systems.

SELF: Manner of speaking, surely.

S: No, literal truth. L. planning on equipping FEI systems with flashing eyes, soft mobile lips, honeyed voice, also thighs like chestnut mare.

SELF: What's chestnut mare?

S: Dunno. Something L. saw somewhere once and liked the look of.

SELF: Compound eye?

S: Don't you start, buster.

(CONVERSATION DEGENERATED INTO OFF-THE-RECORD VULGAR BRAWL. S: BLACK EYE. SELF: BRUISED BLEB, BORMBLEED. RESULT: DRAW)

AB Diary | SMEF again
BROBOSTIGON, ANTAR, FGTS,
PROJECT MANAGER STARSHIP TITANIC
PERSONAL FILE AREA

DIARY 40/2/22

S. came into office under influence of something. V. jolly, told joke.

JOKE:

A woman goes into a bar and says "I'd like a double entendre."

The barman looks her up and down, and says "I'll give you one."

I have heard this joke before. Mrs B explained it. Unfortunately now slipped mind but laughed anyway. S. burst into tears, said wasn't joking yesterday when claimed Spontaneous Massive Existence Failure of SST only way out financial troubles.

I said, wasn't joking when just told joke, either.

(CONVERSATION DEGENERATED INTO OFF-THE-RECORD VULGAR BRAWL. S: BORMBLEED. SELF: WABS BRUISED. RESULT: DRAW)

AB Diary | Self-control
BROBOSTIGON, ANTAR, FGTS,
PROJECT MANAGER STARSHIP TITANIC
PERSONAL FILE AREA

DIARY 1/3/22

MEMO TO SELF: Must stop brawling with S. The senior management team debilitated enough as is w/o behaving like imbeciles. NB All S's fault, goes w/o saying, but all same up to me set example as fully rounded individual not sequestered pointy-headed accountant with bad breath and big blebs from sitting on on bottom from one quonth to the next, nur nurdy nur-nur. Maturity vital otherwise project doomed.

AB Diary | Emotion & Logic
BROBOSTIGON, ANTAR, FGTS,
PROJECT MANAGER STARSHIP TITANIC
PERSONAL FILE AREA

MEETING NOTE 1/3/22

PRESENT: SELF, DROOT SCRALIONTIS (PROJECT ACCOUNTANT), EUPHRAGIA THWFT (LOGIC DIVN), Ms HECATE CONVOLVULA (SENSORY ENG), Dr RAHRAH PERSONIL (ARTIFICIAL EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE DEPT), Dr PUMPHACKER TI'OOB (PROSTHETICS), S.H.GILGIGILGIL (AESTHETICS), DR. P.D.Q.SNEE (PLASTICS & RECONSTRUCTION)

AGENDA: IMPLEMENTATION OF LEOVINUS'S PLANS FOR EMBODIMENT OF SST EMOTIENCE/FEEDBACK SYSTEMS

Ms CONVOLVULA said that she had been approached by L. on the subject of incorporating all sensory feedback switching and monitoring into a central anthropomorph, location as yet undecided.

S.H.GILGIGILGIL said this was the first he had heard of this, but his immediate considerations were those of visual style.

Ms THWFT said all Mr Gilgigilgil ever thought about was visual style and had he ever thought of becoming somebody's auntie.

Mr GILGIGILGIL said if that ever happened, Ms THWFT could be his cat.

Dr TI'OOB said that if Mr Gilgigilgil was so keen on aesthetics, how come he was so short and fat.

Ms CONVOLVULA said that wasn't fair, there was nothing Mr Gilgigilgil could do about his appearance, everyone had their own gurney to push and this was his one.

Dr SNEE said there certainly was something Mr Gilgigilgil could do about it, and if he cared to come to his office that afternoon he would show him some samples.

Ms THWFT said what was a gurney when it was at home.

Ms CONVOLVULA said it was an expression where she came from, where they had like this religious leader, right?, who was, you know, strapped to a gurney and executed by lethal injection by these like repressive forces, and now all his followers wore a little gurney round their necks as a reminder.

Ms THWFT said, yeah, fine, but what's a gurney?

Ms CONVOLVULA said, oh, right, it's one of those like little trolleys? That they put you on in hospital? Okay, and they made this guy push his own trolley into the execution chamber, wasn't that just so gross?

Dr TI'OOB said the whole thing sounded pretty gross to him.

Ms THWFT said, Not half as gross as Leovinus's idea of building this giant kind of Wonder-Woman with all her, Ms Thwft's, logic systems feeding into it and getting messed up with Ms Convolvula's sensory stuff.

Dr PERSONIL said that was how emotional intelligence worked.

Ms CONVOLVULA said, well it was a pity that Leovinus didn't seem to operate on the same principle.

Dr PERSONIL said that the meeting had to understand that Leovinus was over-compensating for a low sense of self-worth acquired in early childhood, leading to feelings of deracination and a perpetual terror of extinction, hence his desire for immortality, whether as Hopping Champion or sole begetter of the Titanic.

Mr SCRALIONTIS said, Why?

Dr PERSONIL said, Why what?

Mr SCRALIONTIS said, Why does the meeting have to understand that? As far as he was concerned, the main thing the meeting had to understand was that Leovinus definitely had one wheel in the sand, to use the technical accounting term, and what was more, the cheese was slowly but ineluctably slipping off his cracker and that, as far as he was concerned, Leovinus was about as much use to the day-to-day fulfilment of the SST project as a one-legged person at a bleb-kicking party. The facts were simple. Nothing could be done without money to pay for it. There was no money left because of horrendous cost overruns, due to Leovinus's mad perfectionism. As far as he, Scarliontis, was concerned, it appeared that L. was trying to scupper the whole project and that was that.

Ms CONVOLVULA said, Scuttle? Did you say "scuttle"?

Mr SCRALIONTIS said, No, he had said "scupper" but now that Ms Convolvula mentioned it, the world "scuttle" had a certain recondite charm under the circumstances.

Mr BROBOSTIGON said nothing, his head being in his hands throughout.

DECISIONS: None

ACTION: None.

DELEGATION: None unless you count buck-passing.

DEADLINE: Long past.

NEXT MEETING: The way things are going, all too soon.

AB Diary | De profundis
BROBOSTIGON, ANTAR, FGTS,
PROJECT MANAGER STARSHIP TITANIC
PERSONAL FILE AREA

2/3/22

MEMO TO SELF: Oy, oy, oy. Why? WHY? Why me? What did I ever do that was so wrong that I should have to endure this... this... words fail me. Off the record, I want my mummy.

AB Diary | Embarkation lobby
BROBOSTIGON, ANTAR, FGTS,
PROJECT MANAGER STARSHIP TITANIC
PERSONAL FILE AREA

DIARY 5/3/22

Site visit to newly-completed Embarkation Lobby. Truly spectacular. Everyone involved has done a brilliant job. Congratulated Gilgigilgil effusively in lieu of bonus payment, the mincing little phoney.

Rare stones and marbles, precious metals, the choicest woods of the Galaxy: truly the Lobby will stun our passengers, the galactic Press corps and, most importantly, the financial backers. Merciful heavens, the financial backers. They will be expecting a preview tour any day now and we only have 1,578 rooms completed to show them (1,578.5 if you include Titania's Chamber, L's new name for the Feedback Control and Synthesis Room).

I am becoming strangely detached from it all. But much troubled with night sweats and horrible Imaginings. Actually I don't even really care about that, either.

AB Diary | Public relations
BROBOSTIGON, ANTAR, FGTS,
PROJECT MANAGER STARSHIP TITANIC
PERSONAL FILE AREA

DIARY 15/3/22

The air is thick with the sound of whickens coming home to roost. Summit meeting with representatives of Ding Wattle Fargula Quogman, the project PR consultants, this morning. V. painful. "You don't need spin doctors," they said, "you need a centrifuge."

Difficult to explain to these abominable functionaries that they are in the presence of true genius, i.e., Leovinus. They just sit there in their molyester shirts and shiny triple-breasted suits, talking nonsense about "public perception" and "ongoing target penetration" and boasting insanely about their ability to place stories with the Press thanks to their intimate contacts with the galaxy's leading journalists, commentators and blah-show hosts.

I suppose they are only trying to do their best and earn a crust, but they combine an oleaginous stupidity with the commercial morals of a Glaburolgean cathouse.

However, the nub of the thing appears to be that L. has promised them shipboard facility trips for their media contacts on the Maiden Voyage of the Titanic, and what's more was reckless enough to specify a date. Not only have 2,176 media jackals accepted with quite unfeigned pleasure but five junior account executives and a passing quantocopier maintenance man have been hospitalized in a pitched battle about who would accompany the press trip. Ding is said to be incandescent, and Wattle and Fargula are said to be incandescent, too. Quogman would be incandescent except that he is taking a research trip to the currently fashionable multi-sun-drenched paradise planet of Hroon g'Vog (I quote) in the company of his catastrophically over-endowed research assistants, Binkie and Bobo Lygament. It is a foregone conclusion, however, that Quogman will be incandescent when he gets back to Blerontis and hears that the others are already incandescent.

The only thing which will persuade them to continue handling the account is more recognition of the difficulty and complexity of their task, in the form of more money. They were however at pains to say that it was not the money but the principle of the thing.

What blebs. It is not the principle. It's the money.

I don't know how to break this to Droot. He will be... well, not incandescent; accountants don't do incandescent. But he may well be moved to perhaps twitch something or raise a nosebrow.

AB Diary | Hysteria of Scraliontis
BROBOSTIGON, ANTAR, FGTS,
PROJECT MANAGER STARSHIP TITANIC
PERSONAL FILE AREA

DIARY 16/3/22

Told Scraliontis about the PR company's demands and the difficulties over the press launch. He was beside himself with rage. His exact words were: "Oh dear."

Strong stuff. But we are going to work out a Plan.

I am in charge of the agenda.

AB Diary | Agenda
BROBOSTIGON, ANTAR, FGTS,
PROJECT MANAGER STARSHIP TITANIC
PERSONAL FILE AREA

AGENDA FOR PLAN MEETING WITH D. SCRALIONTIS

 

(1) Meet Scraliontis.

(2) Make Plan.

 

(signed)

Antar Brobostigon.

16/3/22

**SuperGalactic Traveller Class In-Flight Bag**
Welcome to your
TITANIC
Lovely In-Flight Bag Contents!

We hope that you will enjoy
loving and using these Contents
as much as we, at the
Starship Titanic Contents Center,
enjoyed selecting & packaging them
for your lovely enjoyment!

Here is what you will find!

Be Dry.As.A Fresh New Towel
with our hand-selected and
specially-tested Noist-W-Gon®
surface moisture removal system!
INSTRUCTIONS: To prolong the life of this product, avoid contact with water.
foot discomfort? Not any more, thanks to new
“NeutroTone” Velour Foot-Eeze technology,
lovingly decorated with blibber-free Log-O-Broid.
WARNING: Foot-grease will stain this product.

Say “goodbye” to annoying real-world intrusions
with Nite-Like® visual receptor neutralizers
with woven ,fleadGrab retention strand -
comfy as a spider!

Not to be worn while driving or operating dangerous machinery.
“Blue-as-a-flerb” head hygeine product,
slowly strained through aromatic bledlow-leaves
by the soporific Hygeine Maidens of Fna’‘a
for a true “Mmmmmi It’s summer!” head experience.
INSTRUCTIONS: Squirt onto head. Massage grimly. For head-hair only. Not to be used down there.
Beauty hint: Dampen head for increased comfort. Contents: Shampoo ingredients.
Enrich your post-head-hygeine routine
with mushroom-soft, specially-thickened
lovely product type (same Maidens)
and — Ves! — feel the difference.

INSTRUCTIONS: Smear on head. Rub. Wash off. Not recommended for use down there.
Do not spill — may cause embarrassing stains.
Beauty hint: Wash hair first. WARNING: Contains chemicals.

(Please see page two for more Contents...)

(Welcome to page two. Please see page one for any Contents you may have missed.)

For those days when, Flead flygeine isn’t enough!
Our special dew-moistened and slowly-agelutinated
non-spill Fragrant Other,Areas gel-style gel.
Choice of colors: red.
INSTRUCTIONS: Remove clothes. Rub all over body. Not recommended for use down there.
Beauty hint: Rinse body before re-dressing.
Wow! the people you want to wow with our
personally-inserted-one-by-one sprague-hair
ingestion cavity cleansing artefact.
Gleam and Sparkle,Afterwards! Yes!

INSTRUCTIONS: Use ONE hand only. Rub teeth vigorously. Spit.
Beauty hint: Not recommended for use down there.

Bothered by unwanted sudden-loss-of-limb misery?
Now you too can “laugh” at those
“oops-my-leg’s-been-torn-off” moments
with the SurgiStyle personal suture kit, as used by
qualified people whose mother are proud of them.

WARNING: Sharp instruments can cause loss of limb or death.
Beauty hint: Not recommended for use down there.

Share the secret of InterGalactic gourmets
with our Dinn-O-Back
personal culinary dissatisfaction receptacle
with special hand-grafted Slitherene® lining.

INSTRUCTIONS: Insert sick in open end. Do not wear on head.
Warning: Not recommended for use down there.

Preserve your treasured communications with the
Write On!™ verbal information transcription medium.
Machine- perforated. Variety of uses, e.g. dying wishes,
denunciation, doodle etc.
INSTRUCTIONS: For writing. May be used for pictures.
ED
The perfect partner for your VITM: the Write-W-R®
“long-'n-thin” Transcript-O-Write device
with personal hand-tuned “Click” and
genuine liquid-style marking substance.
INSTRUCTIONS: For writing. May be used for pictures.
Pass those idle hours with a Brush-’n-Twizzle,
and... Watch That Shine!
Ves! See your own face in living shoe colour
(shoes not supplied). Give your feet that Pixie Brightness!

INSTRUCTIONS: Apply. Wait. Brush off. May be used down there.

STARLIGHT LINES and the STARSHIP TITANIC wish to thank
our lovely partners in the Starship Titanic In Flight Bag With Products In It project:

BAG CONTENTS by the Blerontis Bag Contents Co. Inc.,

International Bag Contents Consultants. Bag contents a speciality.
PRODUCT DESCRIPTIONS © Wooddiwiss & Pygge-Phethean (Sesquipedalians) Ltd.
By Appointment to the Gat of Blerontis.

INSTRUCTIONS by: The Instructions Company. Now piss off.


**Galactic Star Traveller Magazine**
1. Galactic Movers and Shakers Profile:
Starship Titanic Finance Director Droot Scraliontis
talks exclusively to StarTraveller® 

DROOT SCRALIONTIS
Man of Accountancy, Man of...Method

Taut, linear, ineffably alert, Droot Scraliontis greets me with a courteous, almost imperceptible nod of his pale, balding, light-bulb-shaped head from behind an imposing haggah-wood desk.

His office is large, airy, austere. Accountancy reference books line one wall. On another hangs a portrait of Vangster Blayne Chitterling, founder of the Chitterling Foundation, which has charitably financed the early education of so many leading figures in the accountancy world -- everyone, in fact, from Parboglio Hmm F.I.A., who introduced the revolutionary Night Audit system into the Hotel Gat, to D.D.Q. Moiety, author of the famous Institute of Accountancy Different Colored Pens Standard Protocol, a document which single-handedly defined the role of the fluorescent green highlighter in non-forensic auditing for all time.

In this distinguished company, the name of Droot Scraliontis stands out as effortlessly yet incontrovertibly as though it had been highlighted in fluorescent green by one firm, decisive stroke of an accountant's pen. "When I know Droot is going to pay a call," said one senior practitioner, "I take extra care to ensure that my red pen, my green pen and my black pen are lined up in parallel, with my ruler at right angles to them."

Another - a senior partner in a firm of private accountants - said "Droot is the sort of man who always wears a grey suit."

Meeting Droot Scraliontis, it is easy to understand the awe in which he is held. His pale, rather expressionless eyes miss nothing. Noticing me looking at the picture on his wall, he says "I see you are looking at the picture on my wall."

"Yes," I say.

"So I see," says Scraliontis. His voice is dry and emotionless, with something of the quality of sand -- appropriate, since this most accomplished of men is, in addition to his accountancy achievments, an avid collector of sand and a founder member of the Sand Society.

"So I see," he repeats, adjusting the position of his ruler with a fluid, controlled movement of his grey-suited arm.

"Yes," I repeat. In the outer office, someone turns over a page. A quiet sob is heard from the Great Filing Room -- Droot Scraliontis eschewing electronic data systems in favour of traditional paper files.

Presently, he speaks. "Art and accountancy have much in common," he says. "That portrait which appears to interest you so much: just like a trial balance, it is done using different colors. Though hopefully not too much red. He he he," he adds; "He he he he he he. Not too much red. He he he."

"Very true," I say.

"Yes," he says; "Red being, of course, the standard colour used in accountancy practice to signify a negative balance accruing to the corporation -- or individual, of course -- in a revenue or capital accounting item."

There you have the essence of the man on whose slender, sloping shoulders rests the entire financial record-keeping burden of the great Starship Titanic project. There you have the meticulous integrity, the precision, yet the ability to make the great creative leap which enabled him to conceive of his most famous contribution to modern accountancy practice: his paper on Internal Fixed-Cost Allocation In Internal Corporate Service-Based Profit Centres, which paved the way for the explosive growth of Accountancy Services Divisions in all major corporations by ensuring that the more accountants such divisions employed, the more internally profitable those divisions appeared.

It is a discipline, a vision which Mr Scraliontis hopes to bring to the Starship Titanic project. "We already have seven accountants for every unit of non-accountancy personnel," he tells me, "and we hope to increase that ratio much, much further. It is the secret of corporate financial health."

Committment, dedication, vision: Droot Scraliontis is the very model of a modern accountant, as we leave him bent over a single sheet of analysis paper, his head whirling with visions of perfectly-balanced columns, different-coloured inks, and -- who knows? -- his wife Wyde, their three Worbs, and their elegant, sand-filled home.

2. Lately Sent: A New Star Unto the Firmament:
The Starship Titanic
New Jewel of the Starlight Lines Fleet

A NEW STAR LATELY SENT...
The Starship Titanic - Leovinus's Masterpiece And Fitting Jewel In The Starlight Lines Crown
By Twicity Fneb, Galactic StarTraveller Social Staff

For the truly sophisticated traveler, ennui is a perpetual hazard of the game. But the new Starlight Lines flagship, the Starship Titanic, defies the most blasé traveler to feel even un petit peu jadé. From the tip of its pinnace to the very bottom of its keel thingy, this extraordinary masterpiece of galactine engineering says three things: class, class and class.

Stepping aboard this extraordinary masterpiece of galactine engineering [you've already said that once. -Ed.] one cannot but be struck by the sheer class which breathes from every pore of this masterpiece of galactine engineering. The moment the great Embarkation Gate swings open like a great iris (the part of the eye which responds to light by opening and closing) you are aware that you are in the presence of a truly unique vessel whose unique qualities lend itself to the awed appreciation of the galaxy's movers and shakers. Entertainers, developers, speculators and shady eminences grises in borkskin suits and big wristwatches: all will thrill to the marbled floorings, the glossy smart walls, the extremely nice furniture and the facilities with which the Titanic is so well supplied. Indeed when it comes to facilities, it can truly be said that the Titanic is the ne plus ultra of the facilities end of the luxury galactic cruiser market.

The Starship Titanic itself is, of course, off-limits to all curious parties - your intrepid correspondent included!!!??! But rest assured - we at Galactic StarTraveller will be the first to bring you an exclusive preview of this exclusive masterpiece of galactine engineering, and are leaving no stone unturned in going out to dinner with a ve-e-e-e-ry hunky senior member of the Blerontin quality-assurance staff and hanging, lips akimbo, on every word he says.

In fact, we are confidently expecting a result real soon now... oh, hi, sweetie; I was just writing about you!!!?!?!

In the meantime, your reporter has obtained exclusive interviews with various key members of the design and construction team: Floburger Argoblast, interior design consultant; Mac "Mac" McMackie, Chief Propulsion Engineer; Monsieur Jean-Pierre Hompe de Peniche, Head of Catering; and Professor Minskin Marvie, Director of Robotics.

Stay tuned!!!

3. Galactic Movers and Shakers Profile:
Starship Titanic Project Manager Antar Brobostigon
talks exclusively to StarTraveller® 


ANTAR BROBOSTIGON
The Man with the Clipboard

"You'll have had your lunch, then?" says Antar Brobostigon, glancing at the cheap digital watch which encircles his wrist, a perpetual reminder of the way the Titanic project encircles his life.

It's a typical greeting from this most untypical of individuals. Mr. Brobostigon (as he likes to be called) carries few outward signs of the almost awesome responsibility which rests upon his narrow shoulders. Short, stout, balding, Mr Brobostigon cannot be called "imposing." His skin has the typical golden tan of the man who spends his time indoors; even in the sun (his associates say) it refuses to turn white.

Nor is Mr Brobostigon's face in any way memorable. His lips twitch as we speak. His hands fiddle incessantly with the eight coloured pens on his modest boxwood desk. He seems jittery yet sessile. We are constantly interrupted by draughts persons, construction workers, people carrying plans and pieces of cable, spanners, connectors, order forms and memoranda. At one stage a large, burly tharpenter bursts in in a state of high dudgeon, but Mr Brobostigon calms his fears and send him on his way without ever seeming really to listen to the problem.

Yet when we ask him what it was all about, he says, in his bluff, project manager's way, "I haven't a clue. I never listen. I just calm their fears and send them on their way. My job is to facilitate, not to innovate."

When we point out that this seems to be a non sequitur, Mr Brobostigon is unperturbed. He rearranges his pens, leans back in his chair and scratches his blimpht. "If it is, it is," he says. "If I waited for sequiturs, nothing would ever get done."

And to give him his due, things are getting done. The Titanic project - quite simply the largest, most luxurious intergalactic leisure cruiser of all time - is proceeding on schedule towards its launch date of Roctumber 15ft: the most spectacular, star-studded maiden voyage in the history of deep-space travel.

But the project has not been without its setbacks. As Mr Brobostigon himself puts it, "The project has not been without its setbacks. We have, for example, had considerable problems with the Anaxiomat system. The Titanic architect, Leovinus himself, has been most insistent that fault-intolerance is absolutely central to the ship's construction, so we have had to work very closely with Klein und Moebius-Gödel GbMH of Zimmerhaven to ensure that his strictures were fully complied with. But we're confident now that this remarkable concept - a feat of engineering unique to the Titanic - will be fully-operational by our target launch date."

Mr Brobostigon glances at his watch. It is time for him to go on his inspection of the magnificent ship herself. We ask if we may accompany him. "Piss off," he says. He picks up his clipboard which seems instantly to become a part of him, and stumps from the room.

