I owned a book which featured a picture of the two of them sharing a bath, although grimly I cannot remember what it was. He'd written for Monty Python's Flying Circus and was a good friend of the Pythons, most especially Terry Jones. Because it was! That's what it was created to be! Fight me!īut Adams was also a comedy writer for other things I cared passionately about. But to me, who'd been played the original broadcasts by my dad as a boy, it was and always will be a radio programme. Which to so many must seem like sacrilege. I had then, and ridiculously still today, never read the books. To me at that time, Douglas Adams was the writer of my favourite ever radio series. He was so astonishingly kind, warm, and most of all, generous, giving answers to questions he must have been asked ten thousand times with verve and wit and no hint of weariness at this 19 year old's green, green approach. I got to talk to Douglas Adams, for what felt like ages, and it was utterly wonderful. Yes, it's a massive namedrop, but you would too, wouldn't you? It was a telephone interview, for my university newspaper, for which I was the 'comedy editor'. Primarily because, by some exceptional fortune, I had the opportunity to interview Adams about the game before its release. Adams wouldn't have approved of a miracle. Starship Titanic was never going to work.

In fact, almost entirely because of ambition. This masterful creator, the man who brought us The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy in all its forms, spent what would turn out to be his last few years working on a fundamentally broken videogame.

It was Douglas Adams's last work of fiction, and it was a truly terrible one. I find Starship Titanic such a sad thing. Past Perfect is a retrospective column in which we look back into gaming history to see whether old favourites are still worth playing today.

Titanic video game switch