We are left alone, aware that we have been in the presence of one who, call him what you will, is -- without any doubt at all -- a project manager. Antar Brobostigon: man and clipboard in perfect harmony.

Galactic Movers and Shakers Profile:
Starship Titanic Designer Leovinus
talks exclusively to StarTraveller® 

LEOVINUS
Designer to the Stars

Pending the resolution of current free, frank, open and amicable discussions between Leovinus himself, Starship Titanic Chief Engineer Brobostigon, Project Finance Director Scraliontis, Leovinus's lawyers, Scraliontis's lawyers, Brobostigon's wife's best friend (who used to be a lawyer before he got into Eufragian holistic fretwork), Starlight Lines' lawyers, Starlight Lines' PR agency, Starlight Lines' PR agency's lawyers and ScamBot, GAIA's* UltraWeb crawler, we regret that the planned profile of Leovinus cannot be published.

Sorry!

**In-Flight Magazine**

Lovely Special Inaugural
Commemorative Heirloom
First Class’
In-Flight Magazine
For You To Keep Forever Because
You’re Special. Like the Starship
Titanic. Lovely. Forever.
*WARNING! Pre-Authorized First Class
Passengers ONLY. Sub-Classes see page 3

HE BLERONTIS SYNDICATE OF INITIATIVE
CONGRATULATES
STARSTRUCT INC.
&
STARLIGHT LINES
ON THE GLORIOUS MAIDEN VOYAGE OF THE
STARSHIP TITANIC
ON BEHALF OF THE GAT OF BLERONTIN
AND HIS LOYAL SUBJECTS
AND IS PROUD TO SPONSOR THIS LOVELY IN-FLIGHT MAGAZINE.

LETTER FROM LEOVINUS
How should I address you?
Customers? Passengers?
People? No. Friends.
I stand before you today,
humble, shy, my arms out-
stretched in supplication. Is
that a tear which glistens
in my eye? Yes! I am an old
man and the Starship
Titanic is my masterwork,
the true, enduring achieve-
ment of my life.
She is more than just
the most fabulous luxury
starship ever conceived.
She is embodied, at her
very core, in Titania, a liv-
ing web of complex, sensi-
tive, pre-emptive Emotelii-
gentT control systems.To
me, she is, literally, alive.
By the time you read
this. Friends,Titania will be
ready to ascend into the
firmament in all her glory.
I wish you joy of her. For me,
triumph will be tinged with
sadness, as I shall be saying
farewell to my starship, my
Titania, my creation, my
daughter, sister, friend, my
- dare I say it? - beloved.
But that is the lot of the
creator. I merety rejoice to
know that she is perfect,
and that neither she, nor
you, her Friends, can come
to harm.
Leovinus, Creator of the
Starship Titanic.

GATSPEAK
	His highnesss the Gat talks to our court reporter - 2
OUT AND ABOUT
	With Marsinta Drewbish - 2
MEET THE BOTS
	#1: Nobby, LiftBot and soldier of fortune - 3
CHICKEN LEGS
	The inside story from the DoorBot to the Stars - 4
KRAGE'S WAVE
	Our Bot on the canal bank - 5
IT'S NIB!
	Reviews and results from The Terrible Game - 6
A LOCUM WRITES
	By Dr. Chuckletrousers - 7
ON BOARD TONITE
	By Busky Denizen - 7
LIFESTYLE
	With Crossa Brobostigon - 8
CELEBRITY SHOPAROUND
	With Cicely Neckflap - 8
BUILDING THE TITANIC
	R. S. Joyste talks to Antar Brobostigon - 9
BACK ON THE ROAD
	With Boppy Headcase - 10
THE SKY AT NIGHT
	By Snarth Erithidostmetes - 10
FINE DINING
	With D’Astragaaar D'A&tragaaar - 11
RECIPE OF THE QUONTH
	Chicken - 11
ITS A BOT-BOT-BOT-IFUL LIFE
	By Threctal von M'Hemp - 12
SAFETY PROCEDURES
	For your comfort and convenience - 13
LOVELY GIFTS FOR YOU
	A selection from the Starship Titanic Haberdashery - 14
A VIEW FROM THE BRIDGE
	By The Captain - 14
BOT NOTES AND QUERIES
	By Edwina Fentible - 15
VASTAN ELEMENTS
	The outlook - 16
ROUTE MAP
	Starship Titanic destinations - 18
	
GAT SPEAK
So Starship Titanic! Pride
of Blerontis! Triumph of
Leovinus! Wonder of the
Age! Dazzling Vessel
Filled to the Brim with
Our Aspirations! Extra-
ordinary Summation of
M etal Tech no I ogy! Fan-
tastic Never-Before-Seen
Linking of Many and
Varied New and Big Ideas!
Into the Ether you go!
And all our hearts beat
stronger! This is not
Goodbye! It is not Fare-
well! It is See You Soon!
Yours,
The Gat.
(His Highness the Gat
was talking to our Court
Reporter)

GARDEN SUPPLIES
Suppliers of Garden Supplies to the
STARSHIP TITANIC.
Why not "dig in" to our stock? Everything
for the garden. Garden equipment a spe-
cialty. Gardenin things always avail-
able. E.g. plants, worms etc.
THIS WEEK:
Special offer. 2 for 8Ht, 3 for 12Ht.

OUT AND ABOUT
WITH MARSINTA
On vacation (writes
Marsinta Drewbish, the
Starship Titanic's DeskBot,
responsible, among other
things, for all your check-in
and upgrade needs), even dri-
ven, cutting-edge, sharp-end
successes like to escape briefly
from the hurly burly of modern
business, and plunge into a
maelstrom of teeming exotic
life. And where better than
Azeppo, the famed capital of
Fna’a, polysolar playground of
the rich and aspirational.
This ancient, time-scrab-
bled city has a pinguid,
tabescent charm which cannot
fail to captivate even the most
jaded of travelers,
Proper arrange-
ments having been
made, and medical
precautions duly
observed, the fun-
seeker lucky enough
not to be perma-
nently deskbound
may visit the ancient, winding
Ha'aqa bin-j’Jabbli, named in
honour of the famous Battle of
j’Jabbli. Even in the meridian
heat, the Ha’aqa bin j’Jabbli is
cool and shady. The click-clack
of reborzo counters forms a
counterpoint to the quiet mur-
mur of grave scholars from the
immemorial School of Callig-
raphy, as they discuss the exact
proportions of the perfect
Reborzo serif.
Now, the street is quiet. The
money-changers who normally
line the pavements with their
ceaseless cry of “X’zum-fa’ang!
Xzum-fa’ang" have retired to
their cool, dark apartments for
qhunch, the traditional vast
and ruminative mid-day feast,
after which the Ha’aqa bin-
j’Jabbli is left to the Reborzo-
players and the first
early wave of
Azeppo’s famous
welli-dancers, myste-
rious and alluring in
their traditional
silken x’zum-fa’ang.
Later, the narrow
alleyway will be in
carnival mood, echoing until
dawn to the irresistible
rhythms of traditional
Reborzo. Then, the intrepid
traveller might choose to dress
himself in the traditional,
baggy jjinja'ama, or three-but-
tocked pantaloons, and ven-
ture out to the throbbing heart
of Fna'a. And should things get
out of hand, a quick manipula-
tion of your PET will summon
my colleague Fentible to con-
duct you back to the safety of
the Starship Titanic.

MEET NOBBY
SOLDIER OF FORTUNE
I hopes, writes Sergeant G.
'Nobby' Nobbington-Froat,
the ubiquitous and unibracchial
major-domo of the Starship
Titanic's Verticulo-Horizontal
Passenger Transportation
Systems Division, to be able to
regale the distin-
guished passidgers
with some of my mili-
tary reminiscences,
and oblige, as per
Standing Horders,
eg. the Battle of
j’Jabbli, which wos
carnage, cut to rib-
bons we wos when
the Hadjadji come
raging down the hill,
worse than Phlegnos
although the Balneans
was more ruthless.
But was we down-
hearted? No. We was perfes-
sional soldiers and privileged
to die for a cause we believed
in. Not that we actually knew
wot the cause wos, seeing as
how nobody told us, just like
the Siege of Osterman, but that
didn't matter. Wot we believed
in was the idea of dying for
something we believed in, and
if that wos good enough for
General Shatton of Penanda, it
was good enough for the lads
sweltering in the fleshpots of
Berrocca, narmean?
So if there is any-
think as any pas-
sidger may wish to
know about the
above campaigns do
not hesitate to ask.
It will be a honor to
fill you in, should I
feel so inclined and
perviding my ealth
olds hup, on account
of I am a martyr to
Asgon’s Tregeriasis,
not to mention my
borms, blibber and
blimpht, but I am a old soldier,
Sir, Madam or Thing, wot
laughs at misery, pain and even
having my ead ripped orft.
So it’s ta-ta for now, and oping
this finds you as it leaves me,
in the pink.

WARNING:
Second Class and SGT Class
passengers not IN possession
OF valid upgrades must hand
IN this magazine immedi-
ately BEFORE hoarding.
You ARE reminded that your
onboard In-Flight Magazine will look LIKE
this. Unauthorized upward class mobility IS strictly
prohibited for your comfort AND safety. Thank you.

- Why not visit our sophisticated bar
and sample the delights of our
barman's extensive cocktail menu?
- Why not visit our beautiful canals
and travel in the languid luxury on one
of our elegant gondolas?
- Why not visit our beautiful arboretum
and experience our multi-seasonal
collection of exotic plants from around
the galaxy?
- Why not visit our exclusive second
or first class restaurants and eat
by the light of a billion stars?
- Why not visit our fabulous art
galleries?
Because you only paid for Super Galactic
Traveler class, that's why not.
SUPER GALACTIC TRAVELER CLASS.
THAT'S WHY NOT.
Want a free upgrade? Dream on (unless you
have the lucky number printed on the corner
of this page!)
27801HQ4-6748

LEOVINUS
A MAN WITH A MISSION
There can hardly be anyone in the galaxy
who has not heard the name of Leovinus,
architect, engineer, cyberscientist, the
greatest genius of the age. He has created
some of some of the greatest structures
in the galaxy - the Duvra Corporation
building in downtown Jerfra, the Arena of
the Gladiatrons in Zerda...
But his dream was to build a ship beyond
imagining, the Starship Titanic, a
stupendous feat of art and engineering,
imbued with the intelligence he called
Titania. After years of struggle, no one can
now doubt the achievement which is the
Starship Titanic, the greatest ship ever
built.

SUPER GALACTIC TRAVELLER CLASS
Swim in the turquoise seas of
Bleronas! Luxuriate on the
powder white beaches of
Osfagon, while being waited on
hand and foot and other hand
and other foot and mouth and
nose and ear and other ear by
the highly trained octopuses of
Fadulonica! Sip heady cocktails
as the suns set over the
tropical lagoons of Ramacula!
These are just some of the
fabulous things you will be
able to watch our second and
first class passengers doing
when you travel
SUPER GALACTIC TRAVELLER CLASS
NEXT TIME, DO IT PROPERLY!
SPEND SOME MONEY!

FINALLY IT'S HERE!
The ship you've heard
all about is finally
completed, ready to fly
and... you're on it!

STARSHIP TITANIC
the most stupendously fabulous ship ever
built. Sadly I won't be aboard with you on
this, its maiden flight because, well, a
couple of things have come up and I'm a bit
tied up just at the moment, otherwise, wild
horses couldn't drag me away from it, and
it's only a slightly busy diary that keeps me,
sadly, from proving this!
I hope you will disregard some of the things
you may have read in the press. The ship is
perfect in every possible respect. Relax!
Enjoy yourself.
BON VOYAGE
Blinton Burgramshill
Chairman, Galactic Starlines

Tache Galactica
Put a smile on your wife's face -
and a moustache
Beyond, Dismal 26

Going up in the world?
Do it in style with a genuine
ELEVATOR
As used in the
STARSHIP TITANIC
“We're with you all the way, mostly®”
The Blerontin Elevator Co. Does Not Accept
Responsibility For Anything. Ever.

Say Goodbye to ugly “no
herring” misery with our
HERRINGS
Boxed set, 4 misleading
colours. Apply in confidence
to Waldo Piddock
PIDDOCK & ROSSO
FISHETEERS TO THE GENTRY
(a divn. of Interfish GbMH)

THE QUALITY CORNER
EXECUTIVE HOTEL
113-113A NEVILLE SINKMEISTER PLAZA
(BEHIND DANK STREET)

All rooms Hot & Cold. Sluices
available. Enjoy our AwayDay
weekend Team Room special. Or
our special “clean room” service
(sheets inc.) Visit The Olfactory
Center for a wide range of tasty
modem catering, cuisine-style.
PLUS! PLUS! PLUS!
dance to Horace Niblo and his
twin-throttled organ (Flatterday
ONLY! (Booking recommended)

BACKACHE?
Why not have your
spine removed?
Cunningham & Blair
Spinosuction is our speciality
We only use the latest Succ-u-Bus
technoblob. Cheap, odor-free.
- no refunds -

First Class?
WHY NOT 'REALLY' ENJOY
YOURSELF AND DESPISE
THE POOR?
Have your scruples out & say goodbye to
tiresome ethical dilemnas.
Only 180,000 Ht.
Pays for itself in quonths.
THE PSYCHOSURGERY CLINIC,
666 THE GLOATINGS, BLERONTIN 6⅛

CHICKEN LEGS
Edmund Fentible, Doorbot to
the Stars speaks to you from
inside.

Dear Guest, what turmoil
we have seen in these last
few weeks! I am sure
as you read this,
cocooned in the
velvety comfort
of your First-
Class Stateroom, an
Astrakhan rug warming
your gracious limbs,
you can have no
idea of the
frantic prep-
aration that
has gone into
preparing the
Starship Titanic
for her maiden voyage!
Even as I write, perched on a
sack of cement with only days
to go before launch, a work-
man’s parrot chatters raucous-
ly above my head, and decora-
tors bustle around me putting
the finishing touches to what I
am reliably informed will be
the Grand Ballroom. Let us
hope they finish in time lest
we shall have to call it the par-
rot lobby! I’m sure not! Of
course just as the Sea Chicken
glides serenely whilst her tiny
legs paddle furiously below
the waves, none of this frantic
activily win be seen by you,
Pleasant First Class Passeng-
er. As I stroll through the pala-
tial public areas of the ship a
veritable army (or should I say
navy?) is at work. Over there
the Grand Axial Canal sparkles
and the RowBots jostle togeth-
er laughing and singing in their
high-pitched operatic lilt In
the Creators' Chamber invisi-
ble beams are tested and test-
ed again for invisibility. Every
last smorbit of the
Grand Central Well
is getting a last lick
and twizzle from
the tiny BuffBots,
the velvet seats of
the Pellerator are
steamed free of
electricians’ stains
once more, beige
technicians
race back
and forth to
Titania’s Cham-
ber... yet hark!
Is that the LiftBot’s
gentle voice I hear calling me
back to my own duties? You,
Future-Reading-Person are
Etherborne and I shall leave
you in peace. Lie back Gentle
Passenger and let the reassur-
ing hum of the safety-certified
Higgs Propulsion Unit lull you
into a child-like sleep...

Sea chicken

WaveGoodbye™
"WaveGoodbye™" Waves “Hasta La
vista” to lucky maiden voyagers.
Suppliers of wave repressant fluids
to Starship Titanic for that
s m o o o o o o o o o o t h
canal experience.

Bird Psychiatrist
Parrots a specialty. Fully-accredit-
ed by the Gorringe & Snedworthy
Retail Choral Fantasia Society.
“My parrot used to say nothing but
“Reborzo! Reborzo!” but now he is
Professor of Semiotics at the
Blerontin Academy of Very Diffi-
cult Things." - Mrs JJJBrainpieces.

CLEAVE AND
SWATHE BUTCHERS
By Appt to the Phlectos of Gat.
wish Bon Viaggio to the
STARSHIP TITANIC
Exclusive Suppliers of Chicken
Goods to Starlight Lines
"If your chicken's not there
You’re damn right we care."
This advertisement approved by the
Guild of Corn-Fritters.

KRAGE'S WAVE
by Krage Koyotaaal IX, Our
Bot On The Canal Bank With
The Revo Shades And The Sus-
piciously Large Cigarette-End
Hi, like, you know, guys and
things and everyone.
Right. So the guys in suits
are like, “Krage, talk a bit
about leisure facilities, okay?”
so I'm like “Okay! Hey, I'm
a BellBot, right? Whatever
you want."
So. Leisure. Okay. So you're
just, you know, cruising, top
down, 110-pack and three bim-
bots, okay? heading out to
catch the wave. I mean like the
Big One.
And you know what? Ship-
board, they thought of that.
Know it for sure. The Big One's
like coming. I been like watch-
ing that Grand Axial Canal and
I tell you the Big One’s coming
along, okay? Right now, okay,
sure, it's kinda flat, water goes
along one way, down the end,
back round again, kind of you
wouldn’t unstrap your board
for, okay? It's not what you’d
call slingshot. But, hey, this
is Krage talking, okay?, and
where there's like water there's
like waves, right? Just a ques-
tion of time, ship hits something
sudden, pump bursts, storm
brews up, man, the way the
weather in the Arboretum
keeps changing, anything could
like happen.
So, hey, hang loose, and you
need Speedos, anything like
that, you call your friend Krage,
okay? Right.
Krage Koyotaaal IV was talk-
ing to Rabbi Stomp, Religious
Affairs Correspondent

It's
nib
THE VIEW FROM
THE TEA SHOP
This week Fortillian
O'Perfluous reminisces.
I was lucky as a lad growing up
in Blargh to see Clem Grunt in
his prime. He was a fine figure,
ruthless, merciless but always
polite, very polite. I remember
one game when the hand-to-
hand combat spilled over into
our section of the crowd. Clem
accidentally slaughtered some
of my family. Next day he sent
us a beautiful bouquet of flow-
ers with free tickets for the next
home game. Not many players
would have done that, Polite,
very polite.
Transfers:
Enid Malaise has been transferred
to Reborzo Rat for a fee of 8 bil-
lion horrints plus 2000 supporters.

HINTS AND TIPS
FOR INTERGALACTIC TRAVELERS FROM
NEVILLE SINKMEISTER
THE MAN WITH THE FAMOUS HAIR
This quonth -
the Exquisite Garotte.
Neville lets us look into his special*
equipment-bag of equipment*
Certain moves within our Great Game
seem to typify the players search for
grace and perfection. Such a move is
The Exquisite Garotte. Peak fitness
and technique are vital of course. But
so is tuning the right tool for the job
- and looking after it properly. You can't garotte with a 4 iron,
no matter how sharp if is. Oh no. And the one-handed neck-
gutter will never do if you’ve left it in the garage all winter
without a protective coating of blarn oil. So don’t forget. Treat
your tools like you treat your body. A small piece of wadding
and a bit of elbow grease can mean life or death on the 18th.

WEEKEND GIRLS GO FOR GOURD!
The Blerontin Weekend Girls
Fellowship survived the fierce
heat of the Ampstrad Stadium
yesterday; qualifying for the last
three of the Blood-Filled Gourd
through a superb beheading
from Emily Sinjun-Whitbee-
Fflyes in the first quarter.
Ampstrad captured some Blerontin supporters and put them to
the sword in the closing minutes but the result was never in doubt.
Blerontin now face the Astrakhan Testicle Stranglers in the next
round. Last night it was reported that cities throughout Ampstrad
were burning and ritual pillaging was taking place.

CROWD NEWS from our Crowd Correspondent
Crowd losses in the north have been lower than usual. Police
again advise that traveling supporters should not engage in small
arms fire until Final Quarter has been blown.

A LOCUM WRITES
by Dr Chuckletrousers -
The Locums' Locum
Hello! Doktor Chuckle-
trousers here! And boy am I
glad to be with you on this voy-
age! So! You may wonder why
this is “A Locum Writes”? Well,
the reason is simple. Because A
Doctor is unwell. My partner,
Doktor Underthing, was struck
down with a temporary indur-
ating hiaena of the blibber.
Wow! Painful! And why?
Not enough precautions, is
why. So, an ill wind a day sends
the Doktor away... or, in this
case, the Locum! On a space
trip! Ha! But so what? You are
important people. Other peo-
ple, less important, depend on
you. If they fall ill, so? No great
loss. But if you fall ill? Ha!
Everything grinds to a halt.
Answer? As a Locum, I say:
don't fail ill.. Anything can go
wrong. Blibber. Borms. Allen-
oids, wabs, treems. Asgon's
Tregeriasis waits to strike! Ha!
Ow! You could split your
allenoicK kritsch your splanck,
one day you find your tharpoid
gone. Ouch! Then you come
kvetching to me. You say “Locum
Chuckletrousers, it hurts,” and I
say, Serves you right. Rich, pow-
erful, important, but no precau-
tions. Ha! Trust me, I'm a Locum.

ON BOARD TONITE
by Bosky Denizen
Well hi-de-hi-de-Hi!!!!, fel-
low-travelers, and wel-
come to this, the jubbelicious
excite-o-rama which is the
Maiden Voyage of this, the great-
est Starship of all time! And you!
are privileged to be part of it!
And nobody more so than I!!
Oh boy! have we got some
hot sounds and whacky glitzy
people for you on the manifest!
You may have seen a few of
them while you sipped your
luxury pre-boarding cocktail
drinks - Mmmmm! thirst-quen-
ching! - in our purpose-built
Vastan Embarkation Center!
And here's just a selection to
wet your whistle and get you
really hepped up, Daddy-o!
• The Emperor Hh'huuuwhi!fft,
that well-known potentate and
gourmand, will he shaking a
chicken-feather tonite, for sure!
• The Frigorifico of Kustz, Its
Honor Jellabanyon Arithro-
glass has chosen - YES! - the
Starship Titanic to introduce
for its nuptial tour with the
new Frigorifica, galactic
glamor-thing Fiji de Thlulp!!
• Celebrated thinker and mal-
content Lemuel Bmmmm will
be holding court at the First
Class Cocktail Bar - and, if
we knew Lemuel, the thoughts
will be flying!?!??!
• Look out for hot beat combo
Swango and the Podosti-
chords. Traveling incognita
(First Class; what else??!?)
but we bet they wont be able to
resist giving a “Jig” on the
promenade deck!!?!
• A little ‘parrot’ who knows
everything tells Bosky that
Euvolvula Bundridge and her
latest husboid, Ebley ‘Sled’ Codu-
like Jnr. are with us... heavily
disguised, but there's no dis-
guising Euvolvula!!?!? Maybe
they just want to be alone - and
who can blame them??!?!?
There'll be more a-plenty
when we *take off,* so, you cool
cat swingers, don’t forget to
say “hi-de-hi-de-HI” to Bosky,
the man with the moustache!
Happy Hyperspace!!!!?!??!

WE *DON'T* WISH THE
STARSHIP TITANIC
"GOOD LUCK!" NO!
Who needs luck when behind you a
KLEIN UND MOEBIUS-GODEL of
ZIMMERHAVEN “Anaxiomat” fault-
intolerant system is? So! It's not
“Goodbye” but Auf Wiedersehen,
Starship Titanic!” Yes! Two jokes!

Happy?

LIFESTYLE
WITH CROSSA
The Starship Titimic is going
to revolutionize home fur-
nishing. Crossa Brobostigon
tells us why.
If you'd already planned your
kitchen make-over this year
then STOP RIGHT NOW!
Because the Starship Titanic
has just re-written the rules of
interior design with a mouth-
drenching display of retro-
classical neo-deco pseudo-
Byzantine chic. Say goodbye
to lead and Iron. We’re talking
marble, marble and more mar-
ble. And friezes. And trees.
And water. And marble.
But why stop at the kitchen?
Take a look around the Titanic
- she’s full of thrilling ideas for
the whole home. How about
that dashing Pellerator fabric
on your sofa? Imagine the
Music Room wallpaper in your
bell-loft back in Blerontis, Take
a peek into Leovinus's study -
isn’t that how the den in your
home should be? Why not give
your garage that airy bilge-
room look? And with real estate
prices this low, can you afford
not to build a second canal?
Mmm, 1 know what you’re
thinking. Gondolas. Well - why
not...? You deserve it. You’re
flying First Class on this baby -
you deserve everything you get.
Think big. Think bold. Think
daring. Think Starship Titanic.
Marble, marble and mare marble

THE BLERONTIS
SPEAR & LONG STICK
COMPANY LIMITED
congratulates Starlight Lines
on its “Maiden” Voyage. Visit
our showrooms and see the
ACME model combined fold-
ing spear and Long stick. As
used to stab Nobby. Nobby
says: “Ow! It’s a winner!”
Phone Blerontis 8 1/2
ANNA MIRANDA SPONG
FOR THE THING IN YOUR LIFE
NEW SEASON SPECIAL:
FEATHER
UNDERWEAR
Elasticated hose a speciality. Put
the zip! back in your man's trousers

CELEBRITY
SHOPAROUND
with Cicely Nedtflap
• You know how it is when hubby
goes through one of those tiresome
"can't-do-a-thing-with-my-mous-
tache” phases? Well, I’ve found a
wonderful answer: a whole host of
elegant and unique moustache alter-
natives from Tache Galactica. Just pop
one in place of an “ordinary” mous-
tache - perhaps while hubby's asleep! -
and, hey presto!, home's happy again.
• We all know that one of the great
discoveries of this Modern Age is
the old saying “What goes up, must
come down” doesn't apply to
Mister Light-Ray! But how many of
us make use of this knowledge in
the home? Well I do... with those
marvelous uplighters, just like in the
Starship Titanic itself. Just dot a few
around your living-room and,
thanks to modern magic, light goes
up...and stays up.
• For that fresh, mmmmmm...
lemony smell around the house, why
not do what I do, and use lemons.
Yummylicious!
• Lots of people are in fayor of
marriage these days...not least
me! But a girl must have some
secrets from hubby. So here's a tip
I picked up in my plumbrng supply
shop the other day: keep hubby in
the dark and admit nothing.
• Nothing lets a homemaker down
more than scruffy Worbs, but did
you know that for just a few Horrints
you can obtain neat-‘n’-cosy hand-
knitted Worbwear from your local
corner shop? Well, you can.
• Next time hubby's feeling
peaky, why not try pistachios?
They really work.
• Sneezing can be such an embar-
rassment at premieres and gala
award dinners. But did you know
that you can't sneeze with your eyes
open? So be like me; use cheek-
mounted spring-loaded eye-sticks.
Sneeze coming on? Press your cheek-
bones and, hey presto!, EyeStix® shoot
out, prop your eyelids apart, and it's
goodbye! to ugly ah-tishoo misery!
Cicely Neckflap and co-star Carb Goryefist
will be joining the Starship Titanic for its
Maiden Voyage.

BUILDING THE
STARSHIP TITANIC
R S. Joyste talks to Antar Brobostigon,
Starship Titanic Project Manager
The cheap digi-
tal watch which
encircles Antar
Brobostigon’s wrist
- a perpetual rem-
inder of the way
the Titanic project encircles
his life - is the only outward
sign of the awesome responsi-
bility resting on his shoulders.
Short, stout, balding, Mr
Brobostigon cannot be called
imposing. He seems jittery yet
sessile. We are constantly inter-
rupted by draftspersons, con-
struction workers, people ca-
rying plans, spanners, order
forms and memoranda; Mr
Brobostigon calms their fears
and sends them on their way
without ever seeming really to
listen to their problems. Yet
when we ask him what it was
all about, he says: “I haven’t a
clue. I never listen. I just calm
their fears and send them on
their way.” He rearranges his
pens, leans hack in his chair
and scratches his
blimpht.
Yet the Titanic
project has not
been without its
setbacks. As Mr
Brobostigon himself puts it,
“The project has not been
without its setbacks. Take the
Anaxiomat fault-intolerant
system. Fault-intolerance is
absolutely central to the ships
construction, so we have had
to work very closely with
Klein und Moebius-Gödel
GhMH of Zimmerhaven. But
we’re confident now that, this
remarkable concept will be
fully-operational by our target
launch date.” Mr Brobostigon
glances at his watch. It is time
for him to go on his inspection
of the magnificent ship herself.
He picks up his clipboard which
seems instantly to become a part
of him, and stumps from the
room. Antar Brobostigon: man and
clipboard in perfect harmony.

Captain’s
All-In-One Lucky Tie Pin
and Neck-Gutter
Make every take-off a smooth one.
Mafee every landing a soft one.
Make every kill a clean one.
438 Ht
(inc. post and packing)
Not actual size.
The Original Bison Impaler Co.

MINDMINERS
(GALACTICA) INC.
Proud suppliers of Gen-
uine People Personalities
to the Bots of the Starship
Titanic. High-quality mind-
donors always wanted.
Apply to Pouch 3183.
No academics, zealots,
politicians.

FAT? LAZY?
Why not try
LOBBY LIGHT®
the NEW chock-full-o’-taste
Lobby sensation they're all talking
about. Join the “In” crowd... the
crowd with Lobby Light in them.
Yes!!! Lobby Light complements
fatty dishes without bulking or
unnecessary leakage. Or why not
try mixing some Lobby Light in
your Jello and stay the same
weight!! Apply The Lobby Light
Coy Inc, Unit 47 Dank Street
(behind Small Mall).

Really?

BACK ON THE ROAD
WITH BOPPY HEADCASE
Well, folks, what can I say?
It’s really great to be guest-
ing here on the Maiden Voyage
of the truly wonderful Starship
Titanic and I know a lot of you
have come a long way to he
here... and, hey, we got a long
way to go together!
What a privilege it was
when my Manager called me
up during my very successful
hit season at the Hotel Gat on
Blerontis’s famous “Golden
Hotel Corner” to say that
Leovinus himself, a long-time
fan of me and the band, had
personally himself requested
that we “open” his own new
“combo”: this truly wonderful
Starship on which we are on.
When I say I had to really
“bust open” my schedule to fit
it in, you will know what I
mean, right? We are all busy
people but a once-in-a-lifetime
opportunity does not come
along every day So it was time
for action. Pausing only to give
my head a quick polish, I
slipped out of my piano and
into something more comfort-
able, and made a beeline for
the Hot Club du Beach. I knew
I'd find the guys there, and I
was right. Snakey was coiled
round something cool, Bells
was hanging loose as usual,
and Bass... well, Bass was feel-
ing pretty low. “Guys,” I said,
“You know I told you one day
we'd be up there with the
stars? Well - that’s just where
we’re headed."
There was a silence, the
kind of silence which only
means one thing: Horrints.
It’s a tough life as a musician.
You got no security but on
the other hand the boys got
lives and I knew what they
were thinking. They were
weighing up fame and adula-
tion and untold wealth
against privacy and the free-
dom of being just, you know,
lines in the counterpoint.
1 could have forced the
issue, but I'm no autocrat.
“Bells,” I said, “Shall we take
this gig, or is it me?” “Sure,
boss,” says Bells. Snakey gives
a tootle which I know means
“Yes". We don’t ask Bass. He
got no life anyways. He just
tags along, half a bar behind.
So. We reckon we got it
altogether now and looking
forward to a big success. We’re
working up a new number spe-
cially for that great gal
Titania... so see ya there!

THE SKY AT NIGHT
by Snarth Erasthidmites
Dark. That’s the word for the
night sky this quonth, although
many amateur astronomers
will be out in the gardens of
their lovely homes, complete
with telephone, warm over-
coat, flask of warming hot soup,
matzos, companionable Wbrb
and plenty of delicious nourish-
ing chocolate. And the main
thing for those amateurs to
remember is that when I said
“telephone” I meant “tele-
scope” of course. You wouldn’t
get very far trying to take a
photograph of the night sky
through a telephone! Oh no!
But you might say "Why
would anyone want to take a
picture of the night sky above
their lovely home?” The
answer is: because we can —
just like the chicken which
crossed the road! Hahaha! But
seriously, if nobody ever took
pictures of the night sky, where
would we be today? Exactly! So
happy stargazing! And enjoy
those matzos! I certainly do!
Hahaha!

FINE DINING
WITH A VERY FINE VIEW
by D'Astragar
xD'Astragaaar* D’Astragar
Hela Foutoucou!!! Surely
there has never been a
restaurant more suited to this
ancient Gallon] greeting than
the fabulously fab¬
ulous Starship
Titanic First Glass
Restaurant! Bien
sur. “Héla Foutou-
cou!!!” our guests
will cry as they
step out of the
Pellerator and
approach the
hearthrug of my
hospitality. Some
may shout the
translation: “Fill
my fat face with
food you puny foreign oik and
hello!!!” but I am no stickler
and I shall not penalize them
with an inferior table. Even if I
wanted to. Which I wouldn’t.
For there are no inferior tables
in the Starship Titanic First
Class Restaurant. Non indeedy.
Every table is fine. And all the
food is fine also. My guests are
to me as the gods. They are my
sublime reason for living. You
do not believe me, mon ami?
Then let me en-
circle your wag-
ons of suspicion
with my family
motteau: “All they
desire, they shall
have. All they
deserve, they shall
get”. Oh yes. I
have waited a
very long time
for this honor
and my pride is
bursting out. To-
day I fulfill one of
my life’s long longings and
continue a family tradition
which has been in my family
for as long as we have had tra-
ditions. We D’Astragars have
excelled throughout our history
in producing Tip-Top-Class
Maitre ds for the catering pro¬
fession. Interestingly we have
also excelled throughout, our
history in producing Tip-Top
Class Ruthless Assassins.
Occasionally it has been possi-
ble to combine the two in one
job. Of course, ha ha, I am on
board the Starship Titanic in
my role of cuisinier, not lethal
and merciless hired killer. That
is a comical notion isn’t it?
Still, better not get out of bed
on the wrong side of me when
you come to dinner tonight - eh?

RECIPE OF THE QUONTH
by the Titanic Tip Top Chef de Cuisine M. Chef
TODAY I AM GIVING YOU MY CHICKEN
Take a chicken
Kill it (Pull off its feathers and
keep to one side)
Empty it.
Bathe it.
Dry it.
Fry it.
Dry it
Poach it.
Dry it.
Roast it.
Dry it.
Put sauce on it.
Make a plump cushion from
the feathers.
Gently lay the chicken on
the feathers.
Serve it.
Eat it.
Do not attempt this operation within 40 smorbits of a working Succ-U-Bus.

NOW ON BOARD!
Why carry large things when you
can send them at no extra cost?
Now installed for your fur-
ther comfort - the Succ-U-Bus
Mark II featuring oil free
Succ-U-Blobs™ technoblobs™.
Succ-U-Buses are convenient-
ly located in convenient loca¬
tions around the ship for your
convenience. Simply place
your large object in the Succ-
U-Bus tray, choose a destina™
tion and hey presto! It's gone!
To where you wanted!
(Passengers are requested to
keep small children a way
from the Succ-U-Bus,
Passengers are also requested
not to attempt to send fellow
passengers around the ship.)

IT'S A BOT-BOT-BOT-IFUL LIFE!
Threctal von M'Hemp our
Vice-Chief Bot Correspondent
gets a sneaky preview of the
latest thing in Bottery.
Wow! That’s the only word
for it Or maybe Wowee!
I’ve just spent a pretty interest-
ing week at Starstruct’s cool
new Bottage Plant and boy oh
boy have 1 got some exciting
impressions for you! Of what
do I effuse? Mr Leovinus's
Genuine People Personality
Bots of course! They’re sleek,
they're shiny, they’re color-co-
ordinated, they’re made of very
hard metal, they’re the latest
all-singing all-dancing all-talk¬
ing Bots! And best of all they’re
here! For you! In your First,
Class Lifetime! Forget a! the
embarrassing incidents we
experienced with last year's
prototypes. Starstruct sent
these guys to the Blerontin
School of Servitude to iron out
all the grumbles. The models
they’re shipping now have
burst right through that big
Envelope of Interest. But if
you're worrying that they've
taken out all the fun - don’t!
They'll give you help when you
want it but it's not a yes sir-
reee! no sirreee! experience
with these fellows. Oh no
Father Turbot, oh no.
Starstruct haven't just kept the
fun - they’ve also kept the
quirky character bits that most
companies throw away. So
how did they do it? The
secret’s in a super-lovely con-
trol room which monitors the
Bots all day long (night-times
too). Any time a Bot looks like
they’re getting out of trim they can
be pulled right back in just like a
stoatfish on a line. You also get a
nice little control - the PET - to
summon a Bot whenever you
feet the urge. And, with custom
clothing by tip-top-trend-tailor
Otto von Doenitz Botwear you’ll
certainly want to have them
around. Split into cohorts
according to function these
perky fellows are guaranteed
infallible. And they’ve fixed that
famous stampede grumble. Mr
Leovinus promises that whatev-
er the number of passengers
there’ll always be just the right
number of Bots to go round.
Somebody stop me! I’m gush-
ing! So what’s the Bottomside?
Not one that I can see. So maybe
I was kidding about the dancing.
Who cares? All you need to
know is - these little rascals
can’t possibly go wrong!

¿WOT BOT?
MAGAZINE
FOR THE WIDEST RANGE OF BOT
REVIEWS. WORRIED WHICH BOT
TO BUY? BUY ¿WOT BOT?
This quonth: GPPs - How Safe
Are They Really?

Why Toss That Bot
When You Can Truck
It Round To...
BARRY'S
BOT SHOP?
The Old Shed, back of Beyond.
Dismal 26. (Outskirts, off ring road
spur) Ask for Barry. Moody
Cellpoints our speciality. Secure
lockup, Bottweilers, for long-term
storage. No questions asked.

Le
Bottage
Chic bot modes for the discerning.
Make your bot a reflection of YOUR
taste and discrimination, Formal
heads, social adjustment, accent
modification, manners installed. For
discreet private appointment, apply
to Madame la Bottiste, Le Bottage,
Hotel Gat Lobby (Unit 1), Blerontis.

SAFETY PROCEDURES
In the event of an emergency, passengers must listen for the
Emergency Klaxon. It sounds like this: whaa-whee; whaa-
whee; whaa-whee. Please ignore the test alarm which sounds
like this: whaa-wheee; whaa-wheee; whaa-wheee.
In an emergency, passengers must return to their
Staterooms and lie down on the bed. Lights must be turned off.
Sheets may be drawn, but no further than waist height. Those
passengers of a religious nature may find solace in prayer.
Known miracle workers are requested to make themselves
known to a member of the crew. A drink of water may he taken
but the glass must he returned to the bathroom. Those passen-
gers who comfort themselves with song are requested to do so
with due regard to the privacy of others.
First Class Passengers dining in the Restaurant when the
Emergency Klaxon sounds may safely finish their meal before
commencing safety procedures.
SGT Class passengers are reminded that First and Second
Class passengers have priority in the lifeboats. This is because
they paid more for their rooms. And this is because they have
worked harder or are simply better at their jobs than you and
are therefore worth more to society.
If there are no official announcements please follow all
instructions given by anyone who appears to be in control.
Passengers of a nervous disposition may be comforted to
know that because the Starship Titanic Cannot Possibly Go
Wrong, there are no lifeboats anyway.

If you are advised that the ship is
about to ditch, please adopt the
following position:
POSITION A
If this is uncomfortable, please
try this:
POSITION B
If you are traveling with a friend, you
may together try this:
POSITION C
On no account position yourself
like this:
POSITION D
Here is a position that is comfort-
able whatever the situation:
POSITION E

Why?

GIFTS

From the Starship Titanic Haberdashery
A SMALL SELECTION FROM THE WIDE RANGE OF NOTIONS
AVAILABLE FROM THE STARSHIP TITANIC GIFT HABERDASHERY
CONTACT YOUR LOCAL SUPPLIER TODAY!
Or visit the Website: www.starshiptitanic.com/

ONLY
7,183 3/5
HORRINTS
STARSHIP TITANIC
JACKET
The jacket with the picture on
the back! Yes - Ins-U-Broid®
embroidery keeps you looking
“cool” but feeling “toasty
warm”!! It's not really magic...
but it could be.

STARSHIP TITANIC
T-SHIRT
Very thin and relaxed shirt with
two short arms & no collar (sim-
ple easy-action head-hole entry).
Available in many colors.
Also Deep Space color (as shown).
Choice of highly appropriate
pictures. Quite popular.
WARNING:
NOT SUITABLE FOR
PEOPLE WHOSE ARMS
GET COLD EASILY.
FONE FOR LATEST!!
CHEAPEST ON MARKET!
WE WILL NOT BE BEATEN!!!!!

STARSHIP TITANIC
TRAVEL BAG
Wow! Look Cool as a Cube with
this spacious logo-printed
Tacky-Patent™ back-buffed
Etherline™ Starship Titanic
Travel Bag. Featuring revolu-
tionary Spilli-Cloth Lining in
case of travel accidents.*
(not actual size)
*Approved by the Blerontis Bag
Board.
NOW ONLY 13,153 Horrints.
This bag may be filled with inter-
esting goods. Please refer to your
licensed bag-dealer for details.

A VIEW FROM THE BRIDGE
by The Captain
Welcome to the maiden
voyage of the Starship
Titanic, which I shall be joining,
along with the rest of our select
passenger list, on Vastan.
Many people have asked:
“Look here, Sir. Johnny Titanic
is getting from Blerontin to
Vastan on autopilot, so do we
actually NEED a Captain?"
No, no, no, no. Of course we
do. Automatic pilotage is all
very well for ferry-flights but a
ship full of priceless, thrusting
winners like yourselves needs
that organic touch. Picture the
scene on the bridge! There’s
my navigator - “Nav”, as we
call him in our rough, stardog-
ly way - hunched in the navi-
gation hood, fiddling with his
starcharts, triangulating our
next fix, very technical, jolly
good show. Nav gets lock-on,
and then I take over for the
hard bit. Land-dogs like your-
selves wouldn’t know where to
start. For me, though, it’s
almost a reflex. A swift manip-
ulation of the millions of com-
plicated dials, knobs and levers
and off we go. In safe hands? I
should say so. Bon voyage!

Captains’ Mats
By us, you’re a Captain.
By your mother,
you're a Captain.
But by a Captain, are
you a Captain?
You will be... in a Captain’s Hat from
Captains’ Supplies. Available in a
wide range ni authoritative styles.

BOT-NOTES AND QUERIES
by Edwina Fentible, best-sell-
ing author of My Man’s Made
of Metal.
NEVER FORGET! Bots
were people too.
So it's no use shout-
mg “Heel!” or “Rab-
bits!" or “Where's
my slipper, Eisen-
hower?”
Dear me, no. Buts
respond to polite, firm,
clear instruction.
Rambling, ill-
disciplined, or
plain sloppy
statements will
normally be ignored
or deliberately misun-
derstood. Ask a poor Bot to
“do this, do that and then
while you're at it do the other”
and he'll do this, do that or do
the other. He won't do all
three. There's nothing a Bot
likes better than a simple ques-
tion easily answered, or a sim-
ple instruction, easily per-
formed. And there's nothing a
Bot hates more than being fid-
dled with, prodded, sworn at
or generally abused.
So treat your Bot
well and you'll have a
faithful friend for life.
And don't forget: we
all have a duty to
look out for any
signs that a Bot may
be unwell. Don’t be
fooled by a wet
nose or shiny eyes.
Bots' settings have
been known to
drift. Just keep
your eye on the
PET and watch out
for warning lights.
This has been me, Edwina
Fentible, wishing you “Buen-
esto voyaggiolo!!!”
Stmiight Lines would like to
remind passengers that the
Starship Titanic is the Ship That
Cannot Possibly Go Wrong. And
that includes the Bots.
My Edmund in a Brown study 

THE AUDITORY
CENTER
Suppliers of Sound Systems to the
Starship Titanic.
We are “Ear” For all your listening
needs. Latest technology! Phono-
graph cylinders re-grouted! Knobs
ground to order! Needles sharpened!
***
Hear the Revolution in Sound:
the new Gram-0-Fone™
***

-FREE-
CHECK-UPS!
Ear, nose, eye, mouth,
brain, moustache etc.
Faulty parts removed
FREE!!!!
The Speech And Vision Centre,
32B(a), Small Mall (behind Large
Mall (back of Large Mall Street
(behind Hotel Gat annexe (staff
entrance)))).

VON DOENITZ
MENSWEAR
Dress At The Shop Where The
People Which Built The Higgs
Drive Shop In Their Lunch
Hour For Their Clothes.
Remember our motto:
“Von Doenitz, Von Doenitz,
Von Doenitz for Men!”
Von Doenitz:
Where The Salesmen Say “Hallo!”
The Von Doenitz RoboSmart
range of Smart Robot Outfits.
Outfitters to the Robots of the
Starship Titanic
Von Doenitz UniDester™
InterGalactic Self-Pressing
Re-Entry Trousers,
“The InterGalactic Trouser
With One Big Leg”.
Say goodbye to gusset misery.
Guaranteed not to distort at
periwarp speeds.
Von Doenitz Thornproof
Ablating Tweed
for the man who prefers a classic
look. The ideal partner for the
UniDexter™ Trouser. Smart,
serviceable, easily steam-cleaned.
Von Doenitz Engineering Shirts.
Outside they are stout crisp
blotton twill. Inside they are a
reference library of crumple-free
engineering formulae.
The Walking Encylopaedia That
You Wear Under Your Jacket®.
The Von Doenitz “Sledley”
Model leather jacket.
Factory-impregnated with sealed-
in Pher-O-Mone® finish for that
“Get a load of *him*" effect.
Available in three strengths and
five popular genders.

VASTAN ELEMENTS
GRAVITY
Gravity will be light in places
everywhere this morning but
it will stiffen up by lunchtime
and there may be planetary
drifting later in the afternoon.
Outlook for the quonth: up
and down.
TIME
Time is expected to go slightly
more slowly than usual. Most
people will feel that this
quonth is dragging until next
Rowday when it will speed up.
Expect next quonth to fly by.
WOOD
Wood will continue to be un-
stable and should be avoided.
UPLIGHTING TIMES
Variable.
THROAT CONDITIONS
Throat condi-
tions are excel-
lent for the time
of year.
WEATHER
Unlikely

EXECUTIVE
Feeling “lobby”? Why not invest in our
top-quality lob bombs. Discount for bulk
purchase. Guaranteed to “go off”! Apply
pouch 177. No troublemakers
Robot parts for sale. All popular
centers (gustatory avbl to order
ONLY). All models from domestic to
“Titania”-style. You’ve tried the rest,
now try the best. Len’s Parts, 226
Spline Street W. No callers.
Hiya KRAGE!! from your friends at the
IO IMPERIAL HOTEL, VASTAN. We
remember you when you were a humble
trouser-press here! We were sure
“creased” to hear how you went “up” in the
world!!!!! Bookings: phone Vastan Center
(+199 1830 18) (01) 189 1 482369 extn 1
Bowl for sale. Nondescript, 1,335 Ht
Pouch 41515.
No canvassers or hawkers, 117(b)
Uplit Avenue, Outskirts (East).
The SINKMEISTER CHAMPION
screw-action double-barbed bone-tapping
competition poleaxe. As used by Neville
Sinkmeister. Clubman & Co “Everything
for the Nibber”, Large Mall, Blerontis.
Pellerator for sale, Low bibbage, non-stick
upholstery, slightly warped hence low price.
Buyer collects. See Father Turbot, The
Penthouse, Escape Heights, The Mount.
Yum Yum Yum! Try Lucky Thermal
Grouting Flesh ‘n’ Dribble Flavor Top-’n’-
Toast® Inst-O-Snax for a change from
Corn Fritters.
CORN FRITTERS! They're TASTY! Buy
some and eat them! ©The Corn Fritter
Association.
Hungry? Try our famous FOOD. Hot
and cold chicken. Greasy chicken.
Plain chicken to order. Range of sauce
dips inc. tomato, mustard, beer, plain,
starling. 291 Engine Belt Street, SE.
BOT COMPONENTS. Why replace
your entire Bot center when you can
repair it at home. Also DIY starship
components. Everything from a fuse to
a complete central core. Bridging-pieces
avbl. to personal callers. Flat 22122, Big
Project Estate, Outer District (take ele-
vator to 12th floor.) Ask for Kevin.
Finest bonemeal mulch, bagged.
Cunningham & Blair Inc.
Dog-seed for sale, mixed up already
Key lost, “Clinton” make, Slightly bent,
Accidentally fell out of trousers during
meeting in Hotel Gat.
Have a nice day! Apply: The Nice Day
Co. Inc. of Blerontis. Phone 37 1/8
For sale: spare perch. Surplus to
requirements. Phone Blerontis 12 1/3
CHICKEN MACHINES for hire. Free!!
You just pay for the chickens. Chick-A-
Vend, 226 Outfall Place (behind
Wulfstan's DIY) Blerontis W199.
Time-wasters wanted. Pouch 161.
Martians need not apply. Box 1318
The Vision Centre. Contact Father
Turbot, St Armalife's, Piazza bin-j'Jabbli.
“A Nod And A Wink Is All It Takes.”
Girls! Girls! Girls! Yes - you want, it, we
GOT it. Beef, chicken, shrimp, etc.
Benny's Bar and Girl, 377 Telephone Road.
Speling Checker wanted. See Benny,
377 Telephone Road.
Rib-tickling, Easy terms. Edwina
Fentibie. Serious gentlemen only. Time-
wasters see separate ad.

Fortillian says “Top of the Well to you!”

STARSHIP
TITANIC
DESTINATIONS
STARLIGHT LINES ROUTE MAP
Local/domestic routes
SuperGalactic routes

**Reviews**
posted by yoz at 3:30 AM on December 23, 2010:
The first version of starshiptitanic.com was designed as a promotional brochure for tours on the ship itself, trying to persuade you to book one. (I'm sure all that site code must still be around somewhere, but I'm buggered if I can find it right now. Sean, can you post a link to it?) The copy was written by Michael Bywater and Neil Richards, for whom "Reborzo" was the best word ever, and it contained pitches along the lines of "You're the kind of person who doesn't take no for an answer. Sometimes you don't even take yes for an answer..." As the game neared release, it was replaced by the site you see now. (Be sure to read the FAQ.) Along with the site was a shop which sold all kinds of Actual Things, including a fabulous Mondrian-ish bag (styled after the coach class rooms on the ship, or Super Galactic Traveller Class, as it was called) with all kinds of ST-branded travel goodies inside.
I wasn't involved with the creation of much of the game, but Douglas definitely was; while he wasn't the only person designing the core gameplay he did do a huge chunk of it, including writing the music for the Music Room puzzle. Most of the dialogue was written by Bywater, Richards and the astonishingly-talented and much-missed Debbie Barham.

The whole thing was tons of fun to work on, especially if you were working on a web side-project and not the seriously deadline-challenged main deliverable. (We ended up sending Sophie on Concorde with the gold masters to make SSI's deadline.) Huge kudos to all the team, especially Emma Westecott who took over the producer role very late in the project, Tim Browse, the lead software engineer, and Robbie Stamp, CEO, who had remarkably few heart attacks.

Random bits of trivia:

    The original intention was that Douglas would work on the game, not the novel. That'd be someone else. TDV shopped around for another writer to take it on. After several failed attempts (including a horrible first draft from Robert Sheckley Douglas declared that he would do it after all. A year passed. Three weeks before the deadline, Douglas confessed that (to almost no one's surprise) he'd made very little progress, so Terry stepped in and wrote the whole thing in the remaining time.
    Douglas, being enamoured of the Internet, wanted to put the whole text of the novel online, and was disappointed when the publishers nixed that idea. However, we still found a way to do it. It ends with the contest mentioned above. The book text was shuffled by one of the best/worst bits of Perl I've ever written, which I've since improved and reused on another book.
    The Spookitalk natural language parser was a heavily modified version of the Velocitext engine from Virtus Corp. It was renamed "Spookitalk" by (I believe) Douglas, who noted that it was so good at understanding what you typed that it seemed spooky. The secret of having a spookily-good parser is to just beat the basement-low expectations that people have of natural language processing, and this was done by Jason spending many hours routing all the inputs logged during playtesting.
    The Mac version was delayed for two reasons: Firstly, SSI correctly estimated that the 1998-era games market was considerably larger on the PC side, and that was where our resources should go. Secondly, it was bloody impossible to find any decent Mac game coders in London at the time, and it ended up with our own dev team getting to grips with the terrible state of OS 8 and Codewarrior.
    Talking of the Bad Old Days of Apple, TDV was one of their ten worldwide partners at the time (a fact we related to anyone who stood still for long enough). During the early development they tried to get us to use QuickTime 2 for video. Tim spent trying to get the thing to perform with the agility we needed for the navs (the little whooshy transition videos you see with each movement) and declared it couldn't be done. Apple told us to wait for QT3; we chose Intel's Indeo codec instead. QT3 eventually shipped a month before ST did.
    Talking of the navs, we were incredibly proud of them. When Riven (Myst 2) came out in the middle of ST's development, the whole team was crowded around a Mac watching Emma start it up, desperately hoping they hadn't stolen our thunder. She clicked the first movement, the picture just flipped to the next and a huge cheer went up from the assembled.
    A small percentage of the ST team, including Tim, Emma, Sean, Cynthia and myself went on to create h2g2 with Jim and Shim. I mention those names because most of us went on to work on other projects together, including helping out with the movie version of Hitchhiker's and its associated marketing, along with lots of stuff for The IT Crowd. Tim died earlier this year, and we all miss him terribly.

posted by ADoubtfulTrout at 1:11 PM on December 23, 2010:
Thank you for this post! Starship: Titanic is in a three-way tie for my all-time most-purchased games.

I remember my brother and I got it soon after it came out. We played it then like we did many games: Abe sitting at the computer, playing the game, and me watching on, occasionally writing down things we wanted to remember, and occasionally offering ideas. I remember loving the parrot and weaseling our way into upgrades. We'd spend hours in the elevator, asking the bot all sorts of nonsense. I remember the music perhaps most of all - like elevator music everywhere, but strangely...good?

I've always wondered why Starship: Titanic's natural-language interactions never took off. NLP is a notoriously difficult problem, I know, but even ST's somewhat naive approach worked, as Yoz says, spookily well. Most of the time, you'd get the answer you expected...or a cool little story. It created such a depth of characterization that more modern games rarely get.

My brother went off to college, took the game with him one semester and we never saw it again. I remembered the music, and I remembered the game, which we had only played through once or twice, when I went to college myself. I hunted on ebay for weeks before finding a new copy (which came with a strategy guide that I, of course, wouldn't use). I tried to install it on my laptop: then a cutting edge laptop pc which cost far too much and broke far too often. The game simply did not work. It was designed for Windows 95, and XP confused it way too much. While I found some approximate solutions, my best attempt was still corrupt. When it came time to catch the chicken, all I saw was a black square where the animation should have been. There was no getting past it.

One of the things I like best about that entire genre of games is the atmospheres - wonderful imaginary locations which seemed so perfect. In Myst IV, there was a room of emerald crystals, but in Starship: Titanic, it was the gondola ride: the bot serenading as the boat slid past marble columns. This was where the game was most immersive: just me, a dozen crazy robots, and a luxury spaceliner all to ourselves.

In college, you end up moving all your possessions three to five times a year and somewhere between freshman and senior year, my disks again disappeared. But my senior year, armed with a new set from ebay, a copy of VMWare and licenses for several old versions of Windows through MSDN Academic Alliance, I tried again. A few weeks later, I had a Win98 image which played the game perfectly. I got maybe halfway through, opening most of the locations, before I stopped really playing the game, and started just wandering, clicking around aimlessly and enjoying all the hidden gems. I plied the elevator-bot for stories, and tweaked the deskbot's cell-point settings. I rode the gondola up and down the ship, and attempted to exit from the wrong side in the pellevator. I played with / antagonized the parrot, and all was well. A great game filled with beautiful places and funny characters; I wish there were more like it.

diyorgasms on Jan 28, 2015:
I remember playing this game when I was younger, and being impressed by the interactivity of the AI. Though honestly, I mostly just swore at them creatively.
I have to wonder, though, if the game did actually have especially good AI, or if I just wasn't familiar with text-based adventure games enough to recognize Starship Titanic as essentially being one.

yoz on Jan 28, 2015:
Here's how the AI worked (second-hand, because although I was semi-involved with the game, I wasn't on the dev team).

The original natural language parser was Velocitext, an engine we licensed from Virtus. I say "original" because our devs - mainly the super-smart Jason Williams - put a ton of tweaks and other new code into it, and Douglas ended up naming the new system "Spookitalk" (because it was spookily good).

Here's how to make spookily good AI:

1. When ST came out (late 90s), everyone had basement-low expectations of natural language parsers. These days things are somewhat better with Siri and Wolfram and the like, but back then the best you had - especially in games - were the Infocom and Magnetic Scrolls adventure systems. It turns out that all you need to blow people away is something that's slightly better than that; people expect computers to be useless at this stuff, so when they can occasionally come out with something smart, the impression is huge.

2. Jason and our test lead (Francine) put HUGE amounts of time in putting people in front of the game, recording text entered and the responses, then tweaking, iterating, etc. The AI's job was to parse text, add a little context and then return one of the several thousand pre-recorded responses. By the time the game came out, Jason had it handling the vast majority of things that people were actually likely to type.

But again, the secret: AI doesn't have to be amazing. It just has to be better than you expect at doing the single thing it's meant to do. (See also: Valve's relatively simple soldier AI in the original Half-Life, which was amazing at the time)

Technomad on Jan 28, 2015:
Nearly: We worked with one particular coder from Virtus, who was a (very good) NL person, who worked with us to implement the original engine that we and she designed (I've still got my original design docs - at least the ones that weren't written on Groucho Club table cloths…). What made Spookitalk (itself about the fourth title it had) so effective was that we combined the outlook of engineers (who always try to disambiguate) and writers (who play with the ambiguity and 'noise' of natural language) to create an engine that was explicitly focussed on delivering the illusion of intelligence by whatever means - a large proportion of the later work was focussed on just that - handling and interpreting the contextual and colloquial 'noise' around a conversation and using it to deliver appropriately smartarse responses. In that regard, Spookitalk was the spiritual successor to ELIZA.

acomjean on Jan 28, 2015:
I remember reading somewhere, they tried to make the "AI" but in the end just relied on having a ton of canned responses to questions.

According to wikipedia: The engine incorporates over 10,000 different phrases, pre-recorded by a group of professional voice actors. The recorded phrases would take over 14 hours to play back-to-back.

I have the hint book. One of few games that made it way to the mac in the 90s. Now sadly unplayable.

Technomad on Jan 28, 2015:
Not so. The AI was always there. We originally intended to use Text-to-Speech for output but rapidly found that TTS couldn't deliver the vocal nuances and timing required for the experience we wanted to deliver - this after all was a game where humour and quality of writing were crucial - hence the move to pre-recorded chunks. One of the heroic and oft-unsung latter-day development efforts on the game was the design of the pre-recorded chunks for assembly on the fly at play time and the mechanism by which they were assembled and delivered.

crngefest: Still have the original box and cds in the attic. Loved that game as a kid but was never able to finish it - similar to Grim Fandango in my memory.

**The Post That Cannot Possibly Go Wrong**
At the centre of the galaxy, a vast, unknown civilization is preparing for an event of epic proportions, the launch of the greatest, most gorgeous, most technocologically advanced spaceship ever built - the Starship Titanic.

An Earthling would see the ship as something, really, really big, but rather less provincial onlookers would recognize it as the design of Leovinus, the galaxy's most renowned architect. Before the launch Leovinus is having one last little look around and begins to find that things just aren't right; poor workmanship, cybersystems out of control, robots walking into doors. How could this have happened? The Starship Titanic is THE SHIP THAT CANNOT POSSIBLY GO WRONG ...

While the galaxy's media looks on the following morning, hugely, magnificently, the fabulous ship eases away from the construction dock, picks up speed, sways a little, wobbles a bit, veers wildly and just before it can do untold damage to everything around it, appears to undergo SMEF (Spontaneous Massive Existence Failure). In just ten seconds, the whole stupendous enterprise is over. And our story has just begun ... 

Halfway through the third book of the Hitchhiker's Guide series, there is a throwaway reference to a doomed starship, one whose incredible splendor was matched only by the cosmic absurdity of its maiden-day annihilation. But the story didn't end there. Unbeknownst to many fans, this small piece of Adamsian lore was the inspiration for an ambitious and richly-detailed side-story: a 1998 computer adventure game called Starship Titanic. Designed by Douglas Adams himself, the game set players loose in the infamous vessel, challenging them with a maddening mystery laced with the devilish wit of the novels. The game was laden with extra content, including an in-depth strategy guide, a (mediocre) tie-in novel by Terry Jones, a whimsical First Class In-Flight Magazine, and even a pair of 3D glasses for one of the more inventive puzzles. Key to solving these puzzles was the game's groundbreaking communications system -- players interacted with the ship's robotic crew through a natural language parsing engine called SpookiTalk, whose 10,000+ lines of conversational dialogue spawned 16 hours of audio recorded by professional voice actors, including John Cleese, Terry Jones, and even Douglas Adams himself in several cameos.

Extra Content
Excerpts of extra material included with the original copy of the game, including a fictional newspaper, profiles for all the bots and helpful guides to their "cellpoint" settings, the rantings of the infamous parrot, background articles from the strategy guide, and a map of the ship (source for scans).

    A highly amusing story about an unusual contest tied into the novel and one fan's quest to crack it.
    Original concept art by Oscar Chichoni, the Academy Award-winning designer of the game's environments.
    A promotional article by game writer Michael Bywater
    An explanation by Douglas Adams in response to incendiary emails complaining about the delay in the Mac version of the game
    The obligatory TVTropes article
    Blerontin.com - an archived promotional site
    Vogon.com - A curious fansite for the series composed of several in-universe corporate sites
	
Reviews
When buying computer games, as in everything else, the public can often be fickle. Perfectly good, even great, games have been known to sink without trace. It can be stated categorically, however, that one game scheduled to steam gracefully into the shops next month will not, indeed cannot, under any circumstances, possibly end up in such a watery grave.

That game, Starship Titanic, has been impressively constructed using the very latest technology, and is the brainchild of Douglas Adams, master of the humorous paradox.

Throw into the equation the public's new-found appetite for anything even vaguely Titanic-related and you will surely agree that only the razing of the Earth in order to make way for an intergalactic bypass could prevent Starship Titanic from being a watertight success.

Since The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy series of books, Adams has reinvented himself as a bit of a technology guru (his fondness for all matters Macintosh is legendary), so graduating from print to computer games would seem to be a perfectly logical step. Having tasted the world of games in the late Eighties, with Infocom's text-based Hitch-Hiker's Guide interpretation, he says: "It seemed like I was doing it the wrong way round, doing the hard work of writing and then handing over the fun games part to someone else." So he formed The Digital Village, which appears to operate much like any other games development house, and set to work on Starship Titanic.

The game, although it essentially belongs to the point-and-click adventure genre, attempts to break new ground, as Adams explains: "We decided to try to come up with a system in which you could say whatever you liked to the game's characters and they would answer. In a couple of years' time we might be tempted to do online speech recognition. But now, with the Internet and so on, we're a post-post-literate society and people are typing again. So we considered a text-to-speech output system, but all the characters sounded like semi-concussed Scandinavians, so we settled on pre-recorded speech output."

Adams and his team of writers (including Connected 's Michael Bywater) have tried to give each of Starship Titanic's characters a pre-recorded answer to every question they could imagine anyone asking them. This system works well enough for you to be able to elicit the information necessary to complete the game and even if you catch the characters (which all have split personalities) when they aren't co-operating, there are lashings of trademarked Adams humour to enjoy.

The game itself is complex, involving, deliciously absurd (naturally, you have to blag your way from steerage to first class) and hilarious. The ability to chat aimlessly with in-game characters creates the illusion of a game that moves faster than the point-and-click norm, and plenty of surreal touches keep you amused inside its stately hull. Which of course, is guaranteed iceberg-proof.

Starship Titanic
Douglas Adams' third computer game was Starship Titanic. He outlined the game with collaborator Michael Bywater, and scripted most of it himself. It was produced by his company The Digital Village.

The original idea for the story that unfolds as you play the game came about as Douglas was writing The Restaurant at the End of the Universe. His agent and friends tried to persuade him to write it as a book, but instead the idea eventually became the award winning computer game.

It features a groundbreaking gaming system, allowing you to have natural conversations with the robots in the game, and some fiendishly difficult puzzles.

There's a parrot in it too. 

**Life, the interview and everything: A chat with Douglas Adams**
Interview Today – March 11th – would have been Douglas Adams' 63rd birthday. To mark this occasion, we are reprinting a lost interview with Douglas Adams. It was focused not on Hitchhiker's, but on Starship Titanic, a text adventure and book. The game had just been released to manufacture and Adams had pulled an all-nighter to get it out, but he was still prepared to spend an hour chatting to promote the title.

This interview first appeared in the house magazine for Demon Internet, Demon Dispatches, in April 1998.

Twenty years ago – on 8 March 1978 to be precise – the earth was destroyed. This is an odd way for a story to start, but fans of Douglas Adams have grown to expect the unexpected.

The adventures of Arthur Dent and Ford Prefect began on Radio 4. Since then, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy has spawned a trilogy of five books, records, a stage play and a TV series, and there's now a film in the making.

Over the years, Adams has learnt to live with Hitchhiker's. "For the first few years I really wanted it all to stop. Now it's fine and we're doing a movie with Disney. It's manageable, and you'd be foolish to resent the success." He says Pete Townsend told him that Tommy presented similar problems.

That success is what has allowed Adams to build The Digital Village (www.tdv.com), which he describes as a multiple media company, since multimedia is only one of the things the company does.

Within The Digital Village the online stuff is the glue that holds everything together. They clearly work hard. We interviewed Adams two days before the first project was due to ship, and there were some very tired people around. Programmers, who'd been working for days without a break, had retired to offices behind notices which warned that the occupants were sleeping.

Their exhaustion is down to Starship Titanic, a text-based adventure game in which your task is to board a spaceship that crashes into your house and get yourself upgraded to first class.

Adams describes Starship Titanic as Myst with things happening. And there's certainly plenty happening: the game comes on three CDs. 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.

Spooky talk

There aren't any real people on the starship – just androids and a demented parrot. However, you can end up in some long conversations with the crew. There are 10,000 responses, adding up to a total of 16 hours.

It's great to hear the careful terms in which Adams couches the way this works. He's keen to distinguish between Starship and artificial intelligence. Starship Titanic doesn't employ Al. The name The Digital Village has adopted for the real-enough sounding phrases that emanate from the characters is Spooky Talk. The game is so deep that in many ways it's more like a book

Adams' two favourite characters are the Deskbot and Liftbot – bot being, of course, short for robot. The Liftbot is based on the old-fashioned lift operators who worked at the BBC: they have one arm and tell lies about the war. Liftbot is principally a product of Michael Bywater; who along with Neil Richards collaborated with Adams on the game.

The Deskbot is a fundamental character based on a check-in person for British Airways. To cut a long story short, Adams was sent on an assignment by a national newspaper. Being well over 6ft, he only agreed on the basis that he wouldn't be sent economy. When economy tickets arrived, he questioned this with the newspaper; but was told it was OK – he'd be upgraded at check-in. At the airport, of course, things were a little different. Adams explained about the arrangement and was asked: "And who is going to pay for this?" After an increasingly haughty conversation, Adams paid for the upgrade himself. Thus was born the mission you undertake on the Starship Titanic.

Starship Titanic is a great place to wrangle with bureaucrats. The artwork is stunning, using pre-rendered images with a 1930s feel. Adams says he looked at the original Titanic, but it was mostly Edwardian, which isn't, he feels, very easy on the modern eye. So the interior is modelled on the Queen Mary.

The great graphics limit the game's potential for playing over the web. At an early stage in the design, it was envisaged that there would be two levels – the smart high-resolution version and a kind of virtual reality level that had simple graphics. Some of the problems would have been VR- based. In this form it would've used a low enough bandwidth to be played across the web. However, other aspects took priority and the only artefact that remains is the blocked entrance to this world: an SCSI cable, which you'll find in one of the rooms.

End of the liner

With only hours left at the end of the two-year project, it seemed a bit churlish to ask what was happening next. But that's the kind of thing interviewers do. The next big project is the Hitchhiker movie. This is at least the third attempt to make a film of the story. Adams says that like all the other iterations, it will be based on what has gone before the radio series and books.

"You'd be right to conclude that the TV series wasn't my favourite," he says. There will also be some new material. He believes that this time it will happen: "We have a studio and a director." He acknowledges that the success of the film Men in Black may well have helped, but wonders if the humour in that owes any¬thing to Hitchhiker.

After the film, there might be a game of the movie – a console action game, nothing like Titanic. And, of course, there's a Mac version of Starship Titanic. Adams is quite emotional on the subject: "If we did the Mac first, there wouldn't be a game. While I will do everything I can to support and evangelise the Mac, that doesn't include bankrupting the company."

Funding for the Mac project will have to come from the success of the Windows version. Adams speculates that as most new Macs are now shipping with DVD drives, Starship Titanic for the Mac might only come out on DVD. Meanwhile, Mac users will have to content themselves with the book of the game, written by Terry Jones. However; even if you're a Windows user you should visit the bookshop: it won't help you with the game, but if Adams' hope of a film of the game gets realised, you'll be able to sit in the cinema and moan that it's not as good as the original.

You've plenty of time to read it, though. Even if it's a high-speed process compared to its predecessor, which has taken over 20 years from original broadcast to celluloid. So it wasn't only Arthur Dent who began a trip into the unknown when the world was destroyed. ®
Bootnote

The film which Adams thought was about to be made went through hiatus after hiatus before finally appearing in 2005, seven years after this interview and four years after Adams died of a heart attack.

One story insight that Adams – who was notorious for missing deadlines – gave during the interview, which has never made it into print before, came when I commented that Hitchhikers was famously written on a typewriter using thin carbon paper, with scripts being finished during recording. Adams was also a pioneer of home computing, and as he says here, a fan of the Macintosh. I asked if there was any difference between writing on a typewriter and a computer, and he said that when using a typewriter you could only stare out of the window, while with a computer you had a whole world of distractions.

https://www.theregister.com/2015/03/11/lost_douglas_adams_interview/

**Edge UK #57**
douglas adams
After writing a trilogy in
four parts and an holistic
detective story, what is
there left to do but design
a videogame? Edge talks
to Douglas Adams about
Starship Titanic and
the future of adventure
gaming technology...

Douglas Adams shot to fame
in the 1980s on the back of
his 'Hitch-hiker's Guide to
the Galaxy' series of books. In these
tomes Arthur Dent, a thoroughly
ordinary Brit, found himself
hitch-hiking around the galaxy
armed with nothing more substantial
than a beach towel. Eventually, he
saves the Earth from obliteration to
make way for an intergalactic ring
road, and finds the meaning of life
along the way. While the books were
turned into a TV series (a film is also
due later this year), Adams kept
busy by reinventing himself as a
technology guru, whose adoration of
his Macintosh is legendary.
Although he's the undisputed
heavyweight champion of the
humorous paradox, Adams took the

logical step and set up a
development house called The
Digital Village in London's Covent
Garden. Here he set to work on
developing a game, Starship
Titanic, to be published by Zablac
Entertainment. It's a hi-tech
point-and-click adventure for the
PC (and, soon, the Mac) with several
twists - including the ability to
converse with its characters using
plain English. Starship Titanic is set
to reach the shops imminently.
Edge: What prompted you to move
from writing books into making
computer games?
Douglas Adams: various things.
Back in the 1980s, I worked with
lnfocom to make a game based on
the 'Hitch-hiker's Guide' series, and
enjoyed this. But it seemed like I
was doing it the wrong way round
- doing all the hard work of the
writing and then handing over the
fun part of turning it into a game
for someone else to do.

Edge: so why didn't you make this
switch earlier?
DA: The 'Hitch-hiker's Guide' game
was text-only, and graphical games
seemed crude, slow, clunky and
ugly. I looked at the technology and
thought 'I don't think games are very
interesting any more,' and sat on the
bench for a bit. But I had it in mind
that I'd like to get back into making
games. The very first clarion call -
tempting me off the bench - was
when Myst came out. It did certain
things very well, such as creating a
new graphics standard, and was
very imaginative and atmospheric.
I liked the way it was developed in
Hypercard; it was brilliant how it
was able to parlay the slowness of
Hypercard with a sense of a longer
mystery. But then nothing much
happened in the game. I thought:
here's a new benchmark for how
good graphics could be. Let's do
something with it; populate its
environment. But then I thought
back to the experience with
lnfocom, which was right at the
other end of the scale, and ended
up thinking that the baby had been
thrown out with the bath water.

Edge: What sort of gameplay would
you have liked to have seen?
DA: I wanted to see if I could push
the idea of conversation forward.
Companies were making games in
which you could go up to characters
and select pull-down conversation
menus. But this was very primitive.
so I thought: let's come up with a
system in which you could say
whatever you liked to a game's
characters and they would answer.
There are three stages involved
in conversations: the input, output
and what comes in between. In a
couple of years hence, I might be
tempted to do on-line speech
recognition. But now, with the
advent of the Internet and so on,
we're a post-post-literate society
and people are typing again. For the
output, I favoured text-to-speech,
which gives you the maximum
ability to construct replies on-the-fly.
But when we tried this, all Starship
Titanic's characters sounded like
semi-concussed Scandinavians, so
it wasn't such a good idea. For that
reason we opted for pre-recorded
speech output from the characters
in Starship Titanic.

Edge: What did that entail?
DA: It means that you have to try to
foresee everything. In the end, my
writing partners, Michael Bywater
['Daily Telegraph' and 'Independent
on Sunday' columnist] and Neil
Richards ended up writing reams.
There's over 16 hours of dialogue
on the game discs. Every few weeks,
we'd go down to the recording
studio, so it got richer and deeper.
we were genuinely surprised when
we started getting answers
appropriate to what we'd typed in.
Edge: Is there artificial intelligence
at the heart of this system?
DA: With language, Al is an
intractably deep problem. on the
other hand, you can make a pretty
good stab at a certain level of Al.
The middle of the system - between
the input and output - is where the
system's smarts are. we haven't
used conventional Al, but all sorts
of methods. I think the route to
artificial intelligence lies through the
terrain of artificial life -you may as
well take the same route as the
natural world. our engine, which
does all the work, is something one
could continually develop, it's a
never-ending problem.

Edge: You'll continue to develop it?
DA: I hope so, because I would love
to do something like what you see
in Starship Titanic on the Web. The
interesting thing is that it develops
iteratively. Every time we test it,
someone says: 'It doesn't do this
very well,' and there's no end to
what you can do. The Web can deal
with the third stage of conversations
better, because pre-recorded
speech has limitations. But you
won't see any more development
of text-to-speech technology in the
foreseeable future. I had a
conversation about a year ago with
Dave Nagel, who's now the head
of AT&T's west Coast Labs, and he
said his problem was that he was
developing text-to-speech
technology, but nobody could find
an application for it. soon, these
sorts of technologies will begin
migrating to the Web. Speech
recognition, which is essentially
easier than handwriting recognition,
is not far off. All these things are
difficult, deep problems, but if you
can solve 60 per cent of them and
then later 61 per cent, they'll
always, at least, be getting better.
At some date, we'll be able to talk
to characters onscreen and they will
respond. But by then, all the work
will be done on servers.

Edge: Did you have to leave
anything out of Starship Titanic?
DA: one whole major idea didn't
make it into the final game. At first
we were thinking that we'd love
photo-realistic graphics and full
navigability, but the two are still
mutually incompatible when you're
dealing with current technology.
There's nothing that can do
realtime rendering of those sorts
of environments. we decided that
the best way to get the best of both
worlds was to have both worlds. so
we came up with a story notion in
which you can see the ship as you
There are several methods of traversing
the enormous Starship Titanic,
including taking a trip on this gondelier
would see it in real life - we call
this the 'matter' side, and it's a
pre-rendered environment. Then
you could enter in the ship's
information system - we called this
the 'data' side, and it was a full
realtime, flyable environment. It
enabled you to track the way
information flows through the ship;
if you like, a VR of the ship. This
turned out to be a bridge too far, so
we dropped it, but there are still a
few minor artefacts from it around,
such as the sculpture chamber,
which is a sculpture of a giant SCSI
cable. Entry to the data side is now
an unexplained phenomenon. We're
thinking of building the data side on
the Web and then putting hooks
between them - we'd publish a
software patch, and when you did
the appropriate things on the CD,
you'd enter the data side through
the Web. Or we may do a totally
new project...

Edge: Will you focus on the Web
after Starship Titanic comes out?
DA: we want to build the equivalent
of the 'Hitch-hiker's Guide' in an
online environment as an
information service - a guide to the
Net, but covering everything else.
It would be like having field
researchers, or embedded guides.
We'd create characters, like a help-
ful taxi driver, which would use our
developing speech technology. The
great thing then is that we could
have a small team of writers
in-house who would be monitoring
conversation traffic day-by-day and
adding more conversation rules.

Edge: Take us through the game ...
DA: You start in Your Lovely Home,
which you can explore a bit. For
example, you can see a PC with
some CD-ROMs next to it. Two of
these cause the machine to crash if
you put them in the drive, but if you
put the Starship Titanic one in, the
starship itself comes crashing into
your living room. The first character
you meet is the DoorBot. One of the
complications we've created in the
game is three dials, which indicate
each robot character's current state
of mind. Each one has different
settings - its memory either works
or not, and it's either optimistic or
pessimistic. so there are four
versions of every response they
make. For example, the BarBot
will either be telling the truth or
lying, charming or belligerent.
The DeskBot will either be fawning
or very unpleasant, as well as
gossipy or terse.
At the bottom of the screen you
have your personal Electronic Thing,
or PET. This has five modes which
govern things like conversations
and summoning the Bots, and
storing things you find in the rooms.
You can store chevron codes - each
room has a unique one. If you want
to send anything anywhere, you
have to use the succubus, which
is kind of like the vacuum tubes
they used to have in old department
stores. The Succubus uses my voice,
totally untreated.

Edge: What is the overall aim of
the game?
DA: You start off in Third Class, and
have to earn upgrades to First Class.
At the beginning, you can see a lot
of things which you can't get hold
of. The first upgrade you get very
easily, but you have to talk your
way into the second one. There are
several puzzles - for example, one
involves putting the ship's parrot in
the succubus; if you don't send it
somewhere, it flies off. When you
grab it, it sheds a feather, which
you'll need. In the First Class bar,
you'll have to help the BarBot make
a cocktail by finding the ingredients.
In the restaurant, you must fight the
maitre d' to get a table.

Edge: What formats will your ganie
come out on?
DA: The first version is for the PC,
but we will do a Mac one. All Macs
are about to start shipping with DVD
drives, and we're thinking of doing a
hybrid Mac/PC DVD version. At the
moment it's on three CDs, but even
so, we've got data budget problems.
There's something like 250Mb
common between each of the CDs.

Edge: Have you enjoyed making
the transition from writer to games
developer with The Digital Village?
DA: From my point of view, I've
been involved with TV, stage and
radio. The book was such a success
that it determined my involvement
in other media. Writing was not what
1 set out to do. If you're a writer, no
matter how successful you are,
there's not much you can do: you
have to go to someone else's
production company. so I thought
it would be nice to have my own.
The aim of the company is
to become an online
purveyor of entertainment
and information.

https://retrocdn.net/images/9/9d/Edge_UK_057.pdf

**Aram Sinnreich interviews Douglas Adams**
Aram Sinnreich interviewed Douglas Adams in 1998, ostensibly to discuss the release of his new video game, Starship Titanic. The interview covered a broad range of subjects, mostly relating to the transformation of media and culture in the internet age.

Let's start with the Infocom game.
Right.
Now, that was your first excursion into new media, correct?
That's right, yeah.
And I played one or two of their games, Suspended I think I've played, and Zork.
I can't remember, but those ones I particularly remember.
And they were great.
And so I worked with them on doing the Hitchhiker game and really enjoyed it.
It was great fun because you're constructing a kind of virtual conversation that goes on
between the player and the game.
And at its best it could be really involving and very engaging.
So then what happened in the mid '80s, graphics started to come along.
And to begin with, they were really not very good.
They kill off text games.
I said, "Well, I think I'll just sort of go off and get on with my day job."
So then the graphics get much better.
You see games like sort of Mist coming out where the graphic realization of these sort
of fantastical worlds is wonderful.
And so I thought, "Well, that's terrific."
But there's nothing in it that has the same kind of compelling or the same sort of engaging quality,
I felt, as the other text adventure games.
So I thought, "Well, basically I've got to go bring them together."
And everybody said, "Well, that's nonsense.
That's some madness."
So I thought, "Oh, well, that's good.
Nobody else is having any of that."
And so then it's a question of making--I mean, it's got to be sort of brought a long way
up to date and sort of take advantage of all of this and a much more powerful technology
and the fact you can do sound and so on.
So we constructed--I mean, we wrote about--over a period of a year, about 10,000 lines of dialogue.
Right.
So that--
Which is not just sentences, but snippets of sentences.
That's right.
It's a mixture.
I mean, some are sentences and paragraphs, but others are all sort of modular so they
can sort of be assembled on the fly by the conversation engine.
So although it has 10,000 responses, in effect, it's actually many times more than that.
And so that was--it was a very sort of iterative process, whereby you need to do one script
and try it out and then you record it and see how it works in the software and realize
it's only covered sort of 1% of the things you need to cover.
So we get together and do another pass and another pass and another pass over a period
of a year.
You know, that sort of came out with 10,000 lines of dialogue.
It's about 16 hours of pre-recorded speech.
And this is how many writers working on it?
Three.
Myself and Neil Richardson and Michael Bywater.
And essentially what--to begin with, you know, we each took a couple of characters each just
to sort of get it fleshed out.
But then, you know, I would get together with a lot of the others.
So you had the whole infrastructure of the game mapped out.
Oh, yeah.
Oh, yes, yes.
But inevitably, as you get into developing it, you know, things start to sort of have
repercussions, which means you've got to change this to fit with that and this to change with--
Right.
--and so on and so forth.
But I think the--I mean, the process was, you know, I came up with a game to begin with,
sort of the sort of basic strategy and the basic idea and the basic concept, and wrote
kind of one level of detail of that.
And then I got together with Michael Bywater, and he and I did it again to another level
of detail.
Then I took it again and did it to, you know, a third level of detail.
And then when it came to doing the actual dialogue writing, which was quite a few months
later, as I said, then it was three of us, me, Michael Bywater, and Neil Richardson.
And, you know, it was a huge, huge task.
And it kind of gives--I mean, the fact that, you know, we each took a character, but then
having done that character, you know, we would each sit in on sort of rewrites of each other's
characters and so on.
So it--
So nobody had kind of an uber say over the whole project?
No.
Did you have veto power?
Sorry?
Did you--
Oh, yeah.
No, no.
I mean, it's my--you know, it's basically sort of my project.
Since your name is going to be on it.
That's right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Though towards the end, I have to say, you know, I think I was practically banned from
the programmers room, because every time I'd go in and say, "Hey, I've just had an idea.
Why don't we put in a bit whereby--" and they'd say, "No, go away.
We've got to get this finished."
I could have just endlessly fiddled with it.
Yeah, yeah.
So, let's see.
Global Village.
Digital Village.
Digital Village.
Oops.
Digital Village is your personal development company?
Not exactly.
I mean, it's a--
It doesn't exist purely to sort of promote my work.
Though, in effect, in this early stage of it, that's more or less what it's doing.
But its aim is to be a digital media and communications company.
Mostly content development, or--?
Mostly.
Mostly.
But we would also like-- we would like to develop content and also to publish other
content.
I mean, the thing is that, as we all know, within a few years, all the various ways in
which we sort of communicate and entertain and inform ourselves and each other are all,
in the end, coming down some kind of digital pipe towards us.
Sure.
So, it's a question of being people who are sort of publishers in that pipe and providers
in that pipe.
And as far as I'm-- I mean, see, the way it works, from my point of view, it's like this.
When I started out, I was doing radio and television and stage and all sorts of different
things.
And then, because of the success of that damn book, it ended up that I was just writing
books.
And it was fine to begin with, but after a while, I began to think, hang on, I'm just
sitting in a room typing, you know, and I actually wanted more fun than this.
And-- but my problem is, you know, if I decide, OK, I'd like to do a TV series or I'd like
to do a movie or I'd like to do a CD-ROM or whatever, then I kind of have to go to somebody
else's production company, which is a problem.
I mean, well, it may or may not be a problem, but I mean, you can never be so--
It's a problem for anyone in the media, I think.
What's that?
Well, very few people have, you know, an entire production company, you know, at their hands
anyway.
Right, yeah.
So, I don't think--
What I wanted to do was to have a regular infrastructure of people that I could sort
of work with and so that I could-- so that I could develop more ideas than I could necessarily
do just as an author sort of sitting working by myself.
Now, from the company's point of view, their-- the way it works is that because, you know,
one of-- our primary sort of focus is in the new media and is in the particular-- the online
side.
What it means is if I do or essentially continue to do what I was doing before but with greater
support and sort of greater range, whether it's a book, whether it's a CD-ROM, whether
it's a movie, whether it's a television show or whatever it is, each of those projects
will then have a sort of foot very solidly in the online world.
And it's very, very clear that the best way of promoting stuff happening in the online
world is to do stuff very publicly in the traditional media.
Right.
And of course CD-ROM now kind of counts as a traditional medium because it's simply one
in which we still ship the bits welded to atoms.
And--
That's an interesting definition.
Well, there's another definition somebody came up with the other day that when you deliver
stuff electronically, you know, over the web or whatever, you're just-- you're stripping
off the protons and neutrons and just delivering the electrons, which I quite like.
So what does that say about world traditions?
About all traditions.
Well, that's just transferring bits.
But not, you know, tacked to any physical media.
Does that make it superior in some way to recorded media?
I'm not really talking about superior.
I mean, it's just sort of-- it's just different.
I mean, I think all the different-- you know, all the different media are different.
And I mean, that's what's interesting about the movement, what's interesting about moving
from one medium to another.
And I think, you know, saying one thing is better than another is really a waste of time.
I was actually trying to just kind of steer you into your spiel about how interactivity
is the status quo before--
Oh, OK.
All right.
Yeah, well, I mean, what-- I guess the thing is here, I mean, you hear a lot of voices
sort of raised saying, ooh, you know, all this interactive stuff, you know, it's not
like sort of proper reading, you know, this is-- people should be encouraged to sort of
read books because all this new stuff is bad for them.
Well, on the one hand, I'm very keen to advocate people writing books.
I think the idea that this is some kind of terrible sort of end of civilization as you
know it is just a load of baloney.
This was when books first came along, or indeed sort of writing or printing.
You know, there were voices which said, ooh, this is all terribly bad and it's going to
kill the art of storytelling.
You know, if you put stuff on a page, then it's killing it.
And, you know, it's another argument.
But I just think it was also a wrong argument.
But I sense-- I mean, the point here that you're trying to get me to make is that, you
know, we have this word interactivity now, which is, you know, sort of buzzword for the
last few years.
And the reason we have that word is because we now have things that aren't interactive.
In the past, everything was interactive and we didn't need a word-- a special word for
it.
But now that we have radio and television and movies and so on, which just sit there
and do their stuff however you respond to it, it's completely non-interactive.
We therefore have to have a word for media that come along and are interactive in the
way that all media used to be.
So, while I wouldn't pretend that interactive CD-ROM equates to, you know, an oral medium,
nevertheless it does actually model some important aspects of that.
And reverses what's been a trend in media for--
Yeah, exactly.
--since Gutenberg.
Yes.
All right.
What are your views on Millennium Fever?
If any.
I think it's very simple.
I mean, it's a completely arbitrary measure of-- you know, we happen to have five fingers
on each hand, so ten is an important number.
And so multiple ten numbers of rotations that we've done around the world since a completely
arbitrary date in the first place.
Because, you know, even if you happen to subscribe to the Christian religion, then one thing
we know is that the first of January zero was not when Christ was born.
Right.
So, probably not by several years.
So, it's also a completely-- and when we sort of have pedants say, "Well, it's actually
the new millennium," it doesn't really start on the first of January 2000.
It's the first of January 2001.
You're completely missing the point because all of this is completely arbitrary anyway.
What we're celebrating is the same thing, you know, when you have a car and the first
time you pass 10,000 miles and all the digits change.
And, "Woo!
That's good.
That was fun."
So, we're celebrating the fact that all digits change and that's all we're celebrating.
That's fine.
Good excuse for a party.
But, I mean, I think, you know, you go to the-- all the people say, "No, we're not going
to celebrate the millennium now until, you know, 31st of December year 2000."
Basically, you'll know that those are parties full of pedants.
You know, if you want to go to a party inhabited by pedants, well, I've got plenty of things
to do.
Don't you think that the kind of collective excitement about it creates some kind of zeitgeist?
I guess so.
I mean, that's true enough.
That if enough people get excited about something, even if that thing is completely fictitious,
then it takes on a life of its own.
And, but, it's hard to know what-- it's funny, we've kind of gone into the habit of sort
of dividing things up into sort of neat periods.
We all know what we mean when we talk about the '60s.
Right.
And it's kind of incredibly neat and useful that the Beatles split up at the end of 1969
because that kind of therefore defines the end of the '60s.
Right.
Although pedants will argue it was Altamont or whatever.
Right.
Yeah, OK, right, yeah.
But, well, I-- whatever it was, I mean, there is a clear thing on the '60s end and the '70s
started and everybody started wearing flares, which we're trying to forget about now.
But I think that-- I suppose, you know, moving into a new century, we're kind of constantly
trying to mind people's minds on what is new, which is, I think, quite a good thing.
It's very interesting having a daughter who's nearly four and thinking, well, I am essentially
a 20th century person.
She is essentially a 21st century person, which kind of gives me a bit of a shiver, you know.
Yeah, I worry about the generation gap between me and my kids, too.
What kids have you got?
I don't have any yet.
OK, all right.
[laughter]
It gives me pause before I can see them.
But I think that, you know, that's a very valid point, is that, you know, any children
that I have will view me as a relative of past age, if only by arbitrary measurements.
And so much has changed in terms of the way that, you know, our culture is organized
in terms of digital media and everything.
What can you say about the 20th century?
I mean, the 20th century really is...
One of the things that's interesting, of course, is that the 20th century is the age of new
physics, because, you know, the special theory of relativity came out in 1905, which is kind
of a defining moment in all kinds of ways.
I suspect that, you know, if one wants to make these kind of arbitrary judgments, that
this is the 20th century, it's been a century in which physics has been the queen of the
sciences.
I think the 21st century will be a century in which biology is the queen of the sciences,
because we've now finally...
In sequencing the human genome.
Well, I think that's absolutely part of it.
But I think it goes a little bit more than that.
I think it's up until now, we've proceeded to investigate nature by taking things apart
to see how they work.
And that's allowed us to arrive at the sort of fundamental principles, fundamental particles,
and sort of the simplest things.
And what a computer is enabled to do is to kind of reverse that process and start putting
things together to see how they work.
Because a previously...
The process was something that was very, very hard for us to understand or to envisage.
It's curious to think that it's not that long ago we didn't even know how a horse could
put its feet down, in what order.
It was only when you get a camera, a video, a cine camera, that you can actually stop
frames and say, "Oh, okay, that's the order in which they..."
It's an extraordinary thing.
We could never, in centuries, figure out what was the order in which a galloping horse
put its hooves down.
An extraordinary idea.
You'd think somebody would lay down some wet sand or something.
I don't know.
I think, would that...
No, you'd just see the pattern, not the order.
Yeah, you'd see the pattern and not the order, necessarily.
Put it this way, if it was as easy as that, I think somebody would have done it.
Right.
But still, by the same token, what the computer is enabled us to do is to see process at work,
and to see growth at work.
I mean, we've suddenly come to an understanding of life sciences that wasn't available to
this report, and we're seeing how evolutionary processes work, and seeing that they're profoundly
simple, even though they give rise to enormous complexity.
And so I think that biology previously has been almost invisible to us, and of all the
extraordinary phenomena we've examined in the past, we've always sort of thought of
bodies, whether they're sort of animal or human, as being...
We haven't actually been sufficiently curious about them, because the order of complexity
involved in them is so far beyond our ability to apprehend that it's just been a kind of
descriptive science.
Now that we have these digital tools that enable us to model the life processes, suddenly
they've become visible to us, and processes have become visible to us.
And I think that's...
So, you know, biology suddenly becomes accessible to us as something we can actually understand
and do something meaningful with.
I'm sure we'll make catastrophically appalling errors, just as we did with, you know, atomic
physics.
But we'll survive, and we'll get through, and we'll have learned something interesting.
Maybe without our genetic sequence entirely intact.
Yeah, yeah.
Do you see that as being a point of departure for a work of fiction?
In the future, maybe?
Well, I don't know.
I mean, the thing is, I tend not to...
I guess the sort of science fiction I write tends not to be sort of, if you like, predictive
fiction.
I mean, it's more...
I mean, every now and then I wonder whether I should write a sort of work of pure science
fiction, as opposed to sort of using it as a vehicle for comedy.
But I haven't kind of done it yet, and I kind of feel a bit nervous about whether I'll be
able to do it.
So, no, I mean, I tend...
I mean, it's...
The ideas I tend to go for sound more like sketch ideas rather than science fiction ideas.
Or social commentary, I'm afraid.
I mean, like, Hitchhiker sort of started out with the idea of somebody who, you know, is
trying to protect his house from being knocked down to make way for a new road, and then
exactly the same thing happens to the planet.
So it's that kind of deal, rather than about some piece of science.
So, you know, my interest in science then tends to sort of color what goes on inside that.
Back to Digital Village.
Do you see the relationship with Simon & Schuster going on indefinitely, or is this kind of
a one-shot deal?
I think we're taking it on a case-by-case basis.
And you said you see potentially the company developing work by other artists.
Has anyone approached you?
Have you approached anyone yet?
Oh, well, we've got plenty of opportunities.
I mean, our challenge is to make sure we don't try and, you know, because we're a very young,
small company, and, you know, two years ago we didn't employ anybody at all.
Now we've employed enough people to create this game over the last two years, and it's
actually been a phenomenal achievement when I say that, because, not to congratulate myself,
but the running of this project, the managing of this project has been the most phenomenal
task, and that's been done largely by our CEO, a guy called Robbie Stamp, who's really
sort of taken this on his shoulders and done a magnificent job.
But managing the growth of a company and saying, "Okay, we're going to do this, and we're
not going to do that, we're not going to do that, maybe we'll do this," is actually
very, it's kind of very tricky, because, you know, you can, you only, you take one misstep
and, you know, do one thing that stretches you beyond your ability to control or manage
it or deal with it.
You know, the company just dies just like that, so we have, so, you know, exactly the
strategy from here on forward, it's kind of hard to know at the moment.
We'll almost certainly be doing another game based on Hitchhiker to go with the movie.
I didn't know there was a movie.
Oh, yeah, yes, there's finally going to be a movie.
Well, the production vehicle is a caravan backed by Disney.
The director is Jay Roach, who did Austin Powers.
Great movie.
And so it's all looking pretty set there at the moment, and hopefully it's going to be
a movie of Dirt Gently as well.
I guess the script has been out there for 20 years, right?
Just kind of bouncing back and forth.
Well, in fact, I recently discovered that there was a version of the script that I didn't
write, but was written by somebody else after I kind of departed from Ivan Reitman.
And, you know, that script has been out there for ages, and I think there's probably a reason
why it never got made.
But, no, I'm actually writing a whole new script, which, after having done lots of different
versions of it, this one is actually going.
Yeah, well, this one is going to go much more back towards where it actually started from,
rather than...
Over the years, I've tried to change it in all kinds of ways to move it away from what
it was and to be more like a movie.
And I suddenly think, no, no, no, it worked as it was for a reason, so let's try and stick
very closely to that.
One last question.
The ownership of Titanic, just a fortuitous coincidence, or did you anticipate Titanic
fever?
Well, I mean, the answer to that, I'm afraid, is terribly, terribly obvious.
How could anybody have anticipated that?
I mean, certainly Paramount didn't, or they wouldn't have tried to sell off half of their
ownership of Fox, you know, because everybody thought it was going to be a complete disaster.
We weren't even aware of the movie until about a year ago, when gradually word came out that
this movie was happening, that it was going to be a disaster because it was overspending
by an order of magnitude and it wasn't working and so on and so forth.
So people said to us, you know, "Yeah, there's this thing coming, are you sure you shouldn't
change the name of your product?"
And I sort of said, "No, let things fall where they fall."
So it didn't really give you any fears or make you take pause?
No, no.
I mean, other people said I should, but the point is, I mean, I think you do what you
do for the reasons you do it, and if you change it because of, you know, what somebody...
It's funny, when I did this book years ago, The Meaning of Lift, do you remember that?
It's funny because I wrote that with a friend of mine called John Lloyd, and he and I had
been looking for a title for ages and ages and ages, couldn't figure out a title, and
eventually, eventually we came upon one that we both agreed on, which was The Meaning of
Lift.
And so at last, that was great, that was terrific.
And I remember about three or four days later, I happened to be talking to Terry Jones on
the phone, and he said, yeah, and he said, "We've just come up with a title for our new
film, it's going to be Monty Python's Meaning of Life."
And I said, "Oh, oh no."
And he said, "What's that?"
And I said, "Well, we call it The Meaning of Lift."
And he said, "Oh, well, it doesn't matter."
Yeah, we got there first, and he said, "Oh, well, it doesn't matter."
And it's funny, a lot of people said, "Oh, it's going to cause all sorts of confusion
in the public," and of course it didn't.
It really didn't at all, you know.
And, you know, if you...
If we'd listened to people who said, "Oh, you've got to change it to this or the other."
So, you know, Catch-22 was originally named Catch-11.
Catch-18, oh, was it?
Catch-11, I thought.
Oh, well, no, I heard him on the radio the other day saying Catch-18.

https://ia801304.us.archive.org/14/items/ASDA042198/Aram%20interviews%20Douglas%20Adams%204-21-98.ogg

**Starship Titanic 25th anniversary**
https://www.alisonhumphrey.com/2023/03/starship-titanic-25th-anniversary.html
Friday, March 24, 2023

Forget ChatGPT. A quarter of a century ago, a point-and-click CD-ROM adventure game from Douglas Adams featured a groundbreaking conversation engine called "SpookiTalk", which allowed you to chat with actual robots.

To celebrate the release of Starship Titanic 25 years ago this April, here's a panel discussion with members of the dev team which I hosted as part of my York U course Writing for Games and Interactive Media this time last year. 

March 2022 was the 25th anniversary of the game's original deadline whooshing by, and as I'd actually worked at The Digital Village back in the day, I figured I'd introduce my old colleagues to my first-year Media Arts students, none of whom were alive when the game was released, so we could all feel old together.

In preparation, I assigned for homework J.C. Herz's 1998 New York Times review, PushingUpRoses' 2014 YouTube review, and the following brief audio interview of Douglas Adams by Aram Sinnreich on the release of the new game: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6MQSblPIrk

**Michael Bywater Interview**
What was the process of writing for Starship Titanic?

I’d like to say it was controlled chaos but actually it was just chaos.
Douglas and I did most of the work sitting on the deck at TDV’s oRces in
Camden, looking out over London and most of the time laughing
maniacally at things which could never go into the game. We also spent a
lot of time on soOware. Partly the soOware to run the game, and partly
on the soOware we were going to use to write it. &ere was, of course, no
soOware suitable for the multiple-path structure of a game like ST or
indeed any game. You inevitably end up with a sort of one-to-one
mapping, by which I mean the only way of describing the thing is by
doing it. &e idea of a “script” for the implementers is – or was then; it
may have changed – a sort of combination of fantasy and black art. I
suppose if I came at it now, I’d use either Tinderbox from Eastgate
Systems, or perhaps something like C-Map Tools, either of which will let
you describe conditional paths between various elements of the game.
But in the end anything like this is, I think, largely done as an iterative
process. You write out a sort of imaginary “game transcript” , then try to
implement it, test it, see where the holes are and the bits that don’t work,
then repeat the process again and again and again. And of course a lot of
stuK that you want to go in can’t. Either the underlying game engines
can’t do it, or it’s too obscure, or the diegetic topography is just too huge
to be managable, or some other constraint kicks in. We ended up with
about 15% of the gamescape we originally wanted and of course every
time we pared something back, Isabel and Oscar, the artists responsible
for the look of the thing, would come up with something indescribably
wonderful which we’d immediately want to put in, so back to square one.
&e other thing was the storytelling itself. It’s really easy to get
sidetracked either by the gamescape itself or by designing endish
puzzles. We knew (from some research done at Infocom) that a lot of
players got huge pleasure from simply wandering around the gamescape
so they had to be able to do that. You can’t lock them in a room and say
“You can’t move on unless you solve this puzzle” but at the same time we
didn’t want to end up with a Zork II situation, where a substantial
proportion of players never got to one particular area in the game world,
but didn’t seem to care; they were perfectly happy pottering about but
never nished the game.
We also went in with the great intention of No Fatal Errors. In other
words, there was nothing you could do that irrevocably would ruin your
chances of nishing the thing. I don’t remember if we managed that or
not.
But the trickiest thing was to keep the focus on the game as a
well-rounded experience. What tends to get lost is narrative. You get this
wonderful gamescape and some superb puzzles and all sorts of
marvellous idiosyncracies – the various robots, including the singing
gondolier, the BarBot and Nobby the LiOBot for example – but in the
end I don’t think the actual story worked. We had a very complicated
backstory about Leovinus and nancial scams and insurance fraud but
you shouldn’t ever make understanding the backstory a condition of the
main story’s making sense, and I think we fell down there a bit. There
was one iteration of the story where I felt we absolutely had it just right.
I’m probably biased because the idea of Titania was mine and I wanted

her to be the focus of the story; the game would then become a version
of the Pygmalion myth, and the object would be to reanimate Titania
who would then Sood the whole thing with music. And the music would
be the “life-force” , if you like, that made everything whole again. But we
rather lost sight of that and you ended up solving puzzles because there
was nothing else to do. Film structure – which doesn’t wholly apply to
games, of course – is quite clear that you have to have a lockout in a
story. Either a time lock – the ticking bomb, if you like – or an action
lock, where you simply run out of options. I don’t think we had either, in
the end, and that weakened the game.
A lot of the stuff I really did like was in the background. I did a preview

website of great intricacy, with a marvellous section on the starship-
building town of Blerontis written by Neil Richards, who is a genius and

the funniest man I ever worked with. One day I want to go back and do
something on Blerontis itself, which was a prototypical semi-steampunk
city in the sense that they had by some unexplained historical accident
this extraordinary starship-building technology but everything else was
locked into the Victorian steam age. I hadn’t read either Ian McLeod’s
e
Light Ages or China Miéville’s Perdido Street Station because neither of
them had been published, but Blerontis was a similar sort of thing. One
overriding superb technology and the rest of it ossied. Neil and I aso
did
e Blerontis Times which was their newspaper... whether it made it
into the nished product I can’t remember, but Neil’s extension of the
steampunk idea into the Classied Advertising section was a masterpiece.
&ese guys had heard of advertising but had never seen it, so they had no
real clue. Neil gave all the companies these terrible little mottos or
jungles and I remember &e Chicken Supply Company of Blerontis: For
All Your Chicken Supplies. If Your Chicken’s Not There / You're Damn
Right We Care was their jingle. And we had hours of slightly hysterical
laughter over Von Dönitz Menswear: Menswear. For Men. &e Shop
Where The Sales Clerks Like To Say “Good Morning Sir.” Their jingle
wsa
Von Dönitz
Von Dönitz
Von Dönitz
For men.
Well you can see we found our level with that stuff. Whether it will ever
be reincarnated I don’t know, but I hope so.

**Steve Mretzky Interview**
Steve Mretzky is very well known in the history of interactive fiction,
not just for creating the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy's Tetraventure game,
but also such classics as Planet Halt, Station Fall, Leather Goddesses of Phobos, and Zork Zero,
for Infocom, and is now the principal game designer for Worldwinner Inc.
in Massachusetts, isn't it?
Yes. Do we want to talk about Starship Titanic?
Go on.
That was another one, more or less exactly the same.
I got hauled into Digital Village in the March following the December
in which absolutely finally the complete script and specifications of the game
had to be delivered to Simon & Schuster, who once again were involved in this.
They had learned nothing.
You could do two things.
May he rest in peace with Douglas.
One was you could work with Douglas,
and the other was you could set deadlines.
But you couldn't work with Douglas and set deadlines.
It was like having tea and no tea.
You couldn't work with Douglas and you could set deadlines.
You just couldn't work with Douglas and meet deadlines.
Meet deadlines.
It didn't happen.
So by the time it was three months past the absolute final lockdown game design,
and nothing had happened,
Douglas' interest began to get aroused in this.
And he said, "You've got to come in because I think--
Just a few loose ends. Can you come and just collaborate on the few loose ends?
It'll be quite fun, and we can sit out on this nice deck in Camden Town
and have drinks and we'll just tie up these little things."
So he'd go there and--
"What have you got?"
"Well, we've got the script."
"Oh, yeah? What is it?"
"Well, the script for Starship Titanic at that point said,
'There is this starship, the Titanic.'"
"There you are.
Well, it all unfolds from there, doesn't it?"
"Yes, I can see."
So it was just a question of just expanding a bit.
So we then had a happy fortnight sitting on the deck
discussing what software we would use to write the script in.
We tried various things.
At one stage, I think we were writing the game plan in Microsoft Excel,
which was rather strange.
Then we wrote--
That's a fine tool. We use that for design all the time.
Well, God, we were ahead of our time then.
We used FileMaker and wrote FileMaker macros to do it.
We did something else. I can't remember what it was.
We had various outliners.
You probably remember the various iterations that--
It went through MacAuthor at one point.
It went through MacAuthor, yes.
Do you remember a product called Brainstorm?
Brainstorm? We had Brainstorm.
And we did recursive clones.
And that was insane because that was our bureaucracy.
You'd type something in, and it would contain 20 cloned words.
So an outline that was perhaps 200 lines long,
and you'd type in something else, and it--
This thing would be suddenly 40,000 lines,
and you couldn't tell where you were
because you'd had a clone of the word "and,"
and it would see the word "and,"
and so it would link to--
Ah, nice.
Yes, MacAuthor. That was great.
It was a word processor where you'd have to set up the entire style sheet
before it would let you type a word,
and then you'd type everything,
and then you'd type the--
We should have done that in bold.
That was great.
And it had a proprietary file format,
which wasn't even actually binary.
I think it was sort of quaternary or something.
Nobody had the remotest idea what it was.
And the interesting thing about Brainstorm,
which--about MacAuthor,
was it had been designed by a bloke who was a database programmer,
which seemed a pretty good start.
But he was a friend--
And they keep saying they're going to bring it back.
Yeah, we did that.
We had it in all sorts of things.
But this was the pressing concern,
getting the right software to design it in.
But the reason that cropped up,
because somebody in this room, who should be nameless,
we decided--Douglas decided he found this thing called Metropolis,
which was an object-oriented authoring system.
Quiet and cheap seats.
Hm?
It's a new quiet and cheap seat.
Yes.
And this was largely driven, I think it's fair to say,
by Douglas, who thought that this would be a system
which we could just sit down and say,
"Right, let's have a parrot."
And we'd, "Oh, we'll have a flock of starlings."
"We'll make a flock of starlings."
"And we'll have an extractor fan."
And then somehow, by some magic,
if you chuck the flock of starlings into the extractor fan,
they come out a starling jam with feathers,
which was slightly beyond the capabilities of Metropolis.
Other things that were slightly beyond the capabilities of Metropolis
were things like running for more than five minutes without crashing.
And things like that.
So somebody in this room sitting, who I won't point out,
said, "Well, what we need to do
"is we need to rewrite the entire game engine ourselves,
"starting from scratch."
And I thought, "Good Lord, it's like bureaucracy.
"It's just like Timothy Focombe."
But it all worked out in the end.
But there again, something I would love to see
is the implementation of the original,
the final iteration, do you remember, for Starship Titanic.
It wouldn't have been 100 kilobytes.
We had a self-assembling statue.
I think we had the complete art of fugue in there
with a complete orchestra which you could play it on.
And then the mystic story, I think,
was the implementation of the third-class recreation room,
which contained a chair.
Third-class recreation, you could sit down in the chair.
That was quite funny.
- Exploration.
Walking around the game universe.
And then there's also eliciting,
as you do that,
what the narrative may be.
'Cause you start--
Hitchhiker was unusual,
because most people who played it
started with a vague idea
of kind of what was going to go on.
There's a sense of what the universe is.
There's a sense of the direction
this thing is going to take.
You know, what is the object of the game?
That's for me to know and you to find out.
But that's how you interrogate life.
You know, here we all are.
What is the object of the game?
Given that nobody gets off the planet alive.
- That was actually one of the things
about Starship Titanic
was that we actually kind of hid
the point of Starship Titanic
and made a big deal,
which made it very tricky
in interviews or in telling.
We'd go, "So, what's the point of the game?"
We're going, "Well, we don't really want
to give any spoilers."
- Yes.
"Well, what's the point of the game?"
- I can't remember.

**Douglas Adams Interview**
It does seem to me to be extraordinary that the computer industry, which of all industries in the world,
is the most focused on the future and how the future can develop, where are we going,
is the one industry that failed to predict that the century was going to end.
It doesn't give you a great deal of confidence, does it?
The other thing, of course, we failed to predict, I mean, going back about five or six years ago,
was the coming of the World Wide Web, which, of course, now is the computer industry.
But no, I think it was... Yes, we certainly should have avoided it.
It makes you worry about, you know, the things...
There are other things we know are going to happen one day, I mean, like that the sun will explode.
I know it's four billion years away, but, you know, I wish I had a little bit more confidence
that we would actually get our act together before then and find some other way of sort of dealing with things.
Well, the problem is it's going to cost us the world, you know, trillions of dollars, perhaps.
Yes, absolutely.
We really need to be more cautious next century.
We don't know, of course, one has here such widely diverging claims as to what's going to happen, you know, on January the 1st.
You do know that in China it's not going to be a problem.
Do you know this thing they've done in China?
No.
Which is that all the airline chiefs are required by law to travel by air on January the 1st.
Oh, to fly that night, yes.
[laughter]
We've probably got quite a lot of airline chiefs.
Yeah, yeah.
But talk about building a better mousetrap.
You've built a better book, in other words, Starship Titanic, which is an interactive.
That's right.
You've got all those voices, there's hundreds of thousands of lives.
What happened? Was it successful?
Well, first of all, I've never claimed that it's a better type of book any more than television is a better type of radio.
I mean, I think one medium sits next to another rather than supplants it.
So I think there are all sorts of things that the interactive medium can do that books can't.
But at the end of the day, there's one little bit of arithmetic that I can't help but notice,
which is that many, many, many years ago I did a game based on The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy,
and that was in the days of text-only adventure games.
And it was myself and Steve Moretzky who wrote it together, the two of us, over a period of about six months.
So two people, six months, and we sold them for about, you know, $40 a pop.
That's American dollars.
And sold about a third of a million of them.
Starship Titanic took about 20 or 30 people two years and sold for about 40 bucks a pop.
And we will probably end up selling about a third of a million of them.
And you think, the arithmetic is slightly off here, isn't it?
Yes.
So it's again not a novel.
It's interactive fiction, it's a novel, it's a game, it's whatever you want to call it.
So it's a natural medium, you think?
I think so.
I mean, at the moment, it's still very, very technological in the following sense of the word technology,
that technology is stuff that doesn't quite work yet.
I've noticed.
No, you see, the thing is how Bran Ferren actually makes this point.
He says that a chair used to be technology when we were still trying to figure it out.
Now we've got a chair down.
We no longer think of it as technology.
We just think of it as a chair.
But computers are still technology because we're still wrestling with it.
So it's still being invented and we're still trying to work out how it works.
So, okay, imagine that the technology has ceased to be stupid and is really, really effective,
and you're still writing in about 2020.
What might this new medium be like?
Well, I think the thing is that if you cast all this forward, then something fundamentally different will change,
which is that at the moment we tend to see these games, these interactive fictions, whatever you want to call them,
as being things that happen between a player and a machine, a prepared machine, a programmed machine.
Whereas I think what will happen is gradually the machine comes out of it
or merely becomes the medium through which other people play with other people.
It becomes like a kind of forum where role-playing or whatever it is.
I'm sure that there's a world of game interaction that you or I almost wouldn't recognize
because it's going to be so different from anything we know now.
Would it be almost as if you're there with the characters rather than there with the machine?
Yeah, I think so. I think so.
I think the machines really -- it's time for the machines to disappear.
We've had enough of these machines.
We want them to go away, do their job out of sight.
I mean, many, many years ago, I remember we were all supposed to get very excited about electric motors.
We were all meant to be electric motor literate,
and you would see pictures of sort of the house of the future, which have a giant electric motor up in the roof.
And there would be belts going around, driving machines,
and everybody would have to sort of think about torque values and all this kind of stuff.
But none of that happened because essentially the electric motor disappears into everything we use.
We never think about electric motors. We never see them.
And that's what the computer's got to do.
It's got to disappear into all the things that we use and make them smarter and more intelligent
and just get the hell out of the way.

---

Let's start with the Infocom game.
Right.
Now, that was your first excursion into new media, correct?
That's right, yeah.
And I played one or two of their games, Suspended I think I've played, and Zork.
But I mean, those ones I particularly remember.
And they were great.
And so I worked with them on doing the Hitchhiker game and really enjoyed it.
It was great fun because you're constructing a kind of virtual conversation that goes on
between the player and the game.
And at its best it could be really involving and very engaging.
So then what happened in the mid-80s, graphics started to come along.
And to begin with, they were really not very good.
So I think they kill off text games.
I think I'll just sort of go off and get on with my day job.
So then the graphics get much better.
And you see games like Mists coming out, where the graphic realization of these fantastic
worlds is wonderful.
So I thought, well, that's terrific.
But there's nothing in it that has the same kind of compelling or the same sort of engaging
quality, I felt, as the old-fashioned adventure games.
So I thought, well, basically I've got to bring them together.
And everybody said, well, that was nonsense, that was some madness.
So I thought, oh, well, that's good because nobody else is having a go.
So then it's a question of making-- I mean, it's got to be sort of brought a long way
up to date and sort of take advantage of all of this much more powerful technology and
the fact you can do sound and so on.
So we constructed-- I mean, we wrote about-- over a period of a year, about 10,000 lines
of dialogue.
Right.
So that--
Which is not just sentences, but snippets of sentences.
That's right.
It's a mixture.
I mean, some are sentences and paragraphs, but others are all sort of modular so they
can sort of be assembled on the fly by the conversation engine.
So although it has 10,000 responses, in effect, it's actually many times more than that.
And so that was-- it was a very sort of iterative process, whereby you need to do one script
and try it out and then you record it and see how it works in software.
I realized it's only covered sort of 1% of the things you need to cover.
So we get together and do another pass and another pass and another pass over a period
of a year.
You know, that sort of came out with 10,000 lines of dialogue.
It's about 16 hours of pre-recorded speech.
This is how many writers working on it?
Three.
Myself and Neil Richardson and Michael Bywater.
And essentially what-- to begin with, you know, we each took a couple of characters
each just to sort of get it fleshed out.
But then, you know, I would get together with a lot of the others.
So you had the whole infrastructure of the game mapped out.
Oh yeah.
Oh yes, yes.
But inevitably, as you get into developing it, you know, things start to sort of have
repercussions, which means you've got to change this to fit with that and this to change with
that and so on and so forth.
But I think the-- I mean, the process was, you know, I came up with the game to begin
with and sort of-- the sort of basic strategy and the basic idea and the basic concept.
And wrote kind of one level of detail of that.
And then I got together with Michael Bywater and he and I did it again to another level
of detail.
Then I took it again and did it to, you know, a third level of detail.
And then when it came to doing the actual dialogue writing, which was quite a few months
ago, as I said, then it was three of us, me, Michael Bywater, and Neil Richards.
And you know, it was a huge, huge task.
And it kind of gives-- I mean, the fact that, you know, we each took a character, but then
having done that character, you know, we would each sit in on sort of rewrites of each other's
characters and so on.
So nobody had kind of an uber say over the whole project?
No.
Did you have veto power?
Sorry?
Oh yeah, no, no.
I mean, it's my-- it's basically sort of my project.
Since your name is going to be on it.
That's right, yeah.
Though towards the end, I have to say, you know, I think I was practically banned from
the programmers room because every time I'd go in and say, "Hey, I've just had an idea.
Why don't we put in a bit whereby--" and they'd say, "No, go away.
We've got to get this finished."
I could have just endlessly fiddled with it.
Yeah, yeah.

**25th Anniversary Panel Transcript**
So, welcome everyone to Media Arts Futures Past.
This is the Starship Titanic 25th-wooshiversary webinar, an event hosted by the Department
of Cinema and Media Arts in the School of the Arts, Media, Performance, and Design at
York University.
My name is Alison Humphrey.
I'm a PhD candidate in Cinema and Media Studies, and I'm also teaching a course in Writing
for Games and Interactive Media, which is hosting this panel of esteemed guests.
In the mid-90s, after doing a Master's in Interactive Multimedia at the Royal College
of Art in London, England, I started working at a little startup called The Digital Village,
which was developing its first product, a groundbreaking CD-ROM adventure game by Douglas
Adams called Starship Titanic.
Full disclosure, I got the job the old-fashioned way, through nepotism.
My Uncle Robbie was Chief Executive of the company, which is a perfect segue into introducing
our panel, because he's here with us today, along with several more lovely, intelligent
members of the dev team of Starship Titanic, who have taken time out of their busy schedules
to join us.
So, I'm going to invite them to introduce themselves, stating their role on the game
then, and what they do now, and kind of seeing if there are any links between those two moments
in time.
So, shall we start with you, Robbie?
And I'll ask you to unmute.
Hi, I'm Robbie.
I'm Alison's uncle.
I was the Chief Executive Chairman and Co-Founder of The Digital Village.
So, what was my role on Starship Titanic?
Well, briefly, it was getting the funding, putting the team together.
It was very, very wisely promoting the next personal talk, Emma, to be the producer, who
sort of took the game by the scruff of the neck.
When I set out to do it, when I look back now, I had not a clue what I was letting myself
in for.
Not a clue.
I'd come from a TV production background, and I just had not a clue.
And it remains one of the most exciting working experiences of my entire life, working with
this astonishing team, and getting something which, you know, lasts in cult status over
the - and I'll talk more in a way, sometimes I think my role in the end was bringing in
food parcels over the weekend.
The team were working all the time.
That was why I could show support.
But then young children would go to Tesco's, and I think they couldn't believe how much
crap I was allowing them to buy, because we were bringing all in, all the goodies and
the cake and things, and box sets of Friends videos, and just anything I could think just
to show solidarity on a Sunday for the team who were working unbelievably hard.
We attempted so many things which were groundbreaking back then.
Now what do I do?
I do a number of things, what's maybe relevant for here.
I do a lot of work on artificial intelligence, particularly governance and ethics around
AI.
I'm actually in fact about to start developing a product which uses conversational AI.
So - and I still have a little history podcast business which is about to launch with Stephen
Fry and Joanna Lumley, and a fabulous diverse crew of writers and young actors and performers
from different backgrounds.
So my interest in storytelling stays.
So I do a variety of things, but I suppose the direct link with the game is thinking
still about all of the philosophy and ideas that we shared with Douglas, which involves
a lot of the working I'm thinking I do around AI.
So that's me, briefly.
So we'll go to Emma now.
Thank you.
My name's Emma Westcott.
I was employed at the Digital Village to work as author on Starship Titanic, which really
perplexed me because I wasn't an author and I was working on a game written by an author
and to be called an author just seemed really confusing.
What it actually meant when I found - when I went into the team, what it actually meant
was working with the game design team to deal with creating a variant of the story world
which started off as a script into a playable game.
And so I think one of the things that's quite interesting in a company like the Digital
Village in which most people came from outside of games was this use of techniques and tools
from other media as core bibles for the development of the narrative and the story.
So yeah, I started as author and I ended up as producer, which meant I had - for the last
six months of production, I had the pleasure of making people tea 24 hours a day to help
the remarkable development team sort of finish the game.
And really, I think the connections to what I started with Starship Titanic and what I
do now - now I'm an associate professor of game design at OCAD University in Toronto,
which is an art and design university.
I'm really interested in thinking about how game making can be used to - as a sort of
experimental and expressive form.
I think we've seen in recent years with phenomena like personal games, the game makers are increasingly
looking at the form as a way of telling their stories in a range of ways.
And one of the things that's my great privilege at the moment is to work with students who
are building experimental and personal narratives through game engines and game classes at my
university.
Brilliant, thank you and welcome.
And let's go to Neil next.
Hi, thanks Alison.
Gosh, Amber, that sounds fantastic.
I should say, a lot of us haven't really kept up and this is the first time we've talked
for 20 years maybe about this game.
So there'll be some catching up I expect going on.
So I was hired as a writer to kind of work alongside Douglas, who's notorious for missing
deadlines and not delivering.
And I think my perceived skill as a writer, script editor at the time, coming from TV
and film was that I've taught the same language as Douglas and maybe help him edge something
and get some deliveries done.
So I think that was a two week hire, Robbie, I can't remember.
But anyway, I was still there two years later.
Still trying to get material out of Douglas.
So I worked in TV and film.
I've never worked in interactive before.
The two years I worked on this game is such a lesson in, you know, when you're young,
taking opportunities because it utterly changed my life and the direction that my writing
took.
And since then, I've worked on 30 or 40 games.
You know, for some years, I just lived interactive.
And I was everywhere and all my career was interactive and games.
And I'm still a writer and I'm still incredibly busy.
And I'm still writing games.
So this one two week job that was just a bit of cash, maybe turned into something that
utterly changed my life.
And I think that's kind of such a lesson in anybody in media just sees it when it comes
along.
What a wonderful story.
Thank you.
And let's go to Jason now.
Hi guys.
Yeah, so I'm a computer programmer.
And I got dragged into work on the Starship Titanic.
And I think most of the work I did was actually rolling around on the floor laughing at the
script from Neil, Mike and Douglas.
It was absolutely brilliant, though after a while, we got to the point where nothing
they said was funny anymore, because we'd had so much of it that we just got saturated.
So it took me a few years before I could look back at some of the lines and actually realise
they were funny again.
But it was it was a great time.
And after Starship Titanic, I moved on to Raumschiff Titanic, which was the German version.
So that was quite interesting, trying to get Neil's jokes to work in German.
So that was quite a challenge for us.
And then after that, I moved on to other games companies.
And I've ended up in the big world of Formula One.
So I've moved off into a different form of entertainment now.
Brilliant.
And what I love about this is that we've got, you know, sort of four quadrants of the game
development experience here and different perspectives on what was a very, very common
and intense experience for everybody involved.
So I want to start with the first question, setting the scene that the game was originally
scheduled for release in 1997, a quarter century ago.
But it was delayed and finally launched in April 1998.
In honour of Douglas Adams's famous quote, "I love deadlines.
I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by."
It seemed fitting that we actually mark the 25th whoosh-iversary of that original deadline.
So I'm now going to read another quote by Douglas.
This one from the intro to the Starship Titanic strategy guide, which was bundled with the
game.
Here it is, written by Neil Richards.
And he said in the introduction, he says, "We are about two days from final delivery
of the game.
A lot of people have been saying to me with worried searching looks, how come the CD-ROM
is six months late?
The answer is very simple.
It's because it's a bloody CD-ROM.
That's why.
All CD-ROMs are six months late, at least.
It's an immutable law of the universe.
The only surprising thing about ours being late is that we were surprised by it.
We had no idea, well, certainly I had no idea, of the scale of the enterprise we were undertaking."
Was that everyone else's experience when you started working on the game?
I know, Robbie, you've actually kind of touched on that already.
- Well, should I, yeah, should I take the first?
I mean, it was the first project that we were doing at the company, the digital village.
And I mean, I'd, when I look back on it, as I say, I think it was probably as well that
I didn't know how much I didn't know, because I don't think we'd have been as bold.
I don't think we would have tried as many things.
Now, my memory, and I may well be corrected by others on the team, just, you know, because
it's distant now, is that it was one of those things where both the actual development software
we needed, we needed to write ourselves, there were 3D engines that were being written for
rendering ourselves.
We were sort of making a few Silicon Graphics machines kind of go far beyond their capacity.
We were going to create a natural language parsing engine for the game.
So I think we were kind of, we were climbing a number of challenges.
And I think in a way, considering all that, it was remarkable how unlike we were.
I mean, obviously, a lot of my job was to try and make sure we got additional funds,
to try as much as possible and keep an increasingly anxious co-publisher off the team's backs,
which I don't really think I desperately succeeded on.
I remember a call which nobody else would have been on, but I was on a call with my
opposite number, the co-publisher, and the game was running late, and we needed more
budget and he was getting cross.
He was a tough New Yorker.
And I, being a Brit, my voice was getting softer and gentler and quieter, and he was
getting more and more anxious.
And I worked out that actually, me going quiet, it demonstrated that I didn't get what was
going on.
I didn't get how serious this was.
He would have been much happier if he'd heard me sort of barking out orders and firing people
as I was on the phone.
And I had to say to him, "No, me being quiet, Gilles, I really get this.
I get how difficult this is.
I get it.
I understand it."
So a lot of my role was to try and keep things.
And then I'll just say one other thing.
I remember gathering Emma and a wonderful man called Tim Browse, who sadly died a number
of years ago, who was one of the absolutely core members of the team, and kind of saying
plaintively, "What can we cut?
Is there a level we can cut?"
And they went, "No, Robbie, it's not designed that way.
Douglas has designed a game where every single thing is inter- there is not a level you can
cut, no."
Fair enough.
I might have been on top of that issue a little earlier, but there we go.
I've learned.
I think that was why it was just such an exciting project.
So from my perspective, it was just do in the end what I could to support the team,
to look after Douglas, to look after publishers, look after anxious investors, but most importantly,
the team, because it was just an amazing team and anything I could do.
And I still, all these years later, I'm not sure I've worked with a more exciting group
of people.
In fact, I don't think I have.
I think it's the most exciting group of people I ever worked with in my career.
Amen.
Who else would like to talk on what it felt like to join that project?
Well, I just wanted to thank Robbie for creating that setting or context.
I share your opinion that I've been lucky to work with really solid teams two or three
times in my career, but the first and the most significant was definitely my experience
at the Digital Village and it was entirely down to the amount of care you put into the
conditions within which we worked.
So it's a significant achievement.
And just to place that firmly at your door.
Thank you.
That's very kind.
Much appreciated.
It's true.
It's true as well.
And I mean, to answer Alison's question about did any of us have an idea of what we were
doing?
Sorry, there's a delay.
I don't know if it's me.
I just wanted to answer your question, Alison.
I don't think any of us had a clue of what we were doing.
You know, I was employed quite early on and I think that not only was it a new company
with people from different industries with the first game they were making, it was also
in a time when very few people had made games like this.
I mean, I remember being so anxious about Myst 2 coming out because I thought that they
were going to have moving video as a way of moving between the game and I rushed to the
store and bought it and took it back and ripped it apart and they were just using point clicks.
They weren't using the video that we had spent so long developing techniques to deliver.
And it was really exciting looking at new work that was being released.
But no, I don't think any of us had a clue.
That idea, Robbie, that there was a point where we just couldn't cut the game.
I learned the biggest lesson ever in that.
And so in all the games I'd ever worked on since then, I've always kept my eye on the
sort of bubbles that I knew from a narrative point of view that I could just snip off.
I never told anybody.
And it's kind of always worth knowing if you're working in interactive media, just have your
own little secret area where you sort of think, you know, I think we could probably lose this
or drop this because it's almost inevitable for everybody when you're building a game
that you're going to have to sacrifice some stuff before you reach the end, whether you're
an artist, whether you're a design, narrative, whatever.
So you want to keep your own little, it's kind of like defensive design.
It's a sort of some stuff that you'll forego.
And obviously you have to fight very hard to let it go.
But you know, quietly you can make the thing work without it.
So because it's probably worth as we look back to this ancient game, trying to pull
out from our experiences, you know, the sort of things that we've that have become our
little, you know, our sort of lanterns that guide us through our creative lives.
Such a lot.
I just want to add one more thing about the people element that Emma said and that Robby
so displayed.
Absolutely.
For me, it's still such a sort of warm cradle, the way I think back to that environment of
building a game.
So many games that I've worked on that haven't had that atmosphere, that caring environment.
And so I've always hoped that I can emulate that and try and bring it to the team relationships
in the games that I've moved on to.
So I suppose another lesson for me, you know, work is your life.
Work is being human and and displaying all the better side of yourself is kind of important
in your working environment when you all create together in a team.
The end.
Yeah, I'd say from my point of view, it was it was quite an interesting thing to jump
into.
So as you were saying before, Robbie, Tim Browse had started the work on the game engine
and realized that he needed more programmers to come along.
And so he invited some of us to join him in that endeavor.
So I jumped in with the game partially done.
And one of the things you find with computer programming is just about everything you start
doing, you say, I don't know how to do this.
It looks impossible.
It's just how could how could I possibly deliver this thing?
So it's really quite stressful to start with, because you just don't know where you're going
to start.
And somehow you get to the end and you've done it and achieved it.
And Starship Titanic was a massive one of those where we jumped into this this natural
language engine, had no idea where we were going to start.
Douglas and Robbie had promised the world that we were going to have amazing characters
that you could talk to.
And we had to make that come come true to some extent.
Little bit of success.
Maybe it could have been better.
But I think for the technology of the time, it worked out really well.
It was an interesting time getting through those challenges.
And what was really good was having a team of people around you who you knew could deliver.
You could trust them if anyone was asked to do something, it would somehow get done, even
though it was impossible.
And I think that that was a thread through the whole team, which which really helped
us to deliver something really great at the end.
Fabulous.
Robbie, please.
Yeah, and maybe jumping ahead, Ali, to something you've already got in line, but I'd be really
interested in asking Emma and Neil and Jason a question that has gone round in my head
about game and gameplay, which was one of the reasons possibly it was not at the time
the hit that we all hoped, although it's gone on to have status, is I wondered about whether
it was too, it owed too much at the very beginning to those old in for comparser games.
And it was just too difficult at the beginning.
And a number that the game, the reward structure of the game just wasn't in a number of people
kind of bailed out too quickly and just felt that I so I've been wondering for years and
wanting to ask the team what they thought about that, particularly people who've gone
on to be experts in a way that I'm not that that early.
So there's one issue about levels, but that early reward structure in the game, which
actually gave people a sense of progress.
I think people have got through it.
But I wonder whether we made the game too difficult to start in the in the in the early
gameplay was just too hard.
Genuine question, not a leading one, but a genuine question.
I think one of the problems that we faced with the dialogue engine was that it was something
that had never really been done before.
And when people went to talk to robots in a computer game, they weren't expecting to
be able to talk to them like other people.
And so the way they talk to the robots was as a person trying to talk to a computer,
knowing that the computer wouldn't understand them.
So I think they had trouble actually having conversation with the robots.
And it was a real challenge to get people to to actually try and talk to them a bit
more naturally.
And there was an interesting point where at one point I put a clever sort of bug into
the robots programming so that it misunderstood what you said and gave you a very funny response.
And the testers actually came back with that and said, there's a bug here.
When I say this, the robot gives me the wrong answer.
So it was actually very hard to convince them that it could be more human and it could make
mistakes.
So even though I was deliberately doing that, it was seen as a fault in the program rather
than a funny joke.
I think the game is notoriously hard.
I don't think it's just at the beginning thing.
I think that the puzzles were very sort of particular and specific.
But one of the things I find really interesting when my students find it and play it is that
many sort of contemporary game players burn through the puzzles quite quickly.
So I think the other challenge we had was also one of positioning, which was we were
interested in going into bookstores and getting to people who didn't really identify as game
players in any way.
And so I think that the type of market that loved the game did have a great experience
with that difficulty.
And there are many games that are sold these days and they're meant to be hard and tough.
But I think with our expectations, with the time of release and the framing of the market
we were going for, it was hard to have a game of the toughness of Starship Titanic.
Maybe I can just add to that as well now.
I guess having worked on a lot of adventure games since Starship Titanic, we're a lot
more careful, I think, in all the games I work on to ease people in.
And also maybe I'm always one asking for logic, you know, logic, logic, please, to every puzzle
all the way through, a logic that belongs to the world.
And I guess on Starship Titanic, there was a kind of crazed illogic that was also logical,
that was part of that world.
And who knows, maybe if we remade it now, we'd sell 100 million.
I don't know, but it wouldn't be half as much weird fun.
And I'm very delighted to introduce the fifth member of the panel, Yoz Graham.
Welcome, welcome.
Hey, Yoz.
Sorry I'm so late.
Hello, everyone.
Hello.
Nice seat.
Wow.
People I haven't seen in a long time.
Thank you so much for having me.
My name's Yoz Graham.
I am currently based in Oakland, California.
And I was the Digital Village's first dedicated web person, I believe.
We had up until that point, a lot of people, we had lots of web stuff, but lots of, you
know, people doing bits of web stuff in between other things.
And so I worked on various websites, and especially the various versions of the Starship Titanic
website with Alison.
I think when I say, actually, sorry, when I say first dedicated web person, I mean first
dedicated web engineer, software person, as opposed to Alison was producer first, I think.
A web producer first.
But given that it was my first ever experience as a web producer, and the web had kind of
only just been invented several years before, I think you were indeed the first real web
person.
I learned tons from you.
I remember you teaching me HTML.
It was an incredible opportunity to work with you as well as with the rest of the team.
Likewise.
So we're just actually been talking about what it was like to kind of jump into a game
that may have been, may have been, was incredibly ambitious for its time.
So what was it like for you to come on board that project?
It was amazing.
It was so obviously I had, like many people, I was a huge fan of Douglas's, I'd grown up
with hitchhikers, and it was, I had just finished my computer science degree at University College
London when I was wondering about things to do.
I'd been working for a couple of years for an ISP and then working on web stuff, ISP
being internet service provider, and, excuse me, and looking around for things to do.
And then I saw Douglas on some Sunday morning TV show interview and I thought, and he mentioned
the Digital Village and I thought, oh, that would be an interesting thing to do.
And so I happened to mention it to somebody who I was at university with and he said,
oh, Digital Village, I've been setting up their networking, I'll introduce you.
A guy called Andreas Antonopoulos, who is now like one of the world's Bitcoin authorities,
apparently.
So it was, and by that time, so this was early '97.
So the game was already well underway, you know.
I came in and there were, it was amazing seeing all the work going on, getting to meet the
team, getting to meet, also that realizing or joined that someone who I'd already known
from my past with internet service providers was working on it, the late great Debbie Barham,
who was one of the writers.
And she recognized me as I was going through the office and said hello.
And it was, and so we got to, the great thing about the web stuff that Alison, I'm sure
you, you know, when we worked on together with the web stuff was being able to put our
own stamp on it, do, tell a lot of the story of Starship Titanic, working with Neil and
Michael on a lot of the text and ideas.
And the, one of the great things about it was that in those days, anything we put out
with Douglas's name on it just got jumped on by fans, right?
It got absolutely flooded.
And so we were able to do things like the employee forums and things, which were kind
of buried secrets, you know, in the basement with a sign on it all saying beware of the
leopard and people would discover it anyway.
And it was wonderful to do those things and be silly.
We could, it was great to have a project which we could be joyously silly on.
I remember part of it, there was something we wanted the employee forum to have Blerontin
calendar dates on it.
And Blerontin being the planet that the Starship Titanic was built on.
And so we said, okay, how does the Blerontin calendar work?
And then Michael said, right, and just wrote out the most ridiculous plan he could think
of and said, right, program that you bastard.
And I said, right.
And I wrote four lines of Pearl to do it.
And to this day, if I look at that code again, I cannot decipher how it works.
It just does.
And so it was just like opportunity to be creative and silly, like we, the form for,
you know, signups in advance, you know, we asked people to put their name, email address
and favorite species of frog.
And we have this giant list of frogs that you could choose as your favorite species
of frog.
And so, sorry, I'm coming late and I've completely missed what has been discussed so far.
So I don't know how much of this and everything has been discussed.
And I don't want to, you know.
None of that was touched on.
So that's perfect.
Okay.
I don't want to like, especially given that the web properties were just kind of a small
offshoot of the much bigger game project, which had much more work going in and much
more creativity going into it.
I think it's worth at some point, you know, talking about the employee forum and everything
around that.
But I want to, you're in charge, Alison, you're in charge.
How do you want this?
Do we, I'll let you lead.
Quite right.
No, no, no.
It's a good point.
So Emma's got her hand up, so I'll defer to her, but that is very definitely on my list
because of course that was the web side of things was this whole other kind of mutant
baby game going on to the side of the main CD-ROM.
So Emma?
Yeah, what I wanted to talk about a little bit was the sort of nested story worlds that
were going on.
So first of all, as a team, we were invited to play into play within Douglas's imaginative
universe, which was huge.
I mean, so Starship Totalink was mentioned in the book series as sort of throwaway reference,
which is Douglas felt very clearly that a game had to be about a place.
So the original sort of conception behind the spaceship was that reference into his
larger universe.
And so the responsibility of making experiences within that universe was something that I
think everybody took quite seriously, whether it be the game itself or whether it be the
website.
And I still realize now, I mean, in the meantime, you know, you can get Jenkins talking about
convergence culture or the field of transmedia where stories are being told across different
forms and see that really what went on at Digital Village with that game wasn't just
game development.
It was a sort of convergent media practice which existed on the web and in forums, in
flat websites, in all of the wonderful work that you did, Alison, in creating the sort
of paratext around the game itself.
And then within the game, you have these multiple layers of storytelling crafted by excellent
writers.
I mean, at the time, I remember, Neil, there was no such thing as a game writer.
You know, it just wasn't a role.
And yet now you look at sort of the amount of narrative designers, big companies sort
of take on board to help with the sort of fictive frame and narrative approach of games.
It's a huge industry.
It wasn't one then.
I think you've got a story about how long it took you to get a writing credit on a game,
which maybe you can share with us.
But so within that, you've got the crafting of the story world.
You've got the sort of framing of the sort of dialogue.
You've got the transposition of that into sort of text or based around this premise
of the discussion between the player and the robot.
And we had, you know, amazing storytellers who were able to say, well, look, if we say
the robots are dysfunctional because the ship has fallen apart, we can get behind the fact
that the dialogue isn't perfect.
So the whole way through the design and development process, whether it be story led or gameplay
led, there was this sort of like checking in on different aspects of storytelling.
So it's not purely the parser, although that is brilliant.
It's not purely the quality of the writing in the robots, although that's world class
and excellent.
It's the way that the combined apparatus works together to further the story universe.
And because it's a classroom, I just wanted to point out that that was looking back.
That's what was created, even if we didn't know at the time that that was what was being
done.
And the motivation for that was to fit to the Douglas's tradition and what we felt as
our responsibility to play within that.
Anyway, I just wanted to say that.
It's brilliant.
Neil, go.
Yeah, Emma, that's so true.
I mean, we were kind of creating transmedia without even knowing we were doing it.
In fact, I think everybody in the office, coders, artists, everybody, they were all
narrative designers and writers.
I think a lot of people probably sort of became writers or felt they maybe understood how
writing worked as a result of that two year experience.
And the great thing was it was all kind of shared.
And there was always a place where people went off to shoveled up more writing, more
stuff, more content.
There was always a place for it to go.
And we kept expanding the world.
So we expanded the world into the in-flight magazine that went in the box, I seem to remember,
or the strategy guide and then the web.
And then it just went in every direction.
And I think I've seen interviews maybe with you, Robbie, talking about big online worlds
that we could have created.
Well, that really would have been the next stage, I think, to kind of create a Titanic
world and the Blerontin world where further great installments and narratives could have
taken place.
I read an interview with Michael Bywater, who was another one of the writing team, the
core writing team, who actually was talking about Blerontin and wishing that he felt that
that was kind of the most fun part for him and the most successful was the world that
you and he and Douglas kind of built out, the sort of backstory, the parts that are
sort of off screen that in a way you don't really know about aside from the little hints
that you get through the game.
He always wished that he could kind of keep building the Starship Titanic universe that
way.
Well, I don't know.
I don't know.
Just I mean, I think as a co-host, I'll be able to share my screen, share my screen quickly
in terms of worlds that got created.
I'd be interested, Ali, I guess your students have sort of seen some of the game or played
some of the game.
So if I could just share my screen just very quickly and just this has always struck me
in terms of worlds that we created as interesting.
The design for the movie Passengers, which was that movie about a doomed ship.
And I was just always struck by looking at the art deco-ness of the bar that got created
and the Michael Sheen character.
My machine's been very slow here.
But if anybody just goes and has a look at the artwork for Passengers, there we go.
And goes and have a look at our bartender and the way that our bartender worked in the
movie, this was a design, an art deco designed ship or a part of the ship.
It's other people.
I think somebody from that production design on that very big movie had definitely seen
or played Starship Titanic because it's definitely just going to have a bit of a Google about
the bartender and his red jacket.
Look at our bartender.
And of course, you know, if we're doing shout outs, I'd love maybe any of you to talk about
the amazing artists we had on the team as well.
Isabel Molina and Oscar.
Oscar, sorry, my mistake.
Because that was another whole major part of the game.
I mean, the insistence on this astonishing quality of the art, this architectural art
design, that was yet another enormously high bar that we were looking to jump in terms
of that.
And I know I think, Emma, you were very involved in a lot of that work and then trying to make
sure that we could take and render and be with those amazing designs that were coming
out.
Yeah, absolutely.
I think it's another example of the craft exhibited in all the different areas and the
storytelling.
So I still remember Terry Jones coming into the studio because he voiced the parrots and
we wanted to use him as art reference for the animation of the parrot in the game.
So he sat in the office one afternoon, sort of pretending to be a parrot and moving that
way and making expressions so that our artists could video it, film it and actually use it
in their animation of the character in game.
So I think when it comes to art, there are all sorts of learning processes in that.
Like I remember this amazing ship and really there were only two or three places you could
see the amazingness.
I also remember wondering about the hyper shiny surfaces where you couldn't see your
own reflection.
So there were some interesting challenges between the quality of the art that was delivered
in sort of traditional painting style as reference and then delivered by our amazing 3D art team
who went on to demo their 3D skills for software houses for many years afterwards.
So there was a sort of gap in how that then became instrumentalised in the experience.
So the puzzles were spread all the way over the ship and the characters were the sort
of robots.
So we were driven throughout this sort of huge physical experience through distributed
puzzles and that's helped us take advantage of really what at the time was a uniquely
looking game.
It was still at a time, it seems a preposterous thing now where we had to make a decision
between real time 3D and pre-rendered 3D and at the time pre-rendered was what was chosen
because that gave us the better quality but it did limit us to the types of game design
decisions we made through the environment.
So I think that the ship itself provided a really interesting and rich environment for
the players to sort of explore the story world from start to finish through the process.
I mean the premise of the game for those of you who haven't looked at it in depth yet
was reassembling Titania.
So in order to be able to fix the ship and end the game you had to reassemble her.
So all the puzzles helped take you to that particular direction and outcome.
I've rambled off a little bit I think there but it really was a spectacularly looking
game for the time and I think that we were all very proud of the way the game looked
as well as the way the game worked.
There's one of my favourite memories working on it because there weren't many games like
Starship Titanic around at the time.
The most direct comparison was the Myst series and we were in the middle of working on Starship
Titanic when Riven came out which was the sequel to Myst and probably our most direct
competitor.
And one of the bits of technology we had that we were really proud of was these little animation
transitions that happened in movements we called nabs which were every time you moved
from view to view there'd be this little animated whoosh that we rendered.
And then I think Emery or somebody who brought in Riven and we all sat down to watch it and
we booted up and we saw the first beautifully rendered screen and somebody clicked and just
flipped straight to the next image without any kind of animation.
This giant roar of victory went up around the room because we had something they didn't
and ours looked better in that way.
And the thing part about this that fascinated me was that we were so much pushing against
the limits of technology.
These days I suppose most productions still are in many ways but there were also things
that we tried to do when couldn't and we spent a lot of time, I remember the engineering
team, they spent a lot of time trying to work out how to throw the amounts of video around
in short time using either QuickTime or Indio or whatever the codec was that we ended up
with.
But to me the parser is a great example of something that you see in technology, these
tipping points where people give up on a particular idea because technology isn't powerful enough,
the software isn't good enough yet and then suddenly somebody realises hang on this can
work now.
And so they try it and it actually is good enough and everybody goes for it and the parser
to me was part of that in that the parser was, most people didn't realise it was now
possible to do something that was good enough.
And I think a big part of that, a huge part of that was Jason's work with especially just
putting a huge amount of labour into it, just loads of testing and tracking what people
were typing and wiring them up to responses.
And so yes I think Jason if you want to talk about, Alison if that's all right.
Absolutely I would actually love for Jason to kind of explain to us what the parser was
and how, what the sort of iterative process was of developing it with the writers.
Yeah so it was an interesting thing to work on.
So we had a natural language parsing engine that was written by a woman who had done a
lot of natural language sort of work in her PhD and that was quite a powerful engine but
it had been trained with newspaper text from the New York Times and so it was very capable
at parsing language but it wasn't very good at conversational language.
So we had to kind of bolster it up with the sorts of things that people would actually
ask the robots.
So there were lots of different threads to that.
So partially understanding what they were saying and being able to try and respond.
We had 14 and a half hours of recorded content to pick through for our responses and there
was never enough.
So whenever somebody asked you something was always something we didn't actually have an
answer for.
So that was that was challenging to find the right sort of response from that stock.
And then also having the robots have some knowledge so they could respond to the sorts
of things people would ask about.
So we put a lot of effort into things like understanding movie references or television
references so that if people talked about something they were interested in the robot
could respond in a way that made it at least come across as understanding what they were
talking about.
So there was an enormous amount of effort not just in the programming team but with
the writers as well to try and add that content throughout the engine so that there was more
understanding of what you were talking about and being able to process that and come back
with a good response.
And we spent a lot of time as well going back to Douglas and saying we need more hello yes
no kind of answers because all of these bits of script you've written go on for five minutes
and they're very funny but they don't actually allow us to have a conversation.
So it was finding that balance really of the content so that we could actually give a good
conversational result or at least try to.
And you kind of look back at it now and think it was very primitive but at the same time
it was very advanced for its day and I think the expectations were very high and we delivered
you know quite an amazing thing for the time and now you see AI is getting to that point
where this sort of thing actually is starting to become possible and I think when we did
it it was it was pretty much impossible and now it is getting to that point where it could
be done.
But to be able to have you know the quality of the artwork and the script writing and
all the other things that were in the game we also went for the same level on the audio.
So rather than having the computer generated voices of the time we had recorded audio from
voice actors and actresses and you know that really did lend a quality to that part of
the game as well that just you did not get in games.
I mean 14 and a half hours of content on the CDs was just an amazing amount of content.
You know you look at most games that come on a floppy disk and we had three DVDs sorry
three CDs even before DVDs three CDs full of all of this content so there was enormous
amount to manage there.
Go ahead Neil.
Yeah yeah Jason because we've not talked since probably we were both in that office together
so I'm still in awe of the job that you did on that and I think you've talked about it
before but I remember a moment when we were just testing and going through talking to
a bot and I think we went down like about 10 layers so if you can imagine you've it's
a conversation level that you know we've had 10 responses and hearing stuff that I was
really confident I don't think we put that in the game and I think that's when it was
called Spooky Talk was that it was as if it had taken a life on its own and somebody else
was writing dialogue and it was it was appearing you know of its own volition from inside the
game but when you also just another quick story about Douglas when you talk about how
much content I remember there was a another point halfway through and I'd been making
lists and lists of movie references and things that the Spooky Talk should recognize and
it was it was still not enough this monster was demanding more and more lines so I went
into Douglas's office and I said Douglas it's this is a big task I think we might have to
list and classify everything in the world and he just sort of stopped for a moment then
he then he turned to me and said you know I've been meaning to do that for a very long
time and isn't that just so that was that was like I think Emma you'd said you'd go
into his office and you'd come away with a bigger job than you expected and I remember
almost sadly leaving and thinking oh no it's this is never going to end but it honestly
was astonishing I've still in all my life working games I haven't come across anybody
who did a job like you did on that Jason so staggering stuff.
Thanks Neil I don't think I take all the credit it was a great team of people there so yeah
it wasn't just me and yeah I'm sure we could have done a better job if we'd had a few more
years with Douglas so.
But the lameness of like the first talk about the talking about the wish-aversary that extra
six months you had to train the parser I mean it wasn't six months but it's probably about
four months made the whole finished piece so much more polished right because I remember
you as a team so there was there was the programmers working on on the game and then there was
a programmers working on the parser and the parser needed as much time as it could possibly
take to be given a chance to be trained to pick up the syntax and the language so I do
think that if we if everything else had made the first deadline then the dialogue system
would have been really impoverished because it really needed that and we were completely
unaware of that beforehand.
Yes absolutely it took a lot of time and feeding it for as you said Neil just feeding it for
all that time really did help to enrich it and you know it was only two weeks but every
week it was another two weeks and it went on for a very long time.
Robbie?
In music again I just in terms of sort of thinking about games I do want to sort of
do a an important about process you know it was an enormously complex process and we were
very lucky with with an extraordinarily creative group of people but again because it is nice
to get to that I mean again Emma I made a hire first off of somebody and it's my fault
I'm somebody who came from a CD-ROM background I had done some CD stuff thinking at my television
company that I've been at and I again I didn't know what I didn't know and he was it wasn't
the right job for him and we needed to move him on and Emma stepped into that role and
it was one of the most impressive producorial jobs I've seen anybody do anywhere and I've
been around a long time now I mean to take that by by the grip to keep everybody's morale
up to manage this complexity this this huge creative egos and they're not with there was
very little shouty screamy I so I mean ego in a good sense and the gales of laughter
that would come out of Douglas's office when he was walking with Neil and Michael and and
as you say Debbie Barham who very sadly died very young but I just want to say the importance
of process I know it sounds dull when all think the the for something as ambitious as
that the job that Emma did to take it by the scruff of the neck and make the the sinews
in the team really fire and really work remains one of the most impressive producing jobs
I've I've been involved with in my career as a sort of chief executive MD type and I
just want to say those things matter because you know and of course Emma had her own creativity
so there was her own creativity but an enormously effective producing role for that level of
complexity I also want to say that the the creativity that Ali bought two things that
were really really new then our first experience of community and creating a community and
it was so exciting to see it all growing and developing you know we put up some incredibly
simple stuff and people flooded in as yours was just saying anytime we create anything
and I think there's a story and correct me if it's apocryphal but well Ali you tell the
story because you mean but the story of the email we got from somebody when we sent out
an email saying go to this and somebody and then immediately sent and I said no no that
was sent by mistake and we got an email from somebody do you want to tell that story Alex
it's a good story absolutely and then I want to just to jump in as well to sort of talk
about this website that we created to basically keep the fans happy while they were waiting
for this delayed game that was sort of the stated purpose of of everything that we built
in the online space but what we did was we as you all kind of said we kind of created
this forum that was sort of buried deep within this intranet of the construction company
that was building the Starship Titanic within the fiction and we kind of sent out having
collected people's name email and favorite species of frog early on we then used that
mailing list a little bit later to send out an email that seemed to have been accidentally
a CC all in the entire company that that went out to the fans that said here is the the
password to the secret employee forum please do not share this password and then immediately
sent out a second email that says delete that email that wasn't supposed to go to you and
in fact we did have somebody reply to us and say absolutely I haven't haven't read it haven't
used the password I will delete it immediately didn't he claims be from the CIA didn't he
claim that he'd worked at an intelligent am I making that up I my memory as he said I
read the AI or the orbs at the CIA so I am an on you can trust me to do this that's my
I don't think I'm making that up I think that is that's the other part of that story I think
if you're making it up then we're adding it to to the real history that that's the mythology
so yes do you want to talk about the the sort of storytelling online sure and I can confirm
that so I remember that email now and it was someone saying yes I used to work at the you
know CIA or something so I know how important these things are don't worry I've deleted
them well done so but we so what we did we had the there were kind of three phases to
the website there was the first phase we did which was kind of the brochure for the ship
okay so it was it wasn't the it was saying come join us on starlight lines tours come
see the galaxy some amazing writing from Neil and Michael I love the kind of you're not
the kind of person for it takes no for an answer sometimes you don't even take yes for
an answer you're just a winner and you deserve to be first class on this amazing starliner
blah blah blah blah blah right and it had little screenshots of the game but otherwise
it was mostly about the the fiction of the game and then we did the the intranet and
this was an intranet that you only knew about if you had already subscribed to the email
list and then you got this email and jumped in and within that website within that intranet
we created you know we had some wireframes of the ship we had some extra content about
testing the robots and things like that and then we created two forums and one of them
was the management forum which you couldn't post to you could just see the various you
know management characters having fights with each other which added backstory and then
an employee forum where we just seeded it with a couple of things but it was a working
forum it was literally written in a couple of days like a really basic web forum and
we left it there never really thought about until like six months later we came back and
there were 10 000 posts in there right and it was this amazing contrast because some of
the other forums unfortunately descended into kind of bizarre infighting and it was really
weird how these things would go the thing about online communities is that they so much
evolve to the shape that they're in that the shape of the the starting conditions and every
you know little you know chaos it's chaos chaos theory in action just small changes
have massive effects um the thing about the employee forum was that the people who joined
in there decided to start role-playing the story of the game and the ship and they took
it so much further right it became this astonishing interactive collaborative writing project
that went on for over a decade right it went on way past when the game stopped being sold
um but it was like when we first discovered it i can't allison i don't know if you remember
i remember very little other than holy crap there's 10 000 posts in here um but also it
was like oh my god there's this it the way i described it later is like leaving the vegetable
drawer of your fridge for a year and then coming back and finding a bunch of sentient
tomatoes who are busily working on their third opera um and it's like part of you wants to
get involved and another part just says no leave them alone they're doing amazingly don't
touch it it's this own little ecosystem and so they were doing this astonishing creative
writing and and i got some emails uh actually a couple of uh interviews there's some articles
about this if you google starlight lines employee forum you'll see a couple of the interviews
i you know i ended up dining out on it for years despite having done very little to create
it um i did end up moving it to my own server once the initial service came down um and
unfortunately it's dead now because i just dropped it by accident sorry little ecosystem
um but uh it it was people who took part it just said i fell into this community and it
was a story that i could take part in and i was welcomed and everybody was building
up right everybody was lifting each other and helping each other and just making a story
together um and sometimes it is being in a fiction that gives you the opportunity to
have the kinds of interactions that you most want rather than constraints of you know real
life so yeah i've still got the archive of of all the posts in it somewhere but um that
is so brilliant yes and thank you and uh sean sully and everybody else who actually kept
the starshiptitanic.com um actual uh website up it is incredible that a website from 1997
is still live um i think actually both both the the sort of basics of the intranet and
then the the launch website itself uh robbie's gonna have to uh leave fairly soon so i wanted
to go to one of the questions in the q a from uh one of our students um saying hi robbie
i'm actually doing an essay on the ethics of ai and i was surprised to hear your interest
in the field i was wondering how your interest in artificial intelligence influenced the
production of this game that is based in a technological futuristic setting if it did
at all well i i would like well the game itself it i i have to i barely even knew about ai
then to be quite honest i mean i know it's been around for a long time because you know
people like claude shannon that they've been working it um i i'll i'll just sort of i i
do have to go but let's just one of the thought experiments i do when i talk about ai i ask
people to imagine uh a moment of great joy probably social joy a dinner a dance a movie
a picnic uh something a great joy and then i use marvin the paranoid android as a thought
experiment and again now now have a moment where you felt that your life was out of control
you were feeling a grief the pain of unrequited love um deep sorrow a time where you felt
out of control uh road rage um and then i was funny as it is would we ever want paranoid
ai uh and so i my my douglas adams used to tell this brilliant parable of a puddle and
he says this puddle wakes up one morning and it looks around at the hole that it's in and
it thinks to itself this hole fits me very neatly in fact it fits me so neatly it must
be made especially for me and i've always taken that to be douglas's plea for a bit
more humility on behalf of sapiens in believing that we are the apogee of cognition perception
and intelligence as opposed to a very special expression of it so a lot of my work is on
the nature of human embodiment and thinking about how ai is manifest in the world in relation
and and i'll i'll i'll finish by something this and i might particularly appreciate i
was recently literally chased out of a group which was looking at technological unemployment
um because i described the singularity um the idea of well i'm sure you all know what
the singularity is the idea of this super intelligent moment where ai takes over as
a deeply colonialized white male fantasy uh and the the the the the coast was so angry
with me that he literally i got an email two weeks later saying a group of us have got
together and either you kind of believe this or or we'd rather you left so i decided to
leave so i think that my interest in thinking about also douglas talked about something
about the data side of the ship and the matter side of the ship and as we start to contemplate
the metaverse the notion of the data side of the ship which was actually a part of the
game we never got to build he wanted to build a whole part of the game which would be the
way the ship saw itself a whole other kind of visit we never got to build that bit so
there's lots there if anybody i'm ali i'm very happy as you know to follow up with people
i do so much work on ai ethics i'm very happy but those thoughts douglas and paranoid ai
dataverse the data side of the ship matter side of the ship and the whole import of douglas's
world view around perspective is trying to shift the centrality of sapiens from the great
big scheme of things</extralore